A Homily for the Ascension of the Lord
Readings: Acts 1:1-11  Ephesians 1:17-23  Matthew 28:16-20

Once you have known love, lived in its light, what would you do rather than surrender it? 

Ian Buruma’s engaging new history Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 (2026) examines the compromises that Germans made, or refused to make, as the Nazi regime took them to war. 

For example, in 1941:

between the middle of October and the end of the year more than seven thousand Berlin Jews were deported. Suicide offered one way out. Many preferred to die by their own hand. Two hundred and eighty people killed themselves in one day in October…

One of the best-known cases of a suicide in 1941 concerned a highly admired movie star, a heartthrob to many German women. His name was Joachim Gottschalk, and he wasn’t Jewish. In 1930, Gottschalk married an actress named Meta Wolff, who was Jewish but had converted to Christianity. Their son, Michael, was born just after the Nazis came to power. Wolff was forbidden to appear in the theater, and Gottschalk was pressed to divorce her and sever his relationship with his Mischling (mixed raced) son. He refused. This intensely annoyed (Joseph) Goebbels (the Nazi Propaganda Minister), but Gottschalk was so popular, acting as a suave diplomat in one film and Hans Christian Anderson in another, that the Nazis let him be for the time being. Then he did something “tactless.” He insisted on taking his wife to a movie party and introduced her to Goebbels, who felt compelled to kiss her hand. Goebbels was so infuriated by this humiliating incident that he ordered Gottschalk to abandon his family. His wife and son would be deported to Theresienstadt. Gottschalk then insisted on going with them, but his request was denied. He would be drafted into the army instead. When the Gestapo arrived at their house in Grunewald on November 6, they found Gottschalk, Wolff, and their young son Michael, dead. They had taken sleeping pills and switched on the gas. 

Once you have known love, lived in its light, what would you do rather than surrender it? 

It is a challenge to morally evaluate Gottschalk’s difficult decision. The sin of despair is a refusal to remain open to God’s future for us, but that hope was very slight. The ethically salient question is one of freedom. Was the family—and so many others like them—compelled by psychological coercion to act as they did?

This much is clear. The Family Gottschalk was a circle of love: a man, a woman and their child, each loving the other.

Joachim and Meta Gottschalk with their son Michael on the Hiddensee (1940). Credit: Archiv Killius

Once you have known love, lived in its light, what would you do rather than surrender it? In this case, a loving circle chose death in love rather than live with its loss. That can happen in a fallen world. 

The Ascension of the Lord is about a circle of love, of love going out from itself toward another and then being fully returned. 

Before he ever came to us, the Son comes forth as the radiance of the Father. Begotten of the Father’s love, the Son is this love. And he is, forever and always, returning the love that he is to its source. Father and Son are a circle of love, one so fruitful it breathes forth the love we name the Holy Spirit. 

Our act of creation was not itself a coming forth from this love. No, we were called out of nothing. But we were summoned into existence because the Trinity is effusive, boundless in bounty. 

We were created to love God as God loves us. But love only lives in liberty. It cannot be coerced. Only the most sacred Trinity could create something destined to return its love, yet, in virtue of its inner constitution, be capable of rejecting that love. 

And only the Trinity could choose to make the eternal Son of the Father someone incarnate in our midst, someone who calls us back into the circle of love that is our origin, who brings us with him as he returns to the Father, closing the circle in a manner that itself inaugurates an endless, fruitful spiral of love. In his Ascension, Christ carries creation into the Godhead.

The Letter to the Ephesians asks:

What are the riches of glory
in his inheritance among the holy ones,
and what is the surpassing greatness of his power
for us who believe? (1:18-19)

Simply this. We live in a world where love must struggle to survive, let alone flourish. It is a world that constantly rips open circles of love. But today our humanity enters heaven. A circle of love triumphs over death. 

In the person of our high priest, the one who sanctifies our dead flesh with his blood and breathes his own Spirit into our lungs, we are also carried back to the bosom of the Father, the high love from which we come. 

Speaking of the bewildered but far from abandoned disciples, St. John Chrysostom penned the most paradoxical little sentence about the significance of the Ascension. 

For their eyes saw in the resurrection the end but not the beginning, and they saw in the ascension the beginning but not the end (Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, 2).

Here is what I think he means. How delighted the disciples must have been when love came back from the dead to claim them! For them, it was the truly blessed vindication of the love they had known in this man. 

But the resurrection of Christ was only the beginning. Christ was not simply coming back to them. He was coming to claim all of creation, all of us, as his own, carrying all back into the circle from which it came. Hence, the Ascension is the completion of the resurrection, its great culmination. In Christ, all of creation comes back to its creator. 

In the Trinity, there is an eternal going forth and an eternal return, a never-ending circle of love. In the Incarnation, there is a going forth in time and space, both of which are created so that there may be this going forth and great return—incarnation passing through death and resurrection into ascension—in an endless circle of love, an unconquered circle.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.