"It is expedient for you that I go away": why we need the traditional lectionary to prepare us for Ascension Day

Jesus said unto his disciples, Now I go my way to him that sent me ... it is expedient for you that I go away.

The opening words of the Gospel for this week - the fourth after Easter - in the traditional Prayer Book lectionary orient us towards the forthcoming feast of the Lord's Ascension.  This is also reflected in the collect:

that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.

Similarly the Gospel appointed for Sunday coming - Rogation Sunday - also prepares us for Ascension Day.  As Wheatly says in his Prayer Book commentary, "it foretells our Saviour's Ascension":

I leave the world, and go to the Father.

These Sundays are, then, are an invitation to catechesis in preparation for the celebration of the Lord's Ascension.  The fixed Gospel readings ensure that year by year we are oriented towards and prepared for this feast.  In the three year lectionary, such catechesis is lost.  Even if the provision for some of the years echoes the traditional Gospel readings, this is not consistent year by year, losing the repetition necessary for successful catechesis.

Added to this is the 'flattening' of this time occasioned by contemporary liturgies insisting that Eastertide is fifty days of festivity, an emphasis furthered by naming what the Prayer Book terms 'The Sunday after Ascension Day' as merely 'The Seventh Sunday of Easter': again, the Ascension is overshadowed.

Contrasting theologies are at work in these provisions. The provision in contemporary Anglican liturgies reflects an immanentizing of the meaning of the Resurrection: the Resurrection, rather than being an eschatological eruption within - while not limited to and by - history, becomes an affirmation of the 'values' of Jesus and the kingdom to be experienced in this world.  The terminology of 'Sundays of Easter' is also suggestive of this, detracting from Easter Day as salvific event, moving the focus to a continued Easter experience. As a consequence, rather than rejoicing in "thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ ... and the hope of glory", the Resurrection can end up being a mere exhortation to make the world a slightly nicer place.

The Ascension can thus becomes something of an awkward embarrassment, for there is no obvious sense in which "it is expedient for you that I go away".  Its eschatological overtones - "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven", "From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead" - distract from the this worldly experience of an immanentized Easter experience.  Against such a theological background, it makes sense for contemporary liturgies to minimize Ascension Day and to avoid the traditional Prayer Book lectionary's catechesis in preparation for the feast.

This catechesis, however, reflects the Scriptural emphasis on the Lord's Ascension as salvific and determining the Church's eschatological hope:

Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places.

This is reflected in the Church's daily praise in the Te Deum at Mattins

When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death: thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God: in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come: to be our Judge.

In the Litany, we pray "by thy glorious Resurrection and Ascension ... Good Lord, deliver us".  Likewise, the Nicene Creed affirms the eschatological significance of the Ascension when it declares "And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead" (an emphasis also seen in Article IV).  The proper preface "upon Ascension Day, and seven days after" celebrates both the salvific and eschatological dimensions of the feast: "that where he is, thither we might also ascend, and reign with him in glory".

To minimize the feast of the Ascension is to disorder the Church's liturgical celebration of the mystery of our salvation, uprooting the liturgical year from the Creedal Faith.  We need a yearly catechesis in preparation for Ascension Day precisely because of the salvific and eschatological significance of the feast, "the hope of glory".  Year by year, as Ascension Day approaches, we need to hear the Lord's teaching that "it is expedient for you that I go away", preparing us to "Hail the day that sees him rise".