A Triumphant Season

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, June 1st, 2025:
The Ascension of the Lord

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Psalm 47

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. For the Lord, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth. 

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. 

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

For God is the king of all the earth; sing praises with a Psalm. God is king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. 

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.
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Pause. Pray. Reflect.

We’re still firmly entrenched in the Easter season. Pentecost, which closes out the liturgical season of Easter, will be next Sunday. So here we sit, the Scriptures filled with almost bracing positivity. The afterglow of the Resurrection stretching out through time to us today.

And it may feel false some days to still be shouting our Alleluias and praises. The world is, as it always is, experiencing challenges. People we love get sick and even die. Bills have to get paid. Wars, both physical and financial, steal our sense of certainty and joy. There are children dying of curable diseases and starving in the streets. The world fails to care. We fail to care. I fail to care.

All that brokenness makes me want to push Easter back to its rightful day and have it keep its place there. None of this extended joy seems fitting. Sure, I can take a break from all this misery for one day, but an entire season seems gratuitous, y’know? So let’s take down the banners. Toss the Easter lilies in the compost. Tone down the music. Get back to our sombre readings.

And yet, the Church is inviting us to stay in this posture of praise—to not get immediately drawn back down into our despair. There are lots of possible explanations for this dwelling on Easter, which by the way is longer than 4 weeks Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, and the 40 days of Lent. Between Easter and Pentecost, we spend 50 days celebrating Easter. 

Easter is the summit of the liturgical year—it celebrates the resurrection, the conquering of not just Christ’s own death, but the conquering of eternal death for the saved. And that’s something that truly cannot be contained, no matter how miserable I may feel. With the eyes of eternity, the solution to all the misery in the world isn’t more misery, it’s the transformative, saving power of Christ. 

The promise of Easter doesn’t belong as a memorial, it is working among us even over 2,000 years later. By making space for the Easter season, we are reminded that the salvation offered through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection isn’t a day, but stretching out through all of human history. There is no misery He cannot heal. There is no strife He cannot overcome. 

So, we make space for our praise. We dwell in this counter-cultural and unreal joy. We declare that hope to ourselves when we are at our most broken. Because both we and our world both still need salvation.

Just as we declared joy into the darkness of night at the Easter Vigil, so too can we sing the song of His praise into the darkness of all suffering today. Salvation is already here, moving among us. Alleluia!



Stéphanie Potter

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