Ascension: We Rise, Even As We Stay (A While)

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The Ascension:  June 29, 2014

Today is we celebrate the Ascension, an in-between sort of day before Pentecost that we don’t spend much time thinking about. It is the day that we remember that Jesus, forty days after the Easter Resurrection, returned to heaven to be with God. 

In the Scriptures, again and again we read of periods of forty days, or forty years: it rained forty days and forty nights in the deluges, Moses fasted 40 days and 40 nights on Sinai; Eliah walked forty days and forty nights in the power of the food given him by the angel; Jesus fasted forty days before His public life, and after His resurrection, during a period of forty days He often appeared with His disciples and dined with them.

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Forty is a symbol of a period of preparation or formation. Our whole life on earth, from the day on which we rose from the dead with Christ in baptism is like the forty days before our Lord’s ascension. It is a period of preparation for our ascension, a period of formation in the divine life until we will receive its final fullness, when we too are taken up in glory.  In the meantime, we are in the process of theosis, our own process of becoming more like Christ.  Or, as St. Athanasius put it, "God became man so that man might become a god."  Even in the Eucharistic liturgy we pray, "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

Just as the glorious Jesus frequently dined with His disciples after His resurrection, so He dines with us throughout our forty days of preparation for heaven, nourishing us with His own body in the Holy Eucharist, forming in us His divine life, which at last will be fully manifest even in our bodies at His second coming. In the strength of that food, like Elias we walk forty days and forty nights to the heavenly city.

We are no longer merely earthly humans.  We are living the heavenly life of the resurrection, waiting for its fullness when we are taken up with Jesus. We have no permanent city here, where “we are in the world.” In fact, this heavenly life is already so real in us, that St. Paul writes: “By reason of His very great love wherewith he has loved us, God, even when we were dead by reason of our sins, has brought us to life together with Christ, and raised us up together and seated us together in heaven in Christ Jesus.” (Eph. 2:5-6)