It is perhaps necessary to remind ourselves that the period between Christ’s resurrection and ascension that we have been celebrating these last six weeks was not some kind of transitional existence in which he was no longer in the world and yet not quite in heaven either—and thus the need for the Ascension. Instead, this period was one in which Christ was slowly and patiently instructing and completing the formation of his disciples in their knowledge and grasp of who he truly was. For, during his time with them on earth they had come to experience and accept the reality of his humanity; now came the delicate and difficult task of leading them to also experience the reality of his divinity.
And because Jesus was still close enough in time to his own experience of being a human being confined within the limits of space and time he was be able to fully empathize with the confusion, doubt, and plain disbelief of his disciples. And so although he occasionally faulted their incredulity and failure to grasp that it was necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter into his glory, nevertheless he was also incredibly patient and understanding with their confusion, fear, anxiety, and sense of loss.
Nevertheless, his reassurances were not by way of promising a return to the way things were before his passion and death. And thus his post-resurrection appearances were generally brief and inevitably concluded with his physical disappearance from their sight. And in this he was steadily weaning them from a purely physical perception of his presence and gradually training them to detect through their emerging and increasing faith the reality of his transformed presence—a presence that was both human and divine and that would remain even with his physical disappearance.
And so there is a sense in which the ascension marks—as it were—a moment of graduation for the disciples who were now sufficiently formed and trained to know beyond a doubt, not only that their Lord had risen from the grave, but that through his resurrected and glorified existence he was no longer simply with them and among them as he had been before his passion and death. For, in the course of these forty days they had come to experience aspects of his divinity and glorified humanity and thereby know that not only was he in their midst, but he was also in them and united with them in a manner not possible during his earthly existence.
And it is this awareness that accounts for Saint Luke’s description of the Ascension ending with the observation they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. For, in the words of Saint Leo the Great, the evidence of their eyes no longer held back their mental vision from contemplating this truth: that the Son descended from his Father without leaving him, and ascended from his disciples without departing from them. And that he began to be more present to them in his godhead once he became more distant in his humanity.
Each one of us is called to walk a similar journey as we grow from what Saint Paul termed knowing Christ according to the flesh and coming to know him according to the Spirit. Earlier tangible and perhaps more consoling experiences of Christ in prayer and worship have to be surrendered, and times of apparent disappearance and even absence have to be endured and embraced as we too are schooled and trained in beholding with the eyes of faith the One who in his divinity and glorified humanity isn’t out there somewhere, but now dwells within us as in a temple and whose Ascension has drawn our lowly but transformed humanity into the heart of our Triune God wherein it shares the life and glory of its Risen, Glorified, and Ascended Lord. And so, like the disciples, let our hearts be filled with joy and expectation as we await the fulfillment of Christ’s promise: I go to prepare a place for you, but I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be. Amen, Come, Lord Je