Heaven Meets Earth: The Ascension of Christ
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
“{Jesus} was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him” (Acts 1:9).
A few years ago, my twin daughters discovered Mary Poppins. They devoured the books and enjoyed the movies, particularly the 2018 offering, Mary Poppins Returns. Perhaps you know the gist of the story: the inimitable, umbrella-wielding nanny floats down from the clouds and provides the Banks family with her sitter services, while simultaneously embarking on peculiar and curious adventures with her two charges, Jane and Michael. During their Mary Poppins phase, one of my girls found Mary Poppins Up, Up, and Away at the local library. This children’s book, sparse on story and heavy on illustration, centers on the beloved nanny’s preferred method of transportation, and all the various sights and experiences she and her children experience in London. Mary Poppins descends and ascends using her trusty umbrella, moving with ease both above and below. But where does she come from? Where does she go? Up, up, and away, indeed!
Today is the Feast of the Ascension. It will be observed in most Protestant churches on Sunday, May 12. This is the penultimate moment in Eastertide, the great fifty days that Jesus spent with his disciples and other witnesses following his resurrection. They fellowshipped with the risen Lord as they ate and drank with him. Relationships were restored; the disciples’ understanding of Jesus as Messiah was enlarged, and they were prepared for ministry in Christ’s name. God’s gracious activity that began on Easter was ready to burst forth upon the whole world. Just before ascending, Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Consider the pairing of these two liturgical feasts: in the resurrection, the earthly realm melds with the heavenly as the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead; at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit is poured out, invading earth with heaven. The Feast of the Ascension is the liturgical linchpin that connects Easter and Pentecost. When approaching the Ascension, it is an understandable mistake to view Jesus as some sort of divine Mary Poppins; up, up, and away goes Jesus to heaven, where we hope one day to join him. The Ascension of Christ is about much more than Jesus going up, up, and away to heaven, leaving his followers behind. It is about the union of heaven and earth and his abiding presence which empowers believers. These are two spiritual realities made possible by the ascension.
The ascension is difficult, if not impossible, for the secular mind to grasp. Believers are not immune to the influence of a society that has sloughed off a robust engagement with the transcendent. Even some churches function in what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” a largely Western paradigm of engaging reality that is closed to the miraculous and numinous. An openness to the supernatural is vital to comprehending the ascension of Christ, and especially how it brings together heaven and earth. What C.S. Lewis writes in Miracles is especially helpful in grasping the physics of ascension: “a being still in some mode, though not our mode, corporeal, withdrew at His own will from the Nature presented by our three dimensions and five senses, not necessarily into the non-sensuous and undimensioned but possibly into, or through, a world or worlds of super-sense and super-space. And He might choose to do it gradually. Who on earth knows what the spectators might see? If they say they saw a momentary movement along the vertical plane—then an indistinct mass—then nothing—who is to pronounce this improbable?”
If we accept Lewis’ mechanics of this miraculous event, it is not about Jesus moving up, up, and away into heaven, á la Mary Poppins. It is about the pre-existent Word, the second person of the Triune Godhead, Jesus the Christ with his resurrected body, stepping into eternity, unencumbered by the laws of space and time which he created and to which he himself submitted as the perfect God-man. When we recite the Apostles’ Creed, we confess that Jesus Christ is now “ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead.” In a moment, we see the perfect union of heaven and earth. The ascension dissolves the myth of separation between our physical plane and divine activity, between humans and God. As Madeleine L’Engle wrote in Bright Evening Star: “[Jesus] is further away from us than galaxies billions of light years away, and he is as close to us as the beating of our own hearts.” Immanence and transcendence meet in the ascension, and participation in this reality is possible through the indwelling Spirit of Christ given just days later on Pentecost.
If the ascension reveals something about the very fabric of reality and the spiritual realm, how does that affect how we live as the people of God, here and now? The church, the union of believers under the Lordship of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit down through the ages, is meant to be the place where this coming together occurs. In the proclamation of the word, the administration of the sacraments, the operation of spiritual gifts, in prayer and fellowship, in works of mercy, earth and heaven come together. In the Great Thanksgiving of the eucharistic liturgy, when the celebrant says “and so, with your people on earth and the whole company of heaven, we praise your name, and join their unending hymn,” we declare by faith that earth might, with Christ, ascend into the heavens and that the heavens, through the person and work of the Holy Spirit, might descend to earth—and that the two dimensions might join their voices as one. The earthly body of Christ is the site of this marriage.
Unlike Mary Poppins and her upward trajectory, the ascension of Christ is not concerned with a literal journey into the stratosphere, for that would simply involve a transfer to another position within the physical order. Christ has gone beyond material creation, yet the world is saturated with his presence. The ascension opens for believers the union of heaven and earth and points to the spiritual realm that suffuses our plane of existence. Because he has gifted us his abiding presence through the Holy Spirit, we point to this realm through service in his name. We who are able to perceive him even though he is no longer physically with us (John 14:19) are tasked with revealing him to others. The Spirit of Christ leads the church as we bear his sacramental presence. No wonder the angelic messengers who appear to the disciples just after Jesus’ ascension say, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky” (Acts 1:11)? In other words, heaven and earth have come together, and we, his witnesses, have work to do!
Evan Rohrs-Dodge is senior pastor of St. Paul’s UMC in Brick, NJ, adjunct instructor at United Theological Seminary, and a member of the Firebrand Editorial Board Lead Team.