The Ascension of Christ

“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.’ And when he had said this, 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.'” (Acts 1: 6-11).

The ascension of the Lord is a significant event in salvation history, and yet it seems to be one of the most misunderstood. Many modern commentators of scripture have suggested that the account of the ascension in scripture is merely a primitive example as to how Christians discussed Christ’s resurrection: they tell us that the ascension is the same thing as the resurrection. With shades of idealistic, spiritualistic hermeneutics used to justify such a claim, it makes one wonder why the Greeks would have had a problem with the resurrection. If such modern interpreters were correct, the Greeks would have had yet another affirmation of the immortality of the soul, highlighting the ascent back to the One. Yet, this kind of thinking, so common in today’s world, is not what the resurrection is about, nor should the ascension be seen as a Gnostic defleshment of Christ. Because confusion of what the ascension is about has become so common, it is no wonder that it has slowly been forgotten in the liturgical life of the church. Yet, when we look into the Gospels, the ascension is clearly an event, one which is related to the resurrection of Christ (for it depends upon the resurrection) but is one which has ramifications of its own.

The resurrection of Christ teaches us many things. It affirms the life, work and mission of Christ. It is a sign of God to the world, telling us that the meaning and value of death have been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. It demonstrates to us the restoration of fallen humanity; the integral unity of the soul and body is necessary for human dignity; eternal life is bodily life and not just an immortal soul living on its own. It shows us that through grace the damage inflicted upon the world to sin can be and is healed. “Christ is risen from the dead, by death he conquered death, and to those in the graves, he has granted life.” While the soul is immortal, and continues even after death, nonetheless, we cannot say the one in the grave is truly alive; only in the resurrection where we find a transformation of the human person do we see true life.

If the resurrection is about freeing humanity from the ancestral curse of sin, what meaning can we find in the ascension? It is about bringing humanity into full participation with the divine life by grace. “God became man so that man can become God.” Through the ascension of Christ, Christ’s humanity is deified, and through Christ, and our union with Christ, our life is free for theosis. His ascent brings the descent of the Spirit upon humanity, for the Spirit is now open to humanity through the union of heaven and earth, God and man, in the resurrected and deified God-Man, Christ. “To be sure, The Ascension to heaven is not Christ’s departure into the astronomical space of the stars and galaxies, and in general is not a departure to some other place, for ‘heaven’ is not a place, and in any case it is not another place in relation to the earth. The Ascension signifies not a physical but a metaphysicaldeparture from the world, analogous to Christ’s metaphysical descent from heaven to earth, which resulted in His physical presence on the earth. Heaven is divine, supramundane, and supracreaturely being; it is the Holy Trinity itself in its Glory, and it is the Divine Sophia,” Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 392. While, in his humanity, he was a spirit-bearer, that spirit can only be given after Christ has given his all for creation; the kenosis of Christ ends, not in the death and resurrection of Christ, but in the ascension – for it is in the ascension that we find the final glorification of the Son by the Father through the Spirit; it is through his self-abandonment, through his kenosis, that he is able to receive glory  (if he kept it instead of giving it up in kenosis, there would have been nothing for him to receive). This is what we should expect, for the glory of God is love, and love exists only in self-sacrifice. Yet, we must not think that the ascension serves as Christ’s final contact with humanity: he is with us, even until the end of the world. If the ascension were the defleshment of Christ, then his unity and presence with us would be at an end; because it is about the glorification of his humanity in the flesh, we must know that the ascension is not abandonment of the world but the ultimate example of Christ’s unity with it, for he has taken his earthly body into heaven, showing us, contrary to the Gnostics, his firm commitment and solidarity with the flesh.

And yet it is only through the resurrection that the ascension and theosis is possible; this is why the two are connected, and the two serve as the beginning and the end of the paschal season. In the ascension, the glorification of Christ begun at the resurrection has been fulfilled. Without the two different, distinct events, understood to be different by the earliest Christians, the salvation and deification of humanity would not have been accomplished. With the resurrection alone, we might have had eternal life, but it would not have allowed for the freedom to the human person; for it is only when humanity is deified that our contingent freedom can find itself at home in the infinite freedom of God’s providence.