Acts 20:16-18, 28-36; John 17:1-13
Forty
days after His glorious resurrection, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ
ascended in glory into heaven and sat at the right hand of God the Father. He did so as One Who is fully divine and
fully human, One Person with two natures. He ascended with His glorified,
resurrected body which still bore the wounds of His crucifixion. The Ascension shows that through Him our humanity
has come to participate by grace in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity. He has made us “partakers of the divine
nature” who may share in His fulfillment of what it means to be a human person
in God’s image and likeness.
Today we commemorate the
Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea. They rejected the teaching of Arius that
Jesus Christ was not truly divine, but a kind of lesser god created by the Father
at a certain point. The Council
declared, as we confess to this day in the Nicene Creed, that our Savior is “the Son of God, the only-begotten,
begotten of the Father before all worlds. Light
of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the
Father, by Whom all things were made.” The Fathers of Nicaea saw clearly that the One
Who brought us into the eternal life of God must Himself be eternal and divine.
Only God could make human persons “partakers
of the divine nature” by grace.
Had
Christ been merely a creature or an especially impressive religious teacher or
example, He would have remained captive to the corruptions of the world as we
know it. He could have taught and
inspired people, but would not have been able to conquer death or make a path
for us to find the fulfillment of our humanity in the Holy Trinity. Those who water down the faith to the point
of viewing the Savior as simply an excellent human being make it impossible to
acknowledge Christ as the One Who has truly united humanity and divinity in
Himself. We can learn a lot from great
teachers and examples, but only the Son of God can make us participants in life
eternal. Only He could say to the Father,
“glorify Me in
Your own presence with the glory which I had with You before the world was
made.”
The
divine glory displayed in Christ’s ascension is entirely different from the
power and fame that people find so appealing in our world of corruption. At some level, we all know how weak and insignificant
we are in the larger scheme of things. That
is why we so easily make false gods of just about anything that can distract us
from recognizing the truth about ourselves, including the inevitability of
death. Putting our ultimate trust in
nations, rulers, and riches—or our health, appearance, talents, and relationships--or
any created thing leads inevitably to idolatry, for it is a form of worshiping
a false god, regardless of whether we call it a religion. Doing so will also
lead us to demonize our enemies, real and imagined, because it often makes us feel
better about ourselves by comparison when we have someone else to condemn. That is surely one of the reasons that so
many people in our culture have become slaves to anger and hatred toward those
they view as their rivals or opponents in a zero-sum game for getting all the
glory by being on the right side.
The
glory of our ascended Lord is the complete opposite of such pathetic and perverse
efforts to build ourselves up at the expense of others. Remember that He
ascended only after descending, only after dying on the Cross, being buried in
a tomb, and descending into Hades. He
rose from the dead because He had humbled Himself to the point of accepting
rejection, torture, and crucifixion as a blasphemer and a traitor. He was mocked as a failure and made a public
example of what happened to people who dared to challenge the authority of
Rome, even though His Kingdom is clearly not of this world. He completely repudiated earthly glory in
order to make a way for us into the brilliant joy of heaven.
Christ endured all
this, not simply as a religious teacher or virtuous person, but truly as the
eternal Son of God Who spoke the universe into existence. Let that sink in for
a moment, for the unfathomable humility of the Savior destroys our usual
assumptions about what it means to be high and mighty. The divine glory
revealed so powerfully at His ascension shines brilliantly in contrast to what passes
for honor in a world that typically chooses to remain in the dark night of the
tomb. If we dare to identify ourselves with
Him, we must open the eyes of our souls to the light of His heavenly glory and
refuse to wander in spiritual blindness.
In order to celebrate the Ascension with integrity, we must ascend with
Him into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity even as we live and breathe with
our bodies in a world that remains very far from the fullness of His Kingdom.
By rising into
heavenly glory as the God-Man, He has shared His gracious divine energies with
us. He shows us what it means to be
truly human in the divine image and likeness. In order to unite ourselves to Him, we must
reorient our desires for fulfillment, meaning, and joy to the One Who overcame
the worst the darkened world could do in order make us participants in the
eternal day of His heavenly reign. The
contrast between the heights of heaven and the mundane realities of our lives is
obviously very great. The point of division is not, however, that we are ordinary
people with common problems who belong to a very small parish. It is, instead, that we have not united ourselves to
Christ in holiness to the point that every dimension of our life in this world
has become a brilliant icon of His salvation.
Of course, that is a
very high goal which no one may claim to have fulfilled. God is infinitely holy and the journey to
become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect is truly eternal.
No matter where we are on that path, we
must all ask our ourselves quite seriously whether we are ascending with Him
into greater holiness as we go through our daily lives, face whatever set of
challenges we have, and respond to the constant barrage of temptations to put
our trust elsewhere. It may be easy to
attend services, sing in praise of the Ascension, and call ourselves
Christians, but it is much more demanding to conform ourselves to Christ such
that His radiant glory shines through us.
We
should not dream of performing grand gestures of holiness, for that would likely
lead us into prideful fantasies.
Instead, we do well to focus on taking the small steps that we are
capable of right now in relation to the people around us and the circumstances with
which we are familiar. That means
humbling ourselves to put the needs of others before our own preferences in our
families, friendships, and workplaces, as well as in our parish.
Christ prayed to the
Father that His
followers “may be one, even as We are one.”
We will never ascend in holiness if we think that we relate to God as
isolated individuals with a religion that concerns only what we do when we are
alone. The Church is one and we are members
of Christ’s Body together. He ascended
with His body and we will too by serving Him in the Church as we do what needs
to be done for the flourishing of our small parish. We ascend into the heavenly Kingdom whenever
we “lay aside all earthly cares” in the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. Nourished by His Body and Blood in the
Eucharist, let us join ourselves to the great Self-offering of the Savior in
our common life, for it is only in Him—our risen and ascended Lord—that we may
enter into the heavenly glory for which He created us in His image and
likeness. He has already ascended. Let us go up with Him together.
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