Today is Ascension Day. The Gospel reading (from the conclusion of Luke’s Gospel) ends with this deceptively simple account:
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
Modern believers, at least those who take cosmological science seriously, tend to imagine the resurrected and ascended Christ as not embodied, as a “pure spirit,” even if the doctrines they confess say otherwise. Others, including the folks who raised me, reject the science out of hand, or simply ignore it, imagining the flesh-and-blood Christ as stationed for now in a galaxy far, far away, awaiting the end of time, the time of his return to earth.
If we say no to these imaginings, and I’m convinced we must, then how can we speak intelligibly of the ascension?1 What are we talking about when we talk about Jesus coming from and returning to heaven? Where, if anywhere, is that? How is such coming and going possible? If he has risen bodily, where is that body located? If it’s not locatable, in what sense is it a body? In what sense is Jesus present to and in and with us now? And what difference, if any, do our answers to these questions make for our lived lives?
First, in spite of what we’ve been left to imagine, the ascension does not mean that the resurrected Christ went away, taking his body with him out to some distant placed called “heaven.” When, as St Luke tells us, he is “carried up,” he does not fly away into outer space somewhere. Ascension does not name a change in him, but in us and in our experience of him—a change that brings us into direct contact with him in the Spirit and so makes us apt to his influence.
Second, we have to bear in mind that God is not conditioned by eternity and heaven as we are conditioned by time and space. God is conditioned by nothing but God. God is God’s own time and space, and heaven is his creature just as surely as earth is. “The right hand of God” to which the Lord rises is not a place, not a location, but the locus of God’s action in and upon creation. “Heaven” names a situation, not a site. Jesus’ “going away,” therefore, is spiritual, not spatial. It is the event of God happening to the created order, not merely an event among others within that order. As I argued in All Things Beautiful,
In the incarnation, the Son translates his way of living the divine life into creatureliness, a way which is inherently deferring and preferring. He becomes an object, a thing, a fact. He is and remains the uncreated truth, of course, but as a creature he is available to and present with other creatures, alongside them, as one among them. In the ascension, this way of living the creaturely life is translated back into uncreatedness, into the full and unbroken communion that is the ground and goal of all that exists… This is the mystery celebrated on the feast of ascension: Christ’s humanity, living and dead, is made integral to God’s way of being God, so that it is the source of all that exists…. He who once was known “after the flesh,” is available as the truth of all facts and factors, infusing all that exists, and all that ceases to exist, with the mystery of his own life. Indeed, in his ascension it is revealed that even that “before” and that “after” are determined by what he did in and between them. And so, in this sense, Ascension Day is also a “festival of the future of the world.” As Rahner says, “He holds eternally within himself the results of creation’s history as his own reality, and lets it participate in his own life for all eternity.”2
Third, whether we appreciate it or not, all of this does in fact bear on every aspect of our day-to-day lives—endlessly more than we can imagine. What David Bentley Hart says about the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo applies also to the doctrine of the ascension: it is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim but also an eschatological and therefore ethical one. Speaking wisely of Jesus’ ascension breaks us free from absorption in the cares of this life and alerts us to the deceitfulness of wealth and power, training us to hear the cry of those in need as the call of God and opening our eyes so that we can glimpse, if only fleetingly, something of what is truly happening in Christ—he is, after all, where the action really is.3
Ascending, vanishing from sight, the resurrected Christ reveals himself as the life-giving spirit who is the very foundation of the world, the new heart of creation—a heart of flesh, not stone. This is why it was necessary for him to “go away” and for Mary Magdalene not to cling to him. As our hope, our future, as well as our past, he is not presently graspable, not something that can be taken to hand. The ascension, we might say, was the crucifixion of our uses of God. Jesus is always with us just to the extent that he cannot be managed. He eludes, finally and forever, our manipulations. Thanks be to God.
And so, finally, we can pray Rahner’s prayer with him:
Lord, when You return even as You have departed from us, as a true man, then may You find Yourself in us as the one who bears all, is patient, is faithful, is kind, is selfless; as the one who cleaves to the Father even in the darkness of death, the one who loves, the one who is joyful. Lord, may You find Yourself in us, being what we would so much wish to be yet are not. But Your grace has not only endured. In reality, it has come to us simply in virtue of the fact that You, having ascended and been enthroned at the right hand of God, have poured out Your Spirit into our hearts. And so we truly believe that against all experience You do continue Your life in us even though it seems to be only ourselves—Ah! almost always only ourselves and not You—that we find within ourselves. You have ascended into heaven and are seated at the right hand of God with our life. You are coming back with that life in order to find Your life in ours. And the fact that You will find it there-that will be our eternity even when we, together with all that we are and have lived and have possessed and have borne, shall have entered into the glory of Your Father through Your second coming. Amen.4
And we can do what the apostles did at the first: we can worship Christ and bless his God with him, filled, as he is, by the Spirit of Joy.
For more of Jenson’s view of the ascension, which has been influential for me, see this reflection by Jason Micheli:
Green, All Things Beautiful, 134.
Here I’m alluding to Peterson’s rendering of Colossians 3: “So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ” (Col. 3.1-4 MSG).
Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime, 76-77.
Amen