199. The Ascension of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ

The Time Jesus Ascended on a String

You may find this hard to believe – but back in the 1940s, the public School Boards of Hancock County in Ohio (where I grew up) hired a teacher who went from school to school throughout the county teaching Bible stories to us children. I can understand why this no longer happens, but oh! our young people miss so much.

In those primitive days teachers sometimes used flannel boards  right  to which various scenes and figures can be attached and moved around to tell a story. It’s an effective way of teaching, The figures hold still for a while, so that children have time to focus on them and remember them.

As I certainly did. I remember vividly the day in May when our teacher had Jesus and His disciples gathered together on the board – till suddenly He went straight up, pulled by a string attached to His head, and He disappeared behind a cloud at the top of the board, and we never saw Him again that year.

I quickly lost faith that Jesus had ascended by means of a Heavenly string.

What Really Happened?

Texts: Mark 16:29, Luke 24:36-53, Acts 1:1-12

It is clear that Christ rose bodily and was with His disciples for a time. Then His appearances ceased. So obviously He went somewhere, somehow. But what’s so very odd is that the those who apparently were present when He left tell us so little about it.

The New Testament accounts relate something very much like what we saw on that flannelboard (without the string). However there is a very different quality, a different character to them. All of Christ’s Resurrection appearances seem to me to have a kind of mythical, mystical, illusive feel about them. I’m using “mythical” here in the classic sense, which certainly doesn’t mean they didn’t happen – but rather that they “more than happened”, shared in something beyond our ordinary reality, and therefore were almost beyond describing. Something very real, but which a person can’t quite grab hold of. Of these apparently the most incapable of description was the Ascension.

Does this explain why those who were there were so reticent about it?

The Apostle Matthew does not even mention the Ascension. He concludes with Christ’s appearance on a mountain in Galilee. He commands them to “preach the Gospel to every nation.. ” and promises “I will be with you to the end of the age.” And that’s it.

The Apostle John concludes with the lovely story of His appearance at dawn by the Sea. Did he intend to tell us more? All we know is that he didn’t.

Mark, whose Gospel account came from the Apostle Peter, reports only that “the Lord was received up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.” No details.

Luke (who had to go digging for his information) tells more. His Gospel account says that Jesus led the disciples out towards Bethany where “He lifted up His hands and blessed them, and was parted from them and carried up into Heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy: and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.”

Why is the Theotokos almost always shown in Ascension icons? Because Acts says she was present with the little community of believers, and so she just had to have been there at His Ascension! How could she not?

Luke’s book of Acts adds: “As they were looking on, He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into Heaven as He went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into Heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven.” Then they returned from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away.”

Up?

There’s a modern myth that people never knew the world was round till about five centuries ago. Wrong. By the time of Christ the Greeks had already measured the circumference. Besides, all anyone had to do was stand beside the sea and watch boats sail away seemingly “over the edge” and then return again, so obviously …  I mean, really, do people think the Apostles were simpletons? Jewish boys attended synagog school. Most came from “Galilee of the Gentiles”, where many Greeks lived. Of course they knew the earth is round.

So what would they have made of it when Christ went “up”? (Note that He entered into a cloud. He didn’t keep going up like a rocket ship.) They would have known immediately that He was using symbols again. He so often spoke and acted this way.

From the round earth which way is up? Up is in all directions. Up leads to infinity. So when Jesus was taken up, it was His symbolic way of showing that He was returning to Infinity – to that Height beyond all heights, that Place beyond all places, to enter (as we would say) that Dimension beyond all dimensions. Eternity.

O Christ God, You have ascended in Glory, granting joy to Your disciples by the promise of the Holy Spirit. Through the blessing they were assured that You are the Son of God, the Redeemer of the world!

But did He really leave? and more

Now, brothers and sisters, prepare to expand your minds, and try to comprehend the incomprehensible. Keep in mind that you have a poor guide here, and you’ll have to do a lot of the comprehending for yourselves.

Jesus told the disciples: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age”.  And then He left. As the Kontakion for the Ascension points out “When You ascended in glory, O Christ our God, You were not parted from those who love You, but You remained with them…”

So though He left, He did not leave. How could Christ our God leave anywhere? God is everywhere present, filling all times, all places.  

Are we getting boggled yet? We’re just beginning.

Let’s go back to the beginning, before the Beginning. Christ is the Word of God whom the Father spoke when He said “Let there be light”, and the Big Bang banged, or whatever happened when the lights first turned on. Christ is the Logos, o λόγος, the Rational Power and Wisdom of God, who has ordered the cosmos from the moment of Creation. We confess that Christ “came down from Heaven and was made Man”. But He was here before that. Saint Paul spoke of the Jews following Christ during the Exodus fifteen centuries before He was born. (See I Corinthians 10:4)

What happened in His Incarnation was that He, who had always been here, took on a human Body, human nature. “He got His DNA from the Virgin Mary”, as a clever Priest I know puts it. And so He who was infinite became more than He was before. Infinity expanding? Again, our human minds can’t comprehend.

So to sum up thus far, Not only did He not leave when He left. He had already always been here before He came here. 

Are you still with us? 

I’m not. I’m confused.

Why am I putting us through all this mind-stretching exercise? For one thing, because Orthodoxy is not a “me and Jesus” religion. Our Faith is cosmic! and we need to try and grasp these incomprehensibly wonderful ways by which our Lord and God Jesus Christ has saved our human race. Glory to God! Glory to Jesus Christ forever!

But even more: This is practice for our future. All of us before too long (me, sooner than most) will arrive in that Larger World where we will have to cope with, as Saint Paul put it, “‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ – the things God has prepared for those who love Him.” I Corinthians 2:9  Get ready for it now, dear ones. Stretch your minds now.

There’s more.

We Ascended with Him

One thing that we can understand about Christ’s Ascension is that He took His human Body into Heaven. As He had said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” So that we in the fullness of our human nature, mind, body and soul, now have a place in Heaven, in Eternity.

You would have thought the Apostles would have returned to Jerusalem in deep sadness: “He’s gone!” Instead they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy”. Why? First, because Christ had promised never to leave them, always to be with them, with us. Second, because they had just seen their future, our future. We will ascend with Him. On Live Stream this Ascension morning I heard a Greek priest * point out that since all mankind have common ancestors and share common DNA, by ascending bodily Christ, with His DNA born of Mary, took all humanity with Him. So here we all go “up” with Him. As He promised.

• If you’re reading this, you know who you are. Thanks, Father.

But even this soon becomes almost incomprehensible. For by His Ascension, Christ “expanded” His human Body to become a super-personal Body, “the Body of Christ”. Saint Paul keeps emphasizing this. (See, for example, Romans 6:3) We sing about it often: “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia!” By our Baptisms we have been incorporated into His Risen Body. We have already literally died and risen with Christ. (I don’t understand this at all. My mind hasn’t expanded that far yet. But there it is.) And that is why the Fathers say that in Him “man can become God”. The Orthodox doctrine of Theosis.

So long as we’re stretching our minds, I’ve never heard this discussed but have often wondered: Christ ascended taking His incarnate human Body with Him. But in Eternity where He dwells, there is no past or future. Everything there is in the eternal Now. So in that Eternal Place has Christ always been Incarnate? Has humanity always been part of Him in Eternity? Let’s not think about that any more.

Here, however, is something else we can deal with. Christ’s Ascension means that Heaven is not at all what many people think it is: shadowy, misty, immaterial. If Christ’s Body entered Heaven, then Heaven must be as solid as this material world. In fact, more so. It must be super-material, super-solid, whatever that means – for the risen Christ had power over matter, as He appeared and disappeared in his Body. And if we are truly to “be like Him”…

C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce imagined that compared to Heaven, the “stuff” we know will be shadowy, misty – that compared to the bodies we will have in heaven, our present bodies will seem ghostly, immaterial. Have you ever noticed that all the New Testament images of Heaven are solid ones: a city, a kingdom, a wedding party, a meal. “I will eat and drink with you at my table in my kingdom.” I have come to believe we will really do that.

The End

All of the above, I would guess, explains why the Gospel writers said so little about the Ascension. They had no idea what to do with it, how to handle it. And after twenty centuries of pondering, we of the Church have only begun to grasp what it all means.

And oh, we can’t forget the words of the angels as He ascended: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into Heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into Heaven.” The promise of His future Second Coming. Yet in the Church’s understanding, His Coming is not entirely in the future. In the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the Priest gives thanks to God for “endowing us [now] with Your kingdom which is to come”. Here we go again: the future doubles back into the present, and our usual categories of time are blown away.

above: Coptic icon

So to sum it all up:

He who was always here came to earth without leaving Heaven, and then He departed from earth without leaving, and returned to His Father whom He had never left. Then at the End (although the End has already begun) He will return in Glory to earth which He never left and where He has always been present.

And so finally this will be all cleared up. Heaven and earth will be united. Will Heaven come to earth? or will earth will be lifted up into Heaven? It won’t make any difference, for finally here and there, then and now, past, present and future will all be united in Jesus Christ. All will be One in Him.

But not yet. For now, you see above what happens when finite beings try to describe the infinite, when we mortals try to talk about the immortal. Our minds get all jammed up. But in such a wonderful way!

When I first saw Jesus go up on that string, I never imagined what all it would come to.

______________________

If you think you’re perplexed now, come back Next Week for A full, complete and totally inadequate explication of The Holy Trinity.

Week after Next: We’ll see…