The Ascension Restores Reality

In this homily that I gave last year during the afterfeast of the Holy Ascension, I emphasized the reality-changing importance of the Ascension, and why it is that we have a hard time seeing it.

This past Thursday, we beheld the joyous feast of the Holy Ascension. We are now in the in the afterfeast. The resurrection and the ascension share some similarities in that neither one was the first. For example, Elisha raised the dead son of a widow and Jesus raised Lazarus and many others from the dead. Likewise, Ezekiel and Elijah experienced a glorious ascension. They witnessed heavenly things, yet they didn’t truly pierce the heavens with their humanity.

But our Lord’s resurrection was more than a biological resuscitation (after all, He walked through walls and was unrecognizable to His closest friends until He opened their spiritual eyes to discern greater mysteries). Likewise, the ascension was more than a man flying upward and witnessing heavenly mysteries. Jesus Christ’s resurrection and ascension have eternal consequences.

St. Paul wrote much about the ascension of this Son of Man in Ephesians chapters one and two. I’ll be turning there for much of my homily. He writes:

[I pray] that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,

Here, St. Paul is saying there’s something special here, something that requires the spirit of wisdom to understand. Just as our Lord had to open the minds of the disciples to recognize Him both in His body and in the Scriptures, we must also receive revelation from God about the ascension and what it means for us.

(18) the eyes of your hearts being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,

Again, St. Paul is saying that our hearts need to be enlightened. He’s not about to lay out ideas with which we may agree or disagree. Instead, he wants to bring a radical shift in our understanding; a transformative epiphany. For this is about the riches of the glory of God in His saints.

(19) and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power (20) which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,

The image given here is that – at the Holy Ascension – God the Father has seated the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, at His right hand in the heavenly places. There are a couple of points to make about this.

First, Christ is seated. Who sits in the presence of a king? Only royalty. Who sits in the presence of the King of kings and God of all? Nobody but God.

Secondly, Christ didn’t snatch this position for Himself – He didn’t conquer heaven and overthrow the Father. That sounds obvious to us, but a familiar pagan mythological trope was the sons of gods overthrowing their fathers (e.g., Uranus overthrown by his son, Chronus, who was overthrown by his son, Zeus).

In another place St. Paul writes, “Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God” (Phil. 2:6). The Son being equal to His Father wasn’t robbery; it wasn’t a coup. After all, the divine Son was always there with the Father. What changed is that He wasn’t always there as a man.

The ancient Divine Liturgy attests to the divinity and omnipresence of Christ. Every time the priest begins censing before the start of the Liturgy, he says this prayer, “In the Tomb with the body, and in Hades with the soul, in Paradise with the thief, and on the Throne with the Father and the Spirit, wast thou, O Christ, who art everywhere present and filling all things.”

This is saying that while our Lord was in the tomb, He was also in Paradise with the thief, and simultaneously on the Throne with His Father whom He never left. How is that possible? He’s God and fills all things with His presence. That’s part of what it means to be divine by nature.

But what changed at the Ascension was that the God-Man Jesus Christ, the resurrected, glorified, deified human, was seated at the right hand of God.

Unlike the prior ascensions of Elijah and Ezekiel, St. Paul tells us in Ephesians

(21) [Jesus is seated] far above all principality and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.

So, there is nothing and no one higher than our Lord Jesus Christ. While that’s nothing new, it is new that our human nature has received this exalted state.

What Does this Mean for Our Humanity?

I’m going to take you all down a philosophical road here. It may seem like an odd rabbit trail, but I promise you that it ties into everything. It’s important that we know what it is that we think, how we got here, and how ancient people thought.

In ancient times, people saw everything that is alike as having some kind of connection. This connection came through an object’s participation in a higher, heavenly version of itself. This worldview has been called realism. Since we’re talking about thrones, let’s use that as an example.

There exists a heavenly throne – the ideal of what a chair can be. All chairs participate in the image of this ideal heavenly chair, though some are certainly closer to the original than others.

The Church Fathers were realists – particularly regarding what it means to be human. The ascension into glory excited them because they understood the consequences of it.

But we modern people usually lose the connection between the ascension and us.

Jesus ascends into the heavens, taking our resurrected, glorified, healed humanity and places it back in the heavens. The prototype has been restored, and now, it not only exists in the mind of God, but is seated at His right hand in glory.

Yet most of us still don’t grasp the significance of this event. If we were to be honest, we would ask, “Ok, but what good does that really do me? I mean, good for Jesus, but how does that help me?”

The Nominalism that Blinds Us

The reason we ask this question is because we’ve lost the proper perception of reality. Beginning with William of Occam in the 1300s, nearly all Western people have become nominalists.

Nominalism teaches there is no such thing as an ideal – a universal. There are simply individuals. Numerous errors that we’re struggling with today were influenced by nominalism. One example is rampant gender confusion. If there is no real universal, and only individuals, then there can be no definitive male and female. Nominalism is our culture’s underlying philosophy that makes this confusion possible. It filters how we perceive the Scriptures and reality. Another error stemming from nominalism is nihilism, which denies the existence of genuine moral truths and values and asserts that life and existence are meaningless.

But reality exists in a hierarchy. The “heavenly” ideals give structure, order, and meaning to the ways in which these things play out in the world around us – whether it’s a chair or a human being. The lower things find their meaning through participation in the higher ideals.

If we understood the restoration of the prototype bringing healing to the whole, we would begin to grasp the beauty of the ascension.

Let me share an example. It’s an earthly one, so it’s not perfect. But perhaps it will lead us in the right direction.

Many years ago, my wife and I took a road trip across the western United States. While driving through Utah, I remembered that it is the home of one of the earth’s largest and oldest living organisms. So, I took a detour to see it, and it remains one of the most memorable moments we have ever shared.

Its name is Pando. It spans over 100 acres, weighs 6,600 tons, and is thousands of years old.

Pando is a tree. And while it looks like it’s 47,000 trees, all the “trees” are technically stems and clones of the one tree from which they all spawned. If you scratched beneath the surface, you’d find one root system since it is one organism.

So, let’s tie that into our humanity and the ascension.

While we are not clones of God like the trees in Pando, we were made in the image and likeness of God. The likeness was lost by Adam and Eve and the image tarnished. But Christ came and restored that image through His incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension. Now our humanity sits at the right hand of the Glory in heaven; the heavenly prototype has been restored.

Nominalism, applied to Pando, would say, “No, these are just 47,000 individual trees. They have a lot in common but they’re not connected in any way whatsoever. And they certainly don’t have one ideal tree from which they all came!”

But the realism of the Church Fathers scratches beneath the surface and sees that we humans are all connected, and that when one of us is sick, we are all sick. But when one of us is whole, healing to can come to the whole body. That’s why St. Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians, continues telling us the significance of the ascension:

(2:1) And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, (2) in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,

So, he’s saying, we were dead. Every one of us. Sin caused death and the image of God was lost in us. But then he continues…

Changing our Perspective

(4) But God who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, (5) even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), (6) and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

He’s talking about the present moment! We are made alive right now with Christ, and we are raised with Him sitting together in Him in the heavenly places. What a scandalous joy! We sinners, sitting in the heavens in Christ Jesus!

This is a reality that we can begin to walk in. It’ll be brought to fullness in the age to come. But we begin to participate in it even now.

During the Cherubic Hymn in the Divine Liturgy, we sing

“Let us who mystically represent the cherubim and sing the thrice holy hymn to the life creating Trinity — now lay aside all earthly cares. That we may receive the King of all who comes invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts.”

The Divine Liturgy is our participation in the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension of our humanity into the highest glory of heaven right now. This very moment! Why are our minds not blown every week? Because we have an erroneous, limited perspective on reality. We also are greatly attached to the world and our sins, which together blind us spiritually.

But we are called to “lay aside all earthly cares.” Why? So “we may receive the King of all who comes invisibly.”

He’s here, with us right now, present in the Eucharist, present in us, around us, everywhere. We are to be like the cherubim, completely enraptured in Christ who is seated in the heavenly places. Like the cherubim, we are His throne: we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist and become the throne of God – Him seated in us and us in Him.

My brothers and sisters, we must turn away from those things that turn us away from God. We mustn’t do like the Disciples who, when Jesus was about to ascend in Glory, began asking Him about earthly politics.

They, of course, had their minds radically changed through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and an existence completely devoted to God. We too, should prepare ourselves to become “precious vessels of the Holy Spirit.” We can do so through repenting, spiritual reading, praying, and going to Church. These things immerse us into a different reality – the one true reality.

We get bombarded daily with a lame pseudo-reality. But we’ve been invited into the heavens, to be seated in Christ at the right hand of God. May we accept the invitation!

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The featured image is from an 11th century German illuminated manuscript, courtesy of Getty Museum. All rights reserved.