Feast of Ascension

Feast of Ascension     June 10  2021,          Acts 1: 1-12  Luke 24: 36-53             

We have finished the Paschal cycle for this year, we do not use the Paschal greeting “Christ is Risen” again until next Pascha, and today we watch in awe with the Apostles, as Christ ascends in His resurrected physical human body and re-takes His rightful place at the right hand of God the Father. This place that has always been His from before creation. Before anything we can comprehend existed, He, the pre-incarnate Christ came and brought all into existence. “In the beginning God made heaven and earth.” He placed the very image of Himself within Adam and Eve and all of us, His human creatures. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’.” Who is “OUR?”! The Church teaches us it is “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit the Trinity, One in essence and undivided” We mere humans bear the image and likeness of God Himself One of the clearest scriptures of the ever-existing divinity of Christ our God comes from the first few verses of the gospel of John (John 1: 1-3, 14) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made….And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”.

At His ascension, Christ ascends physically and takes His eternal place at the right hand of the Father. But what a change in the heavenly order from when He first entered our time and world taking flesh from the most blessed Theotokos – the mother and birthgiver of God. He ascends in the flesh. He has taken on and sanctified our humanity and raised it up with Him to the highest level of heaven. The angels come and marvel to see our humanity revealed and sitting enthroned in Christ, the Lord of all. How can this be? The mystery of all eternity is revealed. When Christ comes to His disciples in today’s Gospel He tells them “Peace be unto you. Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see.” Then just to further prove that He is resurrected with a real physical human body he asks them for food and eats fish and honeycomb in their astonished presence.

You ask, but he wasn’t truly physical, why He simply appeared among them, basically walking through walls. But were you listening last week as we heard Christ tell the Pharisees “I AM” and they took up stones to kill Him and He “passed by through the midst of them.” And then He tells them “I and My Father are One.” And again the scripture simply says that “He escaped their hand” when they again took up stones and tried to seize Him. So this isn’t perhaps such a new manifestation of Christ’s human physicality. And not only Christ in His newly resurrected body, but numerous are the stories throughout the history of the Church of the wonder of God working in His saints who demonstrated rather improved physical characteristics. We have St. Mary of Egypt, walking across the river Jordan to come to St. Zosima and then making the 40-day journey back into the wilderness in a night. We have innumerable stories of saints living and departed, appearing to help and save those who cry out to them, or appearing in two different physical locations at the same time, or not being harmed by fire or other forms of torture. We have the three holy youths thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace and not even having the smell of smoke on their clothes. We have the Deacon Philip being immediately transported to a distant city after baptizing the Ethiopian Eunuch. I could go on and on but I think the point is made. Christ said that His followers would do greater works than the miracles He did because He ascends, bringing His full humanity back to His throne with His Father.

Our redeemed humanity is capable of much more than we generally accept and our union with God makes all things possible – even loving our enemies!

No wonder we are so fascinated by super-heroes these days. But we don’t need to imagine a radio-active spider can grant us super-powers. Buried deep within each of us is knowledge of the power of God, in Whose image we are made, and Who calls us to come and allow Him to transform our lives into the fullness of that image. Today, at Ascension we need to turn our eyes heaven-ward with the disciples, until the angels come and say also to us “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven, will also come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.” For from His Ascension up until His second coming, He is with us always, unto the ages of ages. Let go in peace allowing God’s grace to transform our lives that we might radiate His life to those around us.