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JESUS OF NA ZARETH pp.278-293
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He Ascended into Heaven—He is Seated at the Right Hand of the Father, and He Will Come Again in Glory
All four Gospels, as well as Saint Paul's Resurrection account in I Corinthians 15, presuppose that the period of the risen Lord's appearances was limited. Paul was conscious of being the last to whom an encounter with the risen Christ was granted. The meaning of the Resurrection appearances is also clear from the overall tradition. Above all, it was a matter of assembling a circle of disciples who would be able to testify that Jesus did not remain in the grave, that he lives on. Their testimony is essentially mission: they must proclaim to the world that Jesus is alive—that he is Life itself.
The first task they were given was to attempt once again to gather Israel around the risen Jesus. For Paul, too, the message begins with testimony to the Jews, the first to be destined for salvation. But the final command to those sent out by Jesus is universal: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Mt 28:18-19). "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1: 8). And as the risen Lord said to Paul: "Depart; for I will send you far away to the Gentiles" (Acts 22:2I).
Included in the message of the witnesses is the proclamation that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead and to establish God's kingdom definitively in the world. There has been a substantial trend in recent theology to view this proclamation as the principal content, if not the very heart of the message. Thus it is claimed that Jesus himself was already thinking in exclusively eschatological categories. The "imminent expectation" of the kingdom was said to be the specific content of his message, while the original apostolic proclamation supposedly consisted of nothing else.
Had this been the case, one might ask how the Christian faith could have survived when that imminent expectation was not fulfilled. In fact, this theory goes against the texts as well as the reality of nascent Christianity, which experienced the faith as a force in the present and at the same time as hope.
The disciples undoubtedly spoke of Jesus' return, but first and foremost they bore witness to the fact that he is alive now, that he is Life itself, in whom we, too, come alive (cf. Jn 14:19). But how can this be? Where do we find him? Is he, the risen Lord now "exalted at the right hand of God" (Acts 2:33), not for that reason completely absent? Or is he somehow accessible?
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Can we penetrate "to the right hand of God"? Within his absence is there nonetheless at the same time a real presence? Is it not the case that he will come to us only on some unknown last day? Can he come today as well?
These questions have left their mark on John's Gospel, and Saint Paul's letters also attempt to answer them. Yet the essential content of this answer can be gleaned from the accounts of the "Ascension" at the end of Luke's Gospel and the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles.
[Night Office Reading]
Let us turn, then, to the end of Luke's Gospel. Here it is recounted that Jesus appears to the Apostles gathered in Jerusalem, who have just been joined by the two disciples from Emmaus. He eats with them and issues instructions. The closing lines of the Gospel are as follows: "Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God" (24:50-53).
This conclusion surprises us. Luke says that the disciples were full of joy at the Lord's definitive departure. We would have expected the opposite. We would have expected them to be left perplexed and sad. The world was unchanged, and Jesus had gone definitively. They had received a commission that seemed impossible to carry out and lay well beyond their powers. How were they to present themselves to the people in Jerusalem, in Israel, in the whole world, saying: "This Jesus, who seemed to have failed, is actually the redeemer of us all"?
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Every parting causes sadness. Even if it was as one now living that Jesus had left them, how could his definitive separation from them not make them sad? And yet it is written that they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, blessing God. How are we to understand this?
In any case, it follows that the disciples do not feel abandoned. They do not consider Jesus to have disappeared far away into an inaccessible heaven. They are obviously convinced of a new presence of Jesus. They are certain (as the risen Lord said in Saint Matthew's account) that he is now present to them in a new and powerful way. They know that "the right hand of God" to which he "has been exalted" includes a new manner of his presence; they know that he is now permanently among them, in the way that only God can be close to us.
The joy of the disciples after the "Ascension" corrects our image of this event. "Ascension" does not mean departure into a remote region of the cosmos but, rather, the continuing closeness that the disciples experience so strongly that it becomes a source of lasting joy.
Thus the ending of Luke's Gospel helps us to understand better the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, in which Jesus' "Ascension" is explicitly recounted. Before Jesus' departure, a conversation takes place in which the disciples—still trapped in their old ideas—ask whether the time has yet come for the kingdom of Israel to be established.
Jesus counters this notion of a restored Davidic kingdom with a promise and a commission. The promise is that they will be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit;
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the commission is that they are to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.
The questioning about times and seasons is explicitly rejected. Speculation over history, looking ahead into the unknown future—these are not fitting attitudes for a disciple. Christianity is the present: it is both gift and task, receiving the gift of God's inner closeness and—as a consequence—bearing witness to Jesus Christ.
In this context belongs the statement about the cloud that takes him up and withdraws him from their sight. The cloud reminds us of the hour of the Transfiguration, in which the bright cloud falls on Jesus and the disciples (cf. Mt 17:5; Mk 9:7; Lk 9:34-35). It reminds us of the hour of Mary's encounter with God's messenger, Gabriel, who announces to her the "overshadowing" with the power of the Most High (cf. Lk I:35). It reminds us of the holy tent of God in the Old Covenant, where the cloud signified the Lord's presence (cf. Ex 40:34-35), the same Lord who, in the form of a cloud, led the people of Israel during their journey through the desert (cf. Ex 13 :21-22). This reference to the cloud is unambiguously theological language. It presents Jesus' departure, not as a journey to the stars, but as his entry into the mystery of God. It evokes an entirely different order of magnitude, a different dimension of being.
The New Testament, from the Acts of the Apostles to the Letter to the Hebrews, describes the "place" to which the cloud took Jesus, using the language of Psalm 100:1, as sitting (or standing) at God's right hand. What does this mean? It does not refer to some distant cosmic space,
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where God has, as it were, set up his throne and given Jesus a place beside the throne. God is not in one space alongside other spaces. God is God—he is the promise and the ground of all the space there is, but he himself is not part of it. God stands in relation to all spaces as Lord and Creator. His presence is not spatial, but divine. "Sitting at God's right hand" means participating in this divine dominion over space.
[End of Night Office Reading]
SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
