The
Ascension
“NOW HE LED THEM OUT towards
Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass as he
blessed them, that he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they
worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they were
continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen” (Luke. 24
50-53).
Why the joy?
Because He never left!
Augustine:
"He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from
us when he went up again into heaven: ‘No one has ever ascended into heaven
except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven.’
"These words are
explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body.
No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the
Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are
sons of God.... Thus, no one but Christ descended and no one but Christ
ascended; not because there is no distinction between the head and the body,
but because the body as a unity cannot separated from the head" (St. Augustine
Ratzinger-Benedict
XVI:
"What, then, is the meaning of
Christ's 'ascension into heaven'? It expresses our belief that in Christ human
nature, the humanity in which we all share, has entered into the inner life of
God in a new and hitherto unheard of way. It means that man has found an
everlasting place in God. Heaven is not a place beyond the stars,
but something much greater, something that requires far
more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God.
The basis for this assertion is
the inter-enetration of humanity and divinity in the
crucified and exalted man Jesus. Christ, the man who is in God and eternally
one with God, is at the same time God's abiding openness to all human
beings. Thus Jesus himself is what we call 'heaven;' heaven is not a
place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever
and inseparably one. And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the
extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him. In this sense, 'ascension
into heaven' can be something that takes place in our everyday lives.
"Only in the light of these various connections can we
understand why Luke should tell us, at the end of his Gospel,
that after the Ascension the disciples returned to
Jerusalem
"For the disciples, then, the 'ascension' was not what
we usually misinterpret it as being: the
temporary absence of Christ from the world. It meant rather his new,
definitive and irrevocable presence by participation in God's royal power. This
is why Johannine theology for practical purposes identifies
the Resurrection and the return of Christ (e.g., 14, 18 ff.); with
the resurrection of Jesus, by reason of which he is now with his
disciples forevermore, his return has already begun.
"That Luke did not have an
essentially different understanding of the situation is again
clear from today's reading. In it Christ rebuffs the disciples’ question about
the restoration of the Kingdom and instead tells them that they will receive
the Holy Spirit and be his, Jesus,' witnesses to the ends of the
earth. Therefore, they are not to remain staring into the future or to wait
broodingly for the time of his return. No, they are to realize
that he is ceaselessly present and even that he desires to become ever more
present through their activity, inasmuch as the gift of the Spirit and the
commission to bear witness, preach, and be missionaries are
the way in which he is now already present. The proclamation of the
Good News everywhere in the world is - we may say on the basis of this passage
- the way in which, during the
period between the Resurrection and the second coming, the
Lord gives expression to his royal rule over all the world, as he exercises his
lordship in the humble form of the word.
"Christ exercises his power through the
powerlessness of the word by which he calls human beings to
faith. This fact reminds us once again of the image of the cloud, in which the
hiddenness and the nearness of the Lord are combined in a unique way.
John the Evangelist has conveyed this fusion in an even more drastic
manner by the new meaning he has poured into the Old Testament term
'raise up' or 'exalt.' This word, which had hitherto
expressed only the idea of elevation to royal dignity, also refers in
John to the crucifixion in which Christ is 'lifted up' from the earth. For
John, then, the mystery of Good Friday, of Easter, and of Christ's Ascension
form but a single mystery. The cross has a second, mysterious dimension: it is
the royal throne from which Christ exercises his kingship and draws
the human race to himself and into his wide-open arms (cf. Jn. 3, 14; 8, 28;
12, 32-33). Christ's royal throne is the cross; his exaltation takes the form
of what seems to the outsider the extreme of disgrace and humiliation...."
The
Eschatology of the presence of Christ after the Ascension: “he remains in the plot of human history, he is near to each
of us and guides our Christian path: He is the companion of those who are
persecuted because of their faith, he is in the heart of those who are
marginalized, he is present in those to whom the right to life is denied. We
can hear, see and touch the Lord Jesus in the Church, especially through the
Word and the sacraments” Zenit, May
16, 2010.
Magisterial Christology
The
Sanctification of Ordinary Life: the Divine and the Human are Not in Parallel
but One and the Same in the Person. They are objectively Distinct but
Personally One.
Chalcedon (451):
“Therefore,
following the holy fathers, we all teach that with one accord we confess one
and the same son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in human nature,
truly God and the same with a rational soul and a body truly man,
consubstantial with the Father according to divinity, and consubstantial with us,
according to human nature, like unto us in all things except sin,; indeed born
of the Father before the ages according to divine nature, but in the last days
the same born of the virgin Mary, Mother of God according to human nature; for
us and for our deliverance, one and the same Christ only begotten Son our Lord, acknowledged in two natures, without
mingling, without change, indivisibly, undividedly, the distinction of the
natures nowhere removed on account of the union but rather the peculiarity of
each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and substance, not divided or
separated into two persons, but one and the same son only begotten God Word,
Lord Jesus Christ, just as from the beginning the prophets taught about Him and
the Lord Jesus Himself taught us, and the creed of our fathers has handed down
to us.”
Constantinople III
(680-681):
“And we
proclaim equally two
natural volitions or wills
in him and two natural principles of action which undergo no division, no
change, no partition, no confusion, in accordance with the teaching of the holy
fathers. And the two natural wills not in opposition, as the impious
heretics said, far from it, but his human will following, and not resisting or
struggling, rather in fact subject to his divine and all powerful will.
For the will of the flesh had to be moved, and yet to be subjected to the
divine will, according to the most wise Athanasius. For just as his flesh is
said to be and is flesh of the Word of God, so too the natural will of his
flesh is said to and does belong to the Word of God, just as he says
himself: I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will
of the Father who sent me, calling his own will that of his flesh, since
his flesh too became his own. For in the same way that his all holy and
blameless animate flesh was not destroyed in being made divine but remained in
its own limit and category, so his human will as well was not destroyed by
being made divine, but rather was preserved, according to the theologian Gregory,
who says: "For his willing, when he is considered as saviour, is not in
opposition to God, being made divine in its entirety"… Therefore,
protecting on all sides the "no confusion" and "no
division", we announce the whole in these brief words: Believing our lord
Jesus Christ, even after his incarnation, to be one of the holy Trinity and our
true God, we say that he has two
natures [naturas] shining forth in his one subsistence[subsistentia] in
which he demonstrated the miracles and the sufferings throughout his entire
providential dwelling here, not in appearance but in truth, the difference of
the natures being made known in the same one subsistence in that each nature
wills and performs the things that are proper to it in a communion with the
other; then in accord with this reasoning we hold that two natural wills and
principles of action meet in correspondence for the salvation of the human race.
The Epistemology
The large
point for us working on the order of sensible experience and abstract thinking,
we have understood God to be Spirit and without flesh. We have understood
divinity (God) to be totally immaterial, and therefore eternal because we
understand change to be part and parcel of matter/flesh. Hence, the ascension
of the flesh into the God-head scandalizes us. And this because we are infected
by the heresy of Gnosticism. The spirit and the immaterial are good. Matter and
the flesh are bad. Hence, the Incarnation, which is the divinization of man by
God becoming man, is a blur for us intellectually. We believe it, but as an
idea.
Therefore,
the large point of the Ascension is to fix on the revelation that “the Word
became flesh” in that He took human nature as His. Human nature, i.e. the individual (no human person) is an
integral part of the Second Person of the Trinity. This means that human nature
is not object but subject. That is, by “human nature”
we mean body, soul, human intelligence
and human will as experienced my self, my “I.” Indeed, there are two
objective intelligences and two objective wills in the Person of Jesus Christ
that are ontologically distinct as different as created and uncreated. They are
one
as the “I” of Jesus Christ.
The question arises: what is the
Redemption? Chalcedon (451) does not answer this because Chalcedon speaks in
the vocabulary of the metaphysical object: 2 natures and one Person. The answer
comes from Constantinople III (680-681). The real key to grasp this is to make
the epistemological move of the millennium: understand that there are two
levels of experience: 1) external senses and abstract thinking; 2) the freely
acting “I” that is not mere consciousness but being. The reason we think that the “I” is consciousness is
that consciousness is all we perceive of the “I.” But what gives reality
(being) to the self is the fact that we experience
peace, guilt, joy, sorrow, repentance etc. None of this is available to us from
the external senses, yet they are more real to us than sunshine and dollar
bills. Our free and most real actions produce these experiences and
consciousness.
The point
of this: there is only one “I” in Christ, and that “I” is the protagonist of
every free act that He performs. The human nature of Christ is an object – the
exact same humanity that you have – that is assumed by the Subject (“I”) that
is divine and divinizes it. He uses it as He lives out a human life. But the
point that is still to sink in is that it is His “I” that lives a totally human
life, but in a divine way. The humanity does not live. Only the “I” of God
lives the human life of Jesus in Nazareth .
Not Gone: “The historical
character of the mystery of the resurrection and ascension of Christ helps us
to recognize and to understand the transcendent and eschatological condition of
the Church, which was not born and does to live to take the place of the Lord
who has ‘disappeared’ but which finds its reason for being in his mission and
in the invisible presence of Jesus working with the power of his Spirit. In
other words, we could say that the Church does not carry out the function of
preparing for the return of an ‘absent’ Jesus but, on the contrary, lives and
works to proclaim his ‘glorious presence’ in an historical and existential
manner [my underline][1].
Since the day of the Ascension, every Christian community advances in its
earthly journey toward the fulfillment of the messianic promises, fed by t he
Word of God and nourished by Body and Blood its Lord. This is the condition of
the Church – the Second Vatican Council says – as she ‘presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the
consolations of God, announcing the cross and death of the Lord until he comes’
(Lumen Gentium, 8)… (T)oday’s solemnity calls on us to reinvigorate our faith
in the real presence of Jesus; without him we cannot do anything of value in
our life or apostolate. It is he, as the Apostle Paul recalls in the second
reading, who ‘made some apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists,
others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of
ministry, for building up the body of Christ,’ that is, t he Church.”[2]
The Ecclesiology
Therefore,
it is most important to affirm that in the suffering and joys of human life, it
is God who suffers and rejoices through the humanity. And this means that as He
lives the human as His, we can live the divine as ours (if we want to) since He
empowered us to do so by the sacraments.
That then
means that His Kingdom can come here and now because He is the Kingdom,
and the King. But He is obedience to the Father, forgiveness for us, service to
all, fidelity in love, beginning again after failure, attention to detail for
love, etc. In a word, the human is defined by being assumed by Him and His
living it out. The God-man is the prototype of man. There is no man who has not
been made in the image of Christ. Christ pre-exists man and the creation of the
world: “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we
should be holy and without blemish in his sight in love. He predestined us to
be adopted through Jesus Christ as his sons, according to the purpose of his
will…” (Eph 1, 4-5).
And He is
all powerful. He ascends to the “right
hand of the Father” which is an expression of the almighty power of God.
The Mission
Put Christ at the summit of all
human activities. Be Christ Passing By in work and family life. The world is
awaiting this new experience of the working person, characterized by secularity
and freedom. All peoples are looking for one single absolute truth upon which
to build a global human and economic reality. That truth is the human person
working as gift. The prototype of that person is the Person of Christ Who with
the power of the God-head thrones at the right of the Father as King of hearts.
The key to understanding the unity
of the divine and human in Christ is to understand that there is one divine
Person Who has taken the humanity of the man Jesus of Nazareth epitomized in the human will
as His own. It is critical to understand that it is not the will that
wills, but the person. That is, the divine Person wills with His own
human will. Only this can make sense of Jn. 6, 38: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will
of him who sent me.” The divine “I” does not do His own human will, but
that of the Father. The dynamic of self-mastery consists in the Person subduing
the human will that has been “made to be sin” (2 Cor. 5, 21). [3] In
a word, this is the radical self-gift of the Son as God-man.
Put more
clearly, the relation of the divine and the human in Christ is not a parallelism
of two natures bound together by the commonality of a Person as substance in
itself. Rather, it is the compenetration of the divine and the
human by the fact that the divine Person has taken the human will as His own
and He, the divine Person, wills with the human will. The result is the “compenetration”
of the two “wills,” the divine and the human because it is one and the same
Person doing the willing.
And yet,
the human will does not lose its autonomy and freedom, but rather has it
radically enhanced by the fact that it is a divine Person living out the
Trinitarian relation to the Father, now as man with a human will.
[1] This is
the basic thesis of Joseph Ratzinger. Although we cannot see Him, Christ lives.
Now. This is the reason for updating the
epistemological reality of the second experiential tier of the self. Revelation
is the “I” of Christ. Faith is the act of becoming that “I” whereupon
Revelation takes place from within the self as “other Christ.” This is the
whole of Ratzinger and Josemaria Escriva.
[2] Benedict
XVI “The Ascension Invites Us to a Profound Communion with Jesus,” May 24,
2009.
[3] “Made to
be sin” is to enter into the loneliness of sin as the rejection of the Triune
God, and therefore of the others. This is Benedict’s interpretation of Jesus
death cry, `My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15, 34)
which is the first and only time that Jesus refers to the Father as “El” and
not as “Abba.” Benedict says: “In this last prayer of Jesus , as in the
scene on the Mount of Olives, what appears as the innermost heart of his
passion is not any physical pain but radical loneliness, complete abandonment;”
“Introduction to Christianity,” op. cit 227.
No comments:
Post a Comment