On Thursday, Christians in many places in Germany celebrated the church holiday of Ascension Day. The President of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, Thorsten Latzel, called for people to stand up against hatred and incitement.
Berlin (epd). The church holiday of Ascension Day was celebrated in Germany with church services and processions. In Berlin there was also a procession from the Berlin Cathedral to St. Mary’s Church on Alexanderplatz. After the parade with music, bells, carriages and horses, hundreds of balloons floated into the sky on Thursday. The President of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, Thorsten Latzel, called on Christians to stand up against hatred and incitement. Since the fourth century, Ascension Day has always been celebrated 40 days after Easter.
According to the sermon manuscript, Latzel said that it is part of an adult faith to take responsibility and “courageously face the tasks of our time.” This includes turning against hatred, contradicting the destruction of creation “or calling blatant injustice by its name”, for example when children do not have enough to eat, emphasized the leading theologian of the second largest German regional church on Thursday at the Uhler Kopf Rhein-Hunsrück district.
In Eichsfeld in Thuringia, several thousand Christians took part in the Catholic diocese of Erfurt’s traditional men’s pilgrimage to the Klüschen Hagis forest chapel. The pilgrimage was launched in the second half of the 1950s by the Catholic men’s ministry in the GDR and always takes place on Ascension Day. On the occasion of the pilgrimage, Bishop Ulrich Neymeyr emphasized that the Ascension Day holiday is also a day of human dignity, which Christians must fight for today.
On Ascension Day, Christians celebrate the fact that, according to biblical tradition, the resurrected Jesus Christ “ascended” from death to God after his crucifixion. In addition to the Gospels of Mark and Luke, the biblical basis for the holiday is the first chapter of Acts in the New Testament. It says that Jesus Christ, who rose from death after his crucifixion, was “lifted up” before the eyes of his disciples: “A cloud took him up and withdrew him from their sight.” This is also an important motif in fine art.
In theology today, the Ascension is hardly understood literally as a real journey. According to this, heaven is not a geographical place, but rather the domain of God. When the Creed says “ascended into heaven,” according to Christian understanding, this means that the risen Christ “is with God.” Ascension is also interpreted as a symbol of change and spiritual development of the personality.
The day is traditionally celebrated in churches with services in parish gardens, in the forest and in other natural places. The festival always falls on a Thursday and is a public holiday in Germany. Ascension Day is also known as Father’s Day and in East Germany as Men’s Day.