So we have come to the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord. Thus we have come to the last day of Christ's physical presence on Earth. This marks the fulfillment of all things, since His Conception at the Annunciation to the Holy Virgin, His Birth and all the events of His earthly life, recorded for us in the Gospels.

Christ came down from Heaven in order to destroy the power of Satan over mankind.

Christ was crucified and rose from the dead in order to destroy death.

Christ ascends into the skies in order to raise up fallen human nature to the heights of Heaven.

But He ascends not as He came down. He ascends taking with Himself a human body, a human soul, a human mind, a human will, all the attributes of human nature, except of course for sin, for Christ's human nature is human nature as it was first intended to be, not fallen human nature, but human nature redeemed and made all comely.

We should note, however, that all these victories of Christ over Satan, death and sin are accomplished in humility.

At His Birth there was, as we would say now, no media. All happened in obscurity, lowliness and poverty, as the Saviour of mankind was born in a cave by the ox and the ass.

At His Crucifixion also there was no glory: on the contrary, there was shame, thieves, reviling, mockery, bodily death, a lonely death.

At His Resurrection, nobody saw anything. The women who saw the empty tomb were not even believed. Only a few dozen believers came to believe in the first few weeks after His Resurrection.

So also at His Ascension the only witnesses were His Mother and the eleven disciples amid the obscure olives groves on the Mount outside the City.

We see that all the great events, all the victories, of the life of Christ were accompanied by humility. This is because in the Church victory is humility. Every act of humility is a victory over the pride of Satan.

And in order to grant us the opportunity for humility, at the last event of His physical presence amongst us, Christ gives us two things:

Firstly, He comforts us and the disciples with the promise of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Who will guide us into all truth, into all humility.

Secondly, through His holy angels, He reminds us that as He ascends, so He will return, with angels and a cloud of glory. He reminds us that He will return in His Second and Glorious Coming to judge all the Earth.

When He ascends, He promises us the Holy Spirit.

When He descends at the Second Coming, He will come in glory as the Victor over death to judge all deathly acts, that is, all sins, for as the Apostle writes, the wages of sin are death.

Thus God is victorious in humility.

Therefore the Orthodox Church and faithful Orthodox Christians are also victorious, but only in humility.

God is the Merciful Saviour among us, granting us the Holy Spirit in order to guide us on our path to the victory of humility. As we have sung this day: 'I am with you and no-one will be against you'.

God is the Righteous Judge among us, granting us His Coming again as the Judge of the Universe, guiding us on our path to the victory of humility: 'I am with you and no-one will be against you'.

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Amen.

by Prof. Regis Martin

Of all the conundrums that have come to vex and confound us, there are three that continue uniquely to rivet the attention. Each provides a key to the great and enduring realities of the Christian life. What can we know (Faith)? What ought we to do (Charity)? And, finally, in whom may we trust (Hope)? If, in the evening of our lives, answers to the first two are still not to be found, it may be too late to begin inquiries about them. But in the light of Ascension Thursday, that stupendous feast we celebrate forty days after the Lord's Resurrection, we have got the answer to the third and final question, although few of the faithful these days pay much heed to what it means.

Well, what does the Lord's Ascension mean? This ultimate conquest of sin and death, does it even signify? It does indeed and the answer is nothing less than the blinding affirmation that we are bound for glory, destined to experience a land beyond the stars that will overflow with the radiance of unending bliss and transfiguring joy. Pope Benedict XVI put it very well when, thirty years ago in Dogma and Preaching, he described the Church's celebration of the feast as "the expression of our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in which we all share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard of way. It means that man has found an everlasting place in God."

Here, without doubt, is the supreme moment in the life of Christ, the final climactic event to the work of his Redemption. Face to face with the mystery intended from the beginning, which is nothing less than the Incarnate-Son sitting in glory alongside the Father, we too await a common destiny, that of God himself coming to confer the crown of everlasting life upon those who love him. It means that even as Christ belongs no more to a fallen and corrupt world, so also will we who cleave to Christ find refuge forever in the arms of God. Is it not passing strange, however, that so often this is the very thing most of us are unlikely ever to be thinking about at the moment? What a perverse silence has fallen upon us in the face of so triumphant a prospect!

One would think people already anchored to the event of the Lord's Resurrection, accustomed therefore to be ready at a moment's notice for the sudden return of the Bridegroom, would be the first to anneal themselves in hope. But in order for Christ to come back, crashing through the ceiling of the cosmos one final and triumphant time, he needs first to go away. Isn't that, after all, the whole point of the Ascension? To return to his Father only after having first gathered up the shards of scattered humanity in order to present the whole redeemed actuality before the Throne of Victory? What else is there for us in the Lord's end—but our beginning?

The Scriptures are wonderfully plainspoken about all this, by the way, telling us that, moments before the ascent back to the Father, thus completing the circuit begun thirty-three years before with that daring descent into the brokenness of our world, Christ leaves two promises in the care of the Church he will shortly fashion from his pierced and crucified side. "I go to prepare a place for you," he first tells his disciples, "that where I am you too may be" (Jn 14:3). Followed by this sublime assurance: "I shall not leave you orphans" (Jn 14:18).

Two promises are thus made, one for eternity, the other for time. Both entrusted to those whom he loved to the very end. First there is the gift of everlasting life, then the capacity to endure even this life. Each locked in the treasury of Holy Church, Christ's spotless Bride, whose keys unlock all the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Before taking leave of his disciples, in other words, Christ evinces this great anxiety lest they think he is merely tossing them to the four winds. Instead, he tells them, the disciples, including all who have been summoned to come after—yes, even unto the consummation of the world—that we shall be guided and shaped across the great and fearful sea of history by a very special wind, namely, the breath of God's own Spirit, who will unfailingly impart enough comfort and counsel for us to overcome the world. "I am with you always," he tells us, "until the end of the world" (Mt 28:19). The form or modality this being-with-you takes, of course, is no less than the Third Person of the Trinity, the One who from all eternity spirates the love of Father and Son. He is God's presence within us, in our innermost being, even as he remains entirely transcendent to us.

All of which, of course, crucially depends on Christ being raised up in the midst of his astonished apostles, only to vanish in a cloud that seemingly carries him straight to the Father. Because until that moment of actual Ascension, truly the pivotal turning point in our relationship with God, the unleashing of the Holy Spirit may not take place. The release of the Spirit—that hovering and mysterious Presence who, in the exquisite imagery of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, "over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright / wings"—can only take place when Christ in his blessed humanity is raised to receive the praise and honor of the Father. Only then may the promised Pentecostal fire fall into the gap, the time-bound interval between Ascension and Parousia. Between the time of already and not yet, there necessarily falls the bright shadow of the Spirit, whose sending awaits the Ascension of the Son.

How well our ancestors in the faith understood this when they placed the Christ of the Ascension in the dome of their churches. Like a lance aimed at the heart of God, as someone once said of the art and impulse of the Gothic, here was the very point of the spear itself, thrust through the dome that opens onto the Godhead. Our ancestors realized with the certitude and intuition of real belief that an entirely new beginning has been struck, that the last days had surely come. That he who was the splendor of the Father, the effulgence of eternity itself—who had, indeed, first burst into the darkness of a fallen world—was now bathed in a light and warmth so incandescent as to illumine all creation.

What the feast of the Ascension means is that the One who had to leave us for a time, even to the extent of taking physical leave of those whom he most loved in the world, is thereby much closer to us now. It is simply not accurate to speak of the Ascension in terms of even the briefest of absences, as though Christ were in any way missing from the world he first suffered to redeem. Inasmuch as he holds the entire cosmos in his hands, Pope Benedict reminds us, "the Lord's Ascension means that Christ has not gone far away from us, but that now, thanks to the fact that he is with the Father, he is close to each one of us forever."

When we speak of heaven, therefore, we do so in terms of going home to Jesus, who remains at the deepest level the place we designate as heaven. And by thus entering into his life, mysteriously prolonged now in his Body the Church, we become citizens of that other world. "All the way to heaven, is heaven, " Jesus tells Catherine of Siena. "Because I am the Way." His having first gone there himself to prepare a place—that is what we mean by the Lord's Ascension. From that lofty pinnacle above the careworn world, Christ is enabled thus to stoop once more to lead us by the hand, shepherding us to the place where, from all eternity, he will never tire of telling us how completely it shall burnish and perfect our Easter joy.

About Regis Martin

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar's Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, also published by Emmaus Road, is called Witness to Wonder: The World of Catholic Sacrament.

by Fr. Thomas Hopko

"and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father . . ."

After His resurrection from the dead Jesus appeared to men for a period of forty days after which He "was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God" (Mk 16.19; see also Lk 24.50 and Acts 1.9–11).

The ascension of Jesus Christ is the final act of His earthly mission of salvation. The Son of God comes "down from heaven" to do the work which the Father gives Him to do; and having accomplished all things, He returns to the Father bearing for all eternity the wounded and glorified humanity which He has assumed (see e.g. Jn 17).

The doctrinal meaning of the ascension is the glorification of human nature, the reunion of man with God. It is indeed, the very penetration of man into the inexhaustible depths of divinity.

We have seen already that "the heavens" is the symbolical expression in the Bible for the uncreated, immaterial, divine "realm of God" as one saint of the Church has called it. To say that Jesus is "exalted at the right hand of God" as Saint Peter preached in the first Christian sermon (Acts 2.33) means exactly this: that man has been restored to communion with God, to a union which is, according to Orthodox doctrine, far greater and more perfect than that given to man in his original creation (see Eph 1–2).

Man was created with the potential to be a "partaker of the divine nature," to refer to the Apostle Peter once more (2 Pet 1.4). It is this participation in divinity, called theosis (which literally means deification or divinization) in Orthodox theology, that the ascension of Christ has fulfilled for humanity. The symbolical expression of the "sitting at the right hand" of God means nothing other than this. It does not mean that somewhere in the created universe the physical Jesus is sitting in a material throne.

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of Christ’s ascension in terms of the Jerusalem Temple. Just as the high priests of Israel entered the "holy of holies" to offer sacrifice to God on behalf of themselves and the people, so Christ the one, eternal and perfect High Priest offers Himself on the cross to God as the one eternal, and perfect, Sacrifice, not for Himself but for all sinful men. As a man, Christ enters (once and for all) into the one eternal and perfect Holy of Holies: the very "Presence of God in the heavens."

 . . we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God . . . (Heb 4.14)

For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens. . . . He has no need like those high priests to offer sacrifice daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did this once and for all when he offered up himself.

Now, the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tabernacle which is set up not by man but by the Lord (Heb 7.26; 8.2).

For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf (Heb 9.24).

. . . when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, then to wait until his enemies should be made a stool for his feet (Heb 10.12–13; Ps 110.1).

Thus, the ascension of Christ is seen as man’s first entry into that divine glorification for which He was originally created. The entry is made possible by the exaltation of the divine Son who emptied Himself in human flesh in perfect self-offering to God.

by The Rev. Charles Henrickson

Gospel: Luke 24:44-53

Then Jesus said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high."

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.
- Luke 24:44-53 (ESV)

Today the church celebrates the Ascension of Our Lord. It was forty days after his resurrection that our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, and so this is the day--forty days after Easter, always on a Thursday in mid-to-late spring--when we have this festival. Now there are many things we could say about the Ascension, but tonight I want to focus on this: "Christ's Ascending Is a Sending."

Christ's ascending is a sending. What do I mean by that? I mean that when Jesus ascends into heaven, at that time he sends out his apostles. Christ's ascending thus is a sending, a sending out of the apostles as witnesses. In Luke 24, Jesus tells them, "You are witnesses of these things." And in Acts 1, likewise, he says, "You will be my witnesses." Sending out the apostles as his witnesses--that's what Christ is doing here when he ascends into heaven.

Christ's ascending is a sending, a sending out of witnesses. Tonight I want to focus especially on the content of their witness. And so we ask: In Luke 24, when Jesus tells the apostles, "You are witnesses of these things," what are the "these things" he's referring to? Well, it's what he had just told them, namely: "Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem." That's when he says, "You are witnesses of these things."

Jesus himself tells us here what the church's witness, our public testimony, will be. In fact, this is Jesus' summary of what the whole Bible is about. The heart and core and center of our witness zeroes in on these things: 1) "that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead," and 2) "that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem." That's it. That's the Bible in a nutshell, according to Jesus. That's the content of the church's witness. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And repentance and forgiveness proclaimed in his name.

Did you ever wonder why the Apostles' Creed includes the items it includes? I mean, when you look at it, it seems a little out of balance. There's a lot more in the Second Article, about Christ, than there is in the First or Third Article, about the Father or the Spirit. And even in the Second Article, look at what is mentioned and what is skipped over. It starts out: "And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary." OK, so far, so good. We've established who Jesus is, that he is both true God and true man. We've gotten as far as Christ's birth. But then where does the Creed go next? It zooms forward, fast forward, to the end of the story, if you will: "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried," etc. In other words, it skips over a lot of material that could have been mentioned--all the miracles, all the teachings of Jesus, and so forth. The Creed zooms right past all that and hurries on to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. But then, when you look at the four gospels, that's just where the emphasis lies there, too. In each gospel, out of all the years of Jesus' life and ministry, there is a disproportionate amount of space devoted to just one week, really--Holy Week, Palm Sunday through Easter.

But isn't this what Jesus is saying here in our text? Jesus himself says this is where the emphasis should lie: "that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead." Why put the emphasis there? Because this is why Christ came. This is how he won our salvation. You and I needed a Savior, someone to rescue us from our sin and the death that follows. We could not free ourselves. Only God could do that. And so God sent his only Son--you see, it starts with a sending, the Father sending his Son--Jesus Christ was sent to be that Savior. God in the flesh, come down from heaven. Christ Jesus kept the Law in our place, kept it as a man, which we have failed to do. But even though he was innocent, sinless, righteous in God's sight, Jesus went to the cross. There he died a sinner's death. Only a man could do that, which Jesus did as the one representative man for all sinners, bearing the judgment, the punishment that the Law requires. The righteous for the unrighteous, Christ crucified, shedding his holy blood for the sins of the world. That's what Jesus is talking about when he says "that the Christ should suffer." That's why it is so essential to the church's witness. There is no salvation without a suffering, dying Christ.

That the Christ should suffer "and on the third day rise from the dead." This too is essential to the church's witness--the Resurrection of Our Lord. Christ rose from the dead on the third day. On Good Friday he died; then came Holy Saturday; and then on Easter Day, the third day, he rose from the dead on that glorious Sunday. Christ demonstrated the victory over death that his death on the cross accomplished. Death could not hold him, true; he is the almighty Son of God. But Christ's resurrection also demonstrates what is in store for us, that death has no hold on those who belong to Christ. We share in his resurrection. We have eternal life, victory over the grave, because of what our Lord has done for us.

Do you see now why Jesus zeroes in on his suffering, death, and resurrection as the heart of the church's witness? This is where our righteousness lies. This is where our eternal life is located. This is the focus, the pivot point, of God's love in action, in all of history. This is the most important thing that God wants all people everywhere to know and believe.

So the work of Christ is then delivered in the proclamation of Christ, delivered and applied to each person through repentance and faith. This is the other part of the church's essential witness, when Jesus goes on to say: "that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name." You see, it's one thing to say, "Jesus Christ, God's Son, suffered and died and rose again." OK, fine, ho-hum. I mean, it's amazing, and good for Jesus, but really, ho-hum. What does that have to do with me? That's why Jesus adds, "that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name." The proclamation brings it home, calling sinners to repent of their sins, to turn from relying on themselves, and to turn instead in faith to Christ, for the forgiveness of their sins. This is God's word to each one of us here tonight.

Yes, what about you? Do you have sins of which to repent? How have you tuned out God? Where have you failed your spouse, your neighbor? How have you made yourself your own god, making your own decisions about what is right and wrong, rather than obeying what God says about these things? That is sin. Put a name on it. Confess it. Grieve over your sinful condition, that you can't shake this stuff loose. That is repentance.

But then receive the forgiveness of sins. Jesus Christ died for those sins, for your general sinful condition and for all the specific, ugly ways your sinfulness manifests itself. The good news is being proclaimed to you again this night. Christ suffered and rose from the dead for you. Forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed in his name to you. The Sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood is here to deliver and assure you of that forgiveness.