Acts 20:16-18, 28-36; John 17:1-13
Forty
days after His 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. Our Lord’s Ascension reveals that we may
participate by grace in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity and share in His
fulfillment of the human person in God’s image and likeness. We may experience such blessedness even now
by uniting ourselves to Christ even as we live and breathe in this world with
our feet on the ground.
We also commemorate today 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. 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 brings us into the eternal life of God must Himself be eternal
and divine. No mere creature could ever
enable us to shine with heavenly glory.
Had Christ been simply
a great religious teacher, He could not have conquered death or enabled us to
share in the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.
Those who claim to admire the Savior as merely an excellent human being actually
reject Him, for they deny the true identity of the God-Man Who unites humanity
and divinity in Himself. 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.” Only He can bring those made of
the dust of the Earth into the eternal life of the Holy Trinity.
The
divine brilliance of Christ’s Ascension is entirely different from the illusion
of trying to raise ourselves up according to the standards of a world that has
not yet entered into the joy of the heavenly Kingdom. Since we all know how weak and insignificant
we are in the larger scheme of things, we are eager to distract ourselves from
facing that truth. We do that by seeking
fulfillment in created things that can never heal our souls. Doing so
only serves to make us even more enslaved to self-serving illusions that
alienate us from God, our neighbors, and ourselves. No
wonder that we so often know the misery of captivity to disordered desires that
hold us captive to vain pursuits of pride, power, and possessions that will
never satisfy us. That is a path not of
ascent but of descent to slavery to fear, anxiety, and despair.
Embracing
such darkness in our souls will make us blind to the glory of our ascended Lord,
Who went up to heaven only after dying on the Cross, being buried in a tomb,
and enduring the ultimate descent to 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
purely out of selfless love and compassion for His broken and suffering
children, who were held captive by the inevitable consequences of sin.
Christ endured all this as the eternal
Son of God Who spoke the universe into existence. The unfathomable humility of
the Savior destroys popular assumptions about God and about what it means to
find fulfillment as a human person. He
does not ascend by taking vengeance upon His enemies, causing those who opposed
Him to suffer, or serving Himself, but by suffering the consequences of their sins,
of which He was in no way guilty. The
divine glory of His Ascension shines brilliantly in contrast to the illusions
of those who assume God must be just like them in their spiritual blindness. 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 live as those who wander in darkness
and alienation. In order to celebrate
the Ascension with integrity, we must rise up with Him into the eternal life of
the Holy Trinity even as we remain in a world marred by war, mass murder,
disease, and all the sorrowful brokenness known by the children of Adam and Eve.
By rising into heavenly glory as the God-Man,
Christ has shown us what it means to become truly human in the divine image and
likeness. In order to unite ourselves
to Him, we must reorient our desires away from the false gods we have welcomed
into our hearts and toward the One Who overcame the very worst the corrupt 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. That
is not because we are ordinary people with ordinary problems. It is because we have not united ourselves to
Christ to the point that every aspect of our life in this world has become a
brilliant icon of His salvation. There is
so much in each of us that has refused to ascend in holiness with our Lord.
Our calling to rise with Christ into
heavenly glory is obviously high and no one may claim to have fulfilled it. 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 grapple seriously with what holds us back from embracing the fulfillment of
the human person made possible by our Lord’s Ascension. We must conform our character to Christ’s
such that His radiant glory shines through us as we embrace the challenges of finding
healing for our souls from the disordered desires which we are so strongly
inclined to make the driving force of our lives.
In order to ascend with Him in holiness,
we must abandon the hypocritical spirituality of those who corrupt Christianity
into a way of raising ourselves up in this world in any sphere of life. Nothing
will keep us wedded to the spiritual decay of the fallen world more than
perverting the way of our ascended Lord into a justification for crucifying our
neighbors in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Our Savior calls us to rise up
from the corruption of the world, not to fall even deeper into it through the
delusions of spiritual pride.
In order to ascend in holiness with Him,
we must reject all the proud fantasies that distract us from true faithfulness
in the present circumstances of our lives as we take the small steps toward the
Kingdom that we presently have the strength to take. In our families,
friendships, and workplaces, and also in our parish, we must humble ourselves by
putting the needs of others before our own desires. We must refuse to allow thoughts that tempt
us to self-centeredness to take root in our hearts, for they will make it
impossible for to become like Christ in self-emptying love for our
neighbors. The only way to ascend with
Christ is to unite ourselves to Him in humility from the depths of our hearts.
Christ prayed to the Father that His followers “may be
one, even as We are one.” Contrary to
popular opinion, it is not possible to pursue the Christian life as an isolated
individual on the basis of emotion, ideas, morality, politics, or anything else. The Church is Christ’s Body and we are
members of Him together. He is the Vine
and we are the branches. The Lord ascended
with His Body and, by His grace, we will too as we serve Him together in His
Body, the Church, by doing what needs to be done for the flourishing of our
small parish and for the good of our neighbors. 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, we must 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. Let us make His Ascension the lens through which we see every
dimension of our life together and every aspect of our lives in this
world. He has already ascended. Now we must go up together with Him as we find
liberation from slavery to our passions and share more fully in the salvation
that He has brought to the world. That is His calling to us all even as we remain
in this world with our feet on the ground.
