God Ascends and Remains Human
Pondering the neglected, yet indispensable end of the story of God with us.
Against our attempts to make the resurrection a ghost party, like a wisp of fog on hot tea, Jesus appears among us with “real wounds,” shows us that resurrection is a matter of flesh and bones, of broiled fish and honeycomb.
His wounded body, a body that yet eats, a body of flesh and bones — flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone — now ascends into what it means to be God in eternity, forever taking with his embodied self all the good and hard memories of what it means to be human.
He remembers comfort from the injuries of childhood in the arms of his mother, the ecstatic gladness of meals with friends, the anxiety of facing torture, that odd mixture of cold and thirst in the desert night, and intense heartache at the tomb of his friend.
We worship a God who remembers what it is like to die a human death. Ponder that.
All of this ascends with Christ.
As the human who exists beyond the touch of death, whose scarred and resurrected body is our death’s antidote, as the everlasting human who remembers all our faces, the ascending Jesus keeps his promise to raise us with him — a promise he makes as the first born of a new creation and as God.
And it it this wounded God with human memories whose rule of resurrection overcomes death, whose rule of forgiveness overcomes sin, whose rule of welcome overcomes estrangement.
The Ascension changes everything, for the event discloses a great mystery: that to be God is to be human, to be embodied in flesh and blood forever, because of Jesus Christ.
Ascension means that a human is forever God in the person of the Son. What it means to be God is forever tied to this particular human being, and what it means to be human is forever tied to this God.
Do you see how this changes everything?
The intrinsic value of every human being is tied to this witness: God descends to became human, God ascends to remain human.
My allegiance is to humanity because God became human and God remains human, sharing the one human nature that all humans share.
As a fellow human Jesus is our mediator and advocate, made like his brothers and sisters in every way so that he might be One who rules and judges those whose existence he understands from the inside, because he lives our human story with us in the most vulnerable, authentic, and beautiful way.
In Jesus, God knows hunger and thirst and loneliness and pain. In Jesus, God knows the human devastation of divorce and disease and death.
In Jesus, the One like a son of man, who’s been given all authority in heaven and on earth, is also one of us.
The One who is to be our judge, renders his judgment on his human brothers and sisters from the brutal cross to which we nailed him: “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”
And in the Ascension he is now and forever there with the Father in the flesh — for us — and we are there close to the heart of Father in Jesus, as his body.
We are mystically one with God in the humanity of Jesus and God is one with us, and loves us.
Ascension means that our crucified and risen God is forever embodied in the flesh and bones and blood that Mary gave him — or rather, as Hippolytus says, the body that he knit for himself in the womb of the virgin by his sufferings on the cross — is enthroned where the Father dwells, and God by this love is present everywhere before we ask him to be.
Ascension means that a human, Jesus of Nazareth, is what it means to be God and that this state of affairs is from and for eternity — there is no before and no after, no time, in which our Lord is not human. (We have to contemplate this outside our mental tick tock slavery.)
For God to hate humanity (or any human), God would have to hate himself for God is from eternity human in the nail-scarred flesh of our wounded Healer.
Ascension means that human nature is seated at God’s right hand and therefore no one need impatiently grasp for divinity again, as did Adam, for Christ has divinized human nature by his suffering; creatureliness is godliness in Jesus the Son and we by grace participate in that union forged in the fire of the cross.
Ascension means that by the Spirit Christ is present in the world via his body in the Eucharist and in the church.
He ascends to everywhere descend: to be the bread of heaven on our tables.
He ascends to be present in the world anywhere anyone who is baptized into his death and resurrection is. And in everyone who is hungry or thirsty. Everywhere someone is sick or in prison (behind real bars or imagined ones). Everywhere someone is naked of all help and comfort and confidence, as we all are or will be in the end.
It is Christ himself in baptized Christians who acts and speaks when the church proclaims the gospel, heals the sick, visits prisoners, cares for the poor, releases captives, forgives enemies, gathers together to celebrate Eucharist, and so on. Jesus is the head of his body, and we are the fullness of Christ in the earth.
Ascension means that the sort of power our crucified Lord reveals in the moment of his greatest humiliation is the foundation of every genuine strength. All other ways and means and ends of power are weighed in the balance and found wanting by the weakness of our battered and broken God outside the city walls. Jesus Christ is Lord and all temporal rulers and spiritual powers are judged as inadequate, as false gods. There is no Lord for the Christian but Jesus Christ.
And Jesus discloses a God who rules all things by a humility we cannot even begin to grasp. His power is disclosed in weakness and poverty, by surrender and trust.
Ascension means that now and forever no other human except Jesus Christ governs this wide globe, no matter how certain a tyrant’s control or a court’s control or a junta’s or a bureacrat’s control may seem.
Ascension means that Someone who knows what it is like to be limited by time and embodiment and hunger and anxiety and rejection and torture and pain and betrayal and thirst and contingency — who knows being human from the inside out — is present in God when we pray, and this Someone knows our every petition and our every experience as one of us who is with us in everything before we ask.
Athanasius says that death has caused the image of our crucified Lord to fade from the bodies on which it was inscribed; that Christ comes to renew the lines and colors of his image on and in us like a master restorationist.
The ascended Jesus Christ is at work on and in you by the Spirit, bringing his vibrant hues and sharp lines back to their original magnificence.
May you remember today what it means to be ascended and seated with Christ; may you remember that by grace all you say and do in the world demonstrates God’s love in dying for it.