The Ascension

Humanity in the Presence of God

Tim Chester

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781912102

Three

Ascended Man

The Reformed tradition has often discussed the work of Christ under His roles as our Prophet, Priest and King. So, with chapters on Jesus as our ascended Priest and ascended King, readers may be anticipating a chapter on Jesus as our ascended Prophet. It would certainly be possible to write such a chapter, perhaps beginning with John 16:7-15 or Ephesians 4:7-13, with Jesus ascending so He can send the Spirit to enable His people to know and proclaim His Word.

But one of the greatest wonders of the ascension is that a human being is now in the presence of God. Human flesh is now with God. Central to the doctrine of the ascension is the wonder of an ascended man. We use the word ‘wonder’ in both its senses – something that amazes us and something that puzzles us. The ascended man both amazes and puzzles us. First the puzzle: Where is Jesus?

The puzzle of the ascended man

Before we address this question, forget the ascension of Jesus for a moment. What connotations does the language of ‘ascent’ have in our culture? What do people mean by ‘the ascent of man’?

Sometimes it is a synonym for evolution. Man has ascended above the animals and the sign of our ascent is our superior intellectual development. Or, the ascent of man is a synonym for civilisation. Our ascent is our move from primitive cultures to ‘high’ culture. Or consider the term ‘higher being’. In the television programme Star Trek higher beings are those who have evolved to a point where they have left their bodies behind and become pure mind or pure love. They speak to Captain Kirk from the ether or even communicate thought-to-thought through telepathy. Ascension in our modern culture is an ascent of the mind that often involves a move away from bodily existence – a movement from the physical to the spiritual or from the bodily to the mental.

This is how many people think about the ascent of Jesus. In this view the ascension of Jesus means He is now spiritually everywhere in a disembodied sense. Perhaps He has become one of Star Trek’s higher beings – pure mind or pure love unconstrained in space by a body. We remake the ascension of Jesus in the image of our notions of human ascent instead of understanding human ascent in the image of Christ’s ascension.

The scandal of an ascended man

In John 6:61-62 we read: ‘Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!”’ To understand the nature of this offence we need to see how this ascension statement connects with what Jesus has been saying.

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’

‘Sir,’ they said, ‘always give us this bread.’

Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty …’

At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, “I came down from heaven”?’ …

Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you can eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.’ …

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’

Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, ‘Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!’ (John 6:32-35, 41-42, 53-54, 60-62)

John 6 is about the descent of Jesus from heaven and an explanation of the saving power of His death. Jesus is the bread of life that comes down from heaven. The scandal is that the life-giving bread of heaven is a human person. The life-giving bread of heaven has come down in human flesh. Hence the strange language of eating the flesh of Jesus, a picture of believing that this person in human flesh can give us eternal life. This would have scandalised most Greeks since they thought of salvation as an escape from the flesh. It would have been just as scandalous to Jews to suggest Yahweh the divine Saviour would become flesh and bring salvation through being enfleshed.

But a scandal just as significant is coming: human flesh will ascend into heaven. The life-giving bread that descended from heaven and became human flesh will ascend back to heaven as human flesh. The scandal is not just that God has left heaven to be ‘enfleshed’ on earth, but that God will return to heaven in the flesh. As John (‘Rabbi’) Duncan, the Scottish theologian and missionary, said, ‘The dust of the earth sits on the throne of heaven.’¹ Human flesh becomes a permanent fixture in heaven (a scandal to Greeks) and a permanent fixture for the Son of God (a scandal for Jews).

As early as the third century Origen advised Christians troubled by the idea of literal bodily ascension to understand it in ‘a mystical sense … as an ascension of the mind rather than of the body’.² Origen was the first of many Christian theologians who have ignored or rejected the bodily ascension of Jesus. Just as many have questioned the physical and bodily resurrection of Jesus in the vain hope of making Christianity acceptable to the modern world, so some have rejected or marginalised a physical and bodily ascension. The ascension is ‘spiritualised’ so that to ascend is to transcend the physical world in favour of a mental world. His physical absence is not felt because physicality is unimportant.

Many early theologians could accept that Jesus was divine, but struggled to accept that He was truly human. They suggested He merely appeared in human form or that the divine Christ temporarily resided in the body of human Jesus. It is often said that in modern theology the opposite is true: modern theologians have no problem accepting the humanity of Jesus, but they question whether He was truly God. There is much truth in this. But, when it comes to the ascension, the humanity of Jesus remains a contested area. ‘It is still the humanity of Christ over which we are prone to stumble,’ comments Douglas Farrow, ‘and what is required today more than ever is a doctrine of the ascension that does not set his humanity aside.’³

The Enlightenment developed a secular version of this unfleshed ascension. It made much of the ascent of man, but made it an ascent of the mind. In other words, the modern world has a doctrine of the ascension. But instead of the ascent of human flesh into the presence of God, it is the ascent of the mind through progress in history. Ascension becomes a general principle of human progress. Jesus, if He is retained at all, becomes a model for us to follow. ‘One way or another,’ bemoans Farrow, ‘Jesus-history has been made over into the manifestation of a universal principle or pattern, Jesus himself becoming the dispensable element.’⁴

However, the Bible stubbornly refuses to allow the story of Jesus to be read in this way. The ascension is the story of a body moving to heaven. It is not escape from the bodily realm, but the entry of humanity – in our physical-ness – into the heaven, the sphere of God. Far from diminishing the importance of the body, the ascension is the ultimate affirmation of bodily existence. The Son of God Himself has a body – not as an historical convenience, but as a permanent presence in heaven. In the face of these spiritualised or abstract versions of the ascension we must assert the physical and bodily ascension of Jesus. Human flesh is now with God. Nick Needham says:

This is not to say that his risen, ascended humanity hasn’t been glorified. It has. So there are differences between his earthly humanity and his ascended humanity, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he is still human. He has a glorified humanity, not a glorified something else … The ascended Christ is still a human being and that he will remain a human being for all eternity - an exalted and glorified human being, yes, but a human being with a recognisable human body.⁵

We can assume that Jesus in heaven does not have a body because we think we know what heaven is like – a disembodied, ethereal sort of place. But we should not let our notions of heaven shape our understanding of Christ and His ascension. Instead we should let our understanding of Christ shape our notion of heaven. The body of Jesus is in heaven. If that means we need to think about heaven in a new way then so be it.

People often think of heaven as a place above the earth, a space beyond the clouds, with hell as an ‘underworld’ below the earth. Certainly the first Christians used the language of up and down, of ascent and descent. But they were very capable of using metaphor. We must not assume they naïvely thought of the world as a three-story building with heaven above and hell below. When we talk about someone moving ‘up’ in the world, no-one thinks this means they have moved to live on a mountain.

It is better to think of the heavenly and earthly as two separate planes that intersect. The up and down imagery of the Bible captures the separateness. The heavenly realms transcend earthly existence. But there is also an intersection between the two. Heaven is not a far away place at the corner of the universe. Angels do not need to teleport to appear to people. They simply step from one dimension into another. Jacob dreamed of a ladder connecting earth and heaven at a place he called ‘the gate of heaven’ (Gen. 28:10-19). At the transfiguration the heavenly realm transfigured the earthly realm. Jesus says to Nathaniel: ‘I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ (John 1:51) Or think of it like Narnia. In his series of children’s stories, The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis imagines another world that is not our world, but which intersects with our world so that it is sometimes possible to move between them. Lewis himself said Jesus was like an actor who slips between two curtains, but appears to slip into one of its folds.⁶ Jesus disappears, as it were, into a ‘fold’ in space. Heaven and earth are like different dimensions in one universe – two dimensions that inhabit the same space.

Jesus goes away, but He is also near. So is He in our universe or outside it? Simple spatial descriptions of the relationship between heaven and earth can confuse us. We must not think of space as a fixed receptacle. It is not an empty jar containing the stuff of the universe. If we think of space like this then Jesus, since He is embodied, must be somewhere in the jar. Or, if He is not in our jar, then He must be in another jar, presumably in another universe.

But instead of viewing space as a fixed receptacle, we should think of it from a relational point of view. Space exists or opens up through relationships between things. Take the tabernacle as an example. When the fabric is attached to the poles in an open area of desert, from a receptacle view of space, the inside of the Holy of Holies exists in the same spatial dimensions as the outside. It is just a space within a larger space marked out by some temporary walls. It differs from the outside quantitatively by degrees of measurable distance (it’s a few yards away from the space outside). But viewed relationally, the Holy of Holies was far more than this. It was qualitatively different from the camp that surrounded it. That is, it was relationally different. It was God making a place for Himself in our world from which He could relate to His people and through which they could relate to Him. He did it through His saving acts, the provision of the covenant promises, the sacrificial system and priesthood. Through these things a place was opened up in the desert for God and humanity to relate. There wasn’t just a simple inside and outside, differentiated only by co-ordinates on a mathematical grid. There were holy and unholy places. The presence or absence of God always defies spatial definitions. He inhabited the temple, but no house can hold Him. Space opens up in accordance with what is in it. In theoretical physics we find a similar view of space. Time, motion and space are all measured from the point of view of the observer. The flow of time and the movement of objects through space all happen with some reference to the position of the observer. This was Einstein’s point. If we think about the measurement of the motion of an object through a space, it never happens in a vacuum. We have to include the position of the points the measurements are made from relative to the object measured and the relative motion of the world on its axis and the rotation around the sun. The movement and the space are themselves subject to the relationships between objects. This is simply to say that space, time and motion are not absolute fixed entities, but are constituted through relationships between things. T. F. Torrance says, ‘We must not abstract the notion of space from that which is located in space – for space concretely considered is place, but place not abstracted from purpose or content, and place not without ends or purposeful limits. Time and space must both be conceived in relational terms.’⁷

The relational nature of creation and space should not surprise readers of the Bible who know that it was created, and is continually sustained, by God’s Word. Space exists as a Trinitarian act between the divine persons, the Father creating through the Word and breathing life through the Spirit.

Torrance argues that we are better off speaking of place rather than space. A place is room made for something in terms of the thing that inhabits it. A space just describes a receptacle. Torrance speaks of heaven as God’s place instead of God’s space. In this way we do not ask, ‘where is it?’ but rather, ‘what makes it open up and stay ...