The days between....

This week we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord. It is truly a solemn and meaningful feast. The Ascension begins the Church Age, a time when Satan is bound and the gospel is preached to the ends of the earth.

The prophet Malachi foretells the last days of the Jewish temple, the end of Jewish sacrifices and the beginning of offering "pure offerings"...The Lord says that "My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to my name, because my name will be great among the nations," We know that the pure offering is Jesus. The only pure sacrifice offered for sin. At the Feast of the Ascension, we celebrate that Jesus goes to His Father, and our Father. In heaven, John sees Him as the Lamb of God, standing, and looking as if it had been slain. The once and for all sacrifice who is presented to the Father in Heaven and re-presented every hour on every day on altars all over the world as Malachi fortold... pure offerings.. "from the rising to the setting of the sun".

In this sermon by Pope St Leo, he lays out for us the significance of those 40 days between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Jesus spent time with His apostles after His resurrection to impress on them the reality of who He is and what their mission was.

The days between the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord

A sermon of Pope St Leo the Great

Dearly beloved, those days which intervened between the Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension did not pass by in uneventful leisure, but great mysteries were ratified in them and deep truths were revealed.
In those days the fear of death was removed with all its terrors, and the immortality not only of the soul but also of the flesh was established. In those days the Holy Ghost is poured upon all the Apostles through the Lord’s breathing upon them, and to the blessed Apostle Peter, set above the rest, the keys of the kingdom are entrusted and the care of the Lord’s flock.
It was during that time that the Lord joined the two disciples as a companion on the way, and, to sweep away all the clouds of our uncertainty, reproached them for the slowness of their timid and trembling hearts. Their enlightened hearts catch the flame of faith, and lukewarm as they have been, they are made to burn while the Lord unfolds the Scriptures. In the breaking of bread also their eyes are opened as they eat with him. How much more blessed is that opening of their eyes, to the glorification of their nature, than the time when our first parents’ eyes were opened to the disastrous consequences of their transgression.
Dearly beloved, through all this time which elapsed between the Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, God’s Providence had this in view, to teach his own people and impress upon their eyes and their hearts that the Lord Jesus Christ had risen, risen as truly as he had been born and had suffered and died.
Hence the most blessed Apostles and all the disciples, who had been both bewildered at his death on the cross and backward in believing his Resurrection, were so strengthened by the clearness of the truth that when the Lord entered the heights of heaven, not only were they affected with no sadness, but were even filled with great joy.
Truly it was great and unspeakable, that cause of their joy, when in the sight of the holy multitude the Nature of mankind went up: up above the dignity of all heavenly creatures, to pass above the angels’ ranks and to rise beyond the archangels’ heights, and to have its uplifting limited by no elevation until, received to sit with the Eternal Father, it should be associated on the throne with his glory, to whose Nature it was united in the Son.