Ascension Day falls, by the traditional forty day count, on a Thursday, which in much of the modern world is no longer a public holiday, leading many Western churches to move its observance to the following Sunday even where the traditional date is retained liturgically. Eastern Orthodox practice keeps the feast on its own weekday with a full liturgical rank, one of the twelve great feasts of the church year.
Theologically, traditions describe the ascension as Christ's exaltation, often stated as his taking a seat at the right hand of the Father, language drawn from the Hebrew Bible's Psalm 110 and repeated across the New Testament, though churches differ in how much doctrinal weight they place on the event relative to the resurrection it follows and the Pentecost it precedes. In much historic iconography the ascension closes the cycle of Christ's earthly life depicted in church art and calendars, the final scene before Pentecost begins the story of the church itself.
Some Reformation-era and later Protestant writers read the ascension chiefly as removing Christ's bodily presence from the earth in preparation for a spiritual mode of presence through the church and the sacraments, a reading that shaped debates over the eucharist, while other traditions place more weight on the ascension as the moment of Christ's coronation, and neither reading is treated here as settled doctrine common to all Christians.