What does the Feast of the Ascension have to do with hospitality shared with people on the streets? I was struck by this question on a Thursday morning at Manna House, which happened to be the traditional date on the liturgical calendar for celebrating this Feast. What does the story of the resurrected Jesus rising up into heaven have to do with opening the doors of Manna House?

Ched Myers (see link below) points out something very important about the resurrected body of Jesus that ascends into heaven. Immediately prior to the Ascension, Jesus “invites his traumatized disciples to investigate his wounds… Jesus insists his disciples examine his hands and feet, which would have been the parts most mutilated by the process of being nailed to a tree.” This underlines a “crucial Christological point: The Risen One is the Crucified One… The resurrected Christ is not unscathed by the violence of empire.” Jesus’ body is still marked by the wounds of his crucifixion, and his Ascension “makes it clear that heaven—wherever that may be—is a place for liberated real bodies, knitting heaven together with earth indivisibly.” 

Thus, Jesus’ heavenly enthronement is not a denial of his tortured and executed body. Rather, it is a sign that “the One who was executed by the Powers now has sovereignty over them! Heaven thus symbolizes the space where the Powers of domination have been overthrown.” Heaven as “up there” points to another reality, where God’s will is done.  

The Ascending Christ in going “up there” has not abandoned us, but rather invites us and journeys with us to carry on his mission, he remains present in history. We are now Christ’s body. Ched writes, “The Ascension inaugurates… a double incarnation: the battered body of Jesus resides in heaven, while the body-of-Christ-as-church attends to battered bodies on earth by the power of the spirit.” This is why the angels seek to redirect the disciples’ view, “People of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” (Acts 1:11). Myer’s concludes, “The focus of our discipleship is here.”

So what about hospitality? The Ascension underlines that it is Christ who waits at the gate before we open, and then waits for his or her name to be called for showers or socks and hygiene, or hardly waits at all for a cup of coffee. In our guests, Christ invites us to love and listen, to be attentive to God’s presence in those made in the image of God and rejected by the powers that be. The Body of Christ, the Ascension affirms, is no longer limited by space and time, but is with all of us, and insofar as we live in the faith of Christ, we are that body. Further, the risen and ascended Christ comes to us just as he said he would, in the least of these. His wounds are visible in the wounds of our guests. His life in God “in heaven” is visible as we share a space of refuge in which something of God’s will is done. And like the Ascension, this too is a mystery. We are invited to see and enact, if even in a small way, a different world.

Link to full article by Ched Myers, https://bcmonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/How-the-Ascension-Story-Doubles-Down-on-Incarnation.pdf