BILLTESKA

VII Easter

 May 17, 2015

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.

.

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

When the Son became flesh He did not leave the Father. He did not go anywhere. Hold that thought. For now, how about this: GLORY means the Holy Spirit.  When Jesus says that He gives us the Glory that the Father gave Him, He is speaking of the Holy Spirit. Glory, here means something more than reputation: it is the Light that shone round about the shepherds outside Bethlehem.    

Eastern theologians called this visible Glory the Uncreated Light.  It is not the essence of God, but neither is it a creature of God. It is energy that proceeds out of God’s essence, as the warmth of the sun proceeds out of the sun itself. This seems to me close to the notion that God is Light.  At least in some sense, light and God are connected.  Is this merely metaphor?  Maybe not. The shepherds saw something, and so did the Apostles on the mountain of the Transfiguration. I understand that modern physics regards matter and energy as a kind of continuum.  In a sense, all matter is nothing but energy organized into patterns. Some of this energy is visible, some isn’t. This brings us to the Mystery of the Ascension, when the visible energy of Jesus’ risen Body became invisible.

The Ascension is an aspect of the Incarnation. If God became human, and if in the flesh of Jesus Christ dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily as St. Paul teaches, where is He now? What happened to this Body after the Resurrection?  The Ascension into heaven and enthronement on the right hand of God is the dogmatic answer. But what on earth (!) does that mean?

A few years ago, I said that it was easier for the ancients to wrap this up because of their view of the cosmos as three-storied: earth where we live, Hades underneath (where, before Christ, all the miserable shades of the dead were imprisoned), and then heaven – up above, where God is.  So we affirm as a matter of creedal dogma that the Son “came down” from heaven, and returned thereto to sit at the right hand of the Father.

But where is this heaven? I was mistaken about the early theologians, because using the philosophy and science of their own age, they recognized that heaven was not a place. After all, God is outside time and space. God has no location. God is not up there above the clouds or among the stars. So where is He? He is everywhere and nowhere. The categories of place, as found in the biblical three-storied cosmology, do not apply to a pure Spirit. It is a mistake in thinking to ask where God is, just as it is a mistake to ask what is north of the North Pole. The category just doesn’t apply. Just as He did not go anywhere when He came down from Heaven, so He did not go anywhere when He ascended to the right hand of God. That is what the 4^th-Century theologians taught. OK, so what happened to Jesus’ Body and what do we mean when we say that He ascended into heaven?

Perhaps it has something to do with light and glory. As the ancient Mothers and Fathers used the cosmological categories of their era, we are free to do the same, and our modern physics is not entirely useless here. Probably more helpful to Christian dogma, in fact, than the three-storied universe. If all matter is energy, it means that creation is light organized by myriads of patterns, maybe we can say that the Resurrection of Christ had something to do with the previous pattern of His Body taking shape in a new and incorruptible way, so that it could be seen and heard and fed, but was also capable of being several places at once and passing through locked doors. One scholar has suggested that our modern imagination is open to this kind of weirdness, at least in our science fiction: “beam me up, Scotty.” Maybe what is beamed up to the Enterprise is the pattern of light. What the Hindus call the “subtle body.” Not the molecules themselves, but the pattern of their organization. The scholar suggests that Captain Kirk might better command, “fax me up, Scotty”!

Then there is the unrecognized Lord cautioning Mary Magdalene not to touch Him, because he was “not yet ascended to the Father.” What does this mysterious warning  mean? After the Ascension, she would be welcome to touch Him? And what about the Holy Shroud of Turin, which seems to have been imprinted by a burst of light.

Glory. The Holy Spirit. The images of chariots of fire and floating up in a cloud were the best the eye-witnesses could do to describe the Glory they saw.  What is even more mysterious is the apparent fact that the Apostles did not experience the Ascension as a loss.  You would think that they would have been devastated by this disappearance.  Quite the opposite, however, they all experienced the Real Presence of the Risen Lord even more intensely. A later teacher, Leo the Great, would observe that the Lord’s visible Presence was transferred to the sacraments: now that He was ascended, they could touch Him.

The ancient theologians compared this experience of continuing Presence to the dogma that the Son never left heaven when He came down from heaven, because heaven is not a place. It is a relationship to the Father. That relationship was not broken when the Son “came down from heaven.”

 Likewise, the Presence God established with creation in the Incarnation did not end with the Ascension. The symbolic journey of the Son back to the Father, now clothed with human flesh, is a way of saying that God’s Incarnation is permanent, the marriage with Creation indissoluble. Jesus did not go anywhere. Heaven and the right hand of God are not a place, but a way of being – a way of being that has to do with light and glory. The account in the Acts underscores this Mystery by telling us how the angels ridiculed the Apostles for gazing into the sky. The Ascension is not about going   anywhere, it is about the transfiguration of the world.

After the initial resurrection appearances, the Apostles were ready to go back to their previous, ordinary life.  Peter announces that he is "going fishing."  But after the Ascension, their reaction is just the opposite: the Apostles wait, as a community,  for the Holy Spirit — the Glory that Christ became — to descend upon them in the holy city, as it were in tongues of fire (light again), and then they go out and  change the world.  The Ascension transformed them into completely new people. Our new Collect gets it right, I think:

 …Jesus Christ ascended far above all heavens that He might fill all things:

The Ascension is the completion of the Resurrection, as the Lord’s Glorified Body unites with all things – ta panta – all the energy bound in what we call “matter,” speaking from within the limits of our sensory perception. The Collect goes on to ask that God will give us new organs of perception: faith to perceive that, according to His promise, He abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.

This faith is the new Apostolic capacity to perceive the Glory of God – the Light that fills the whole creation –  the gift of the Holy Spirit, Who bestows that capacity, and Who is that Glory. The grace to see the universe suffused with the Divine Energies, the Body of Christ as Light filling all things. As the post-Communion prayer from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom has it: “We have beheld your Resurrection, O Christ our God, we have seen the True Light, we have found the true faith, we have received the Heavenly Spirit.” And as St. Paul says to the Corinthians:

… we all, with unveiled face, beholding the Glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.