The Ascension: Our Destiny in Christ

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

FEAST OF THE ASCENSION

You were born, as was your will, O our God.
You revealed Yourself, in Your good pleasure.
You suffered in the flesh, and rose from the dead,
trampling down death by death!
Fulfilling all things, you ascended in glory ...
(Vespers of Ascension)

Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
And He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered, and was buried.
And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father.
(Nicene Creed)

The two texts above - one from the Feast of the Ascension and the other a portion of the Nicene Creed - are wonderful expressions of the great mystery of the "descent" and "ascent" of the Son of God. The eternal Son of God becomes the Son of Man, descending into our world to live among us and to teach us about, and prepare us for, the Kingdom of God. This is what we call the Incarnation. This movement of descent is only completed when Christ is crucified and enters the very realm of death on our behalf. There is "nowhere" further to descend (in)to. Thus, there are no limits to the love of God for His creatures, for the descent of Christ into death itself is "for our salvation." The Son of God will search for Adam and Eve in the very realm of Sheol/Hades. He will rescue them and liberate them as representative of all humankind, languishing in "the valley of death." Since death cannot hold the sinless - and therefore deathless - Son of God, He begins His ascent to the heavenly realm with His resurrection from the dead. And He fulfills this paschal mystery with His glorious ascension.

As St. Paul writes: "He who descended is he who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things." (EPH. 4:10) The One who ascended, however, is now both God and man, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the incarnate, crucified, risen, and glorified Jesus Christ who is now seated at "the right hand of the Father," far above the heavens. It is the glorified flesh of the Incarnate Word of God which has entered into the very bosom of the Trinity in the Person of Christ. As St. Leo the Great, the pope of Rome (+461) taught:

With all due solemnity we are commemorating that day on which our poor human nature was carried up, in Christ, above all the hosts of Heaven, above all the ranks of angels, beyond the highest Heavenly powers to the very throne of God the Father.

This is simultaneously our ascension and our glorification, since we are united to Christ through holy Baptism as members of His Body. Therefore, St. Paul can further write: "For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (COL. 3:3) Out of our physical sight, we now "see" the glorified Christ through the eyes of faith. St. Leo further explains how important this spiritual insight is:

For such is the power of great minds, such the light of truly believing souls, that they put unhesitating faith in what is not seen with the bodily eyes; they fix their desires on what is beyond sight. Such fidelity could never be born in our hearts, nor could anyone be justified by faith, if our salvation lay only in what is visible.

The Feast of the Ascension is not a decline from the glory of Pascha. It is, rather, the fulfillment of Pascha, and a movement upward toward the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the joyful revelation of our destiny in Christ. To return to the opening theme of the marvelous acts of God moving from the Incarnation to the Ascension, I would like to turn to St. Leo one more time for his understanding of that entire movement:

It is upon this ordered structure of divine acts that we have been firmly established, so that the grace of God may show itself still more marvelous when, in spite of the withdrawal from men's sight of everything that is rightly felt to command their reverence, faith does not fail, hope is not shaken, charity does not grow cold.

I would like to further note that within my memory, at least, we never had as many faithful present for this Feast than we had yesterday evening at the Vesperal Liturgy. It is always wonderful when a Feast is ... festal! And it is most festal when many faithful members are present worshiping and glorifying God. According to St. Luke, once the disciples beheld Christ ascend into heaven, "they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God." (LK. 24:52) The "temple" is our common place of worship. Hopefully, we too, will continually be in the temple blessing God.

Fr. Steven

The Ascension - 'An Endless Soaring Upward'

Dear Parish Faithful,

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Pascha - The Thirty Ninth Day

Today is the "Leavetaking of Pascha" but also the "Forefeast of the Ascension." I am prone to saying on an annual basis "that Pascha comes in with a roar and goes out with a whimper." How far and long ago it may seem that we experienced that explosion of joy at the Paschal Liturgy following Holy Week. And how quickly that experience disappears! I often find myself asking the pastoral question once Great Lent is over: Did we "redeem the time" and by the grace of God and our efforts allow Great Lent to bear fruit in our lives? Or were we deceived by the evil one and squander the precious time of Great Lent? Perhaps the same kinds of questions are fair now that the forty-day paschal season has ended: Did we "redeem the time" and by the grace of God and our efforts allow the Paschal Season to bear fruit in our lives? Or were we deceived by the evil one and squander the precious time of the Paschal Season? These are both forty-day periods of liturgical time and together combine for an extended period (Holy Week connects them) that without a doubt is at the very center of our lives as Orthodox Christians. Without any real elaboration here, I come up with an over-all question or two: What impact did either Great Lent or the Paschal Season - or again both combined - have on our lives? Does the Death and Resurrection of Christ shape our worldview and the manner in which we live our lives?

Regardless of how we answer these questions, the coming Feast of the Ascension allows us to be positive and hopeful, for in this celebration we experience both glorification and a "taste" of heaven. In words that I hope will inspire all of us to embrace this Feast with sincerity and awareness, Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes the following about the Lord's Ascension:

There is a thrill of joy in the very word "ascension" that issues a challenge, as it were, to the so-called "laws of nature," the perpetually downward-leading, downward-pulling, and enslaving laws of gravity, weight, falling. Here, in contrast, all is lightness, flight, an endless soaring upward. The Lord's Ascension is celebrated forty days after Pascha, on Thursday of the sixth week after the feast of Christ's Resurrection.

The feast of the Ascension is the celebration of heaven now opened to human beings, heaven as the new and eternal home, heaven as our true homeland. Sin severed earth from heaven and made us earthly and coarse, it fixed our gaze solidly on the ground and made our life exclusively earthbound. Sin is the betrayal of heaven in the soul....

... heaven is the name of our authentic vocation as human beings, heaven is the final truth about the earth. No, heaven is not somewhere in outer space beyond the planets, or in some unknown galaxy. Heaven is what Christ gives back to us, what we lost through our sin and pride, through earthly, exclusively earthly sciences and ideologies, and now it is opened, offered, and returned to us by Christ. Heaven is the kingdom of eternal life, the kingdom of truth, goodness and beauty. Heaven is the total spiritual transformation of human life; heaven is the kingdom of God, victory over death, the triumph of love and care ... And therefore, heaven permeates our life here and now, the earth itself becomes a reflection, a mirror image of heavenly beauty. Who descended from heaven to earth to return heaven to us? God. Who ascended from earth to heaven? The man Jesus.

Fr. Alexander writes of "flight, and endless soaring upward ..." Perhaps that may be claiming a great deal more than what we are prepared for. However, the opportunity for lifting up our minds and hearts to "Our Father who art in heaven ..." through the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ is always an open possibility when we are present at the Divine Liturgy. For the Feast of Ascension itself, we will serve the Vesperal Liturgy this evening beginning at 6:00 p.m. If you come, you offer yourself and your families that blessed possibility. The Lord can "lift us up," but we need to give Him the opportunity.

Fr. Steven

The Risen Lord - Evidence Which Leads to Faith

Revised 5/18/2010 - Link to the full article (in pdf format) by Fr Steven appears below...

Dear Parish Faithful and Friends in Christ,

Christ is Risen!

Pascha - The Thirty-Fourth Day

The Resurrection of Christ and the Rise of Christianity

Orthodox Christians believe that the New Testament Church and the Christian faith itself appeared at a particular point in history because the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. The cause behind the emergence of the Church and the Christian Faith was not a crucified, dead and buried Jesus. Rather, that very crucified, dead and buried Jesus was revealed to be both Lord and Christ following His Resurrection “on the third day.” God vindicated the messianic claims of Jesus when He raised Jesus from the dead “according to the Scriptures.” Contemporary Orthodox Christians readily agree with the Apostle Paul’s insistence on the absolute centrality of the bodily resurrection of Christ as the foundation of Christian faith in Jesus: "If Christ is not raised, then your faith is in vain and our preaching is in vain.” (I COR. 15) Among all Christians this has been an overwhelming consensus since the initial witness of the apostles to the Risen Lord. But since the emergence of critical biblical scholarship within the last two centuries or so, we find Christian scholars and those influenced by them questioning, reinterpreting or openly denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. This process may be more accelerated today, or simply more prominent and public in its expression. A vivid – if not lurid - expression of this skeptical approach to the resurrection claims of the first Christians can be found in the work of the New Testament scholar Dom Dominic Crossan. In his reconstruction of events, the body of the crucified Jesus was discarded in a shallow grave, there to suffer the further humiliation of becoming the food of ravenous dogs. That is also the kind of counter-claim that will attract a good deal of publicity. This threatens to undermine a consistent and long-standing witness among all Christians that points to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ among the great “religious founders” within human history. That uniqueness was articulated by Prof. Veselin Kesich in the following manner in his book The First Day of the New Creation:

For the members of the first Christian community in Jerusalem, the resurrection of Christ was above all an event in the life of their Master, and then also in their own lives. After meeting Christ following his resurrection, they could have said with St. Paul that necessity was laid upon them to preach the gospel of resurrection (I COR. 9:16). Christianity spread throughout the Greco-Roman world with the proclamation that Jesus who died on the cross was raised to a new life by God. The message of Christianity is without parallel in religious history in its content and in its demand. (p. 15)

The Risen Christ spoke to His disciples about “belief” in His Resurrection even among those who did not “see” Him as those very first disciples did. This was in response to the Apostle Thomas’ movement from unbelief to belief when Jesus appeared to Thomas and offered him to probe the wounds in His hands and side: “You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” (JN. 20:29) Clearly, the presence of faith is essential in confessing that Jesus has been raised from the dead: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” (ROM. 10:9) However, in perhaps challenging a misconceived understanding of faith, this does not mean that believing that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead is an irrational leap into the unbelievable and indefensible. On the one hand, the Resurrection is an overwhelming and awesome event that invokes “trembling and astonishment” in those who are presented with its reality – and perhaps initial silence because of its numinous quality (cf. MK. 16:8). On the other hand, Christians do not believe in the resurrection of Christ in the face of evidence that clearly contradicts or “disproves” that claim. It is not as if the first disciples of Jesus were confronted with His (rotting) corpse in the tomb, but then said: “Nevertheless, we still believe that He is risen!” The resurrection of Christ is not about the fate of the “immortal soul” of Jesus, which is quite irrelevant to the Christian claim that death has been overcome in the resurrected Christ. Resurrection is the claim that the body – and thus the whole person conceived biblically – has been raised and glorified to a new mode of existence in an eternal relationship with God. What many Jews believed would occur at the end of history, happened with Jesus within history. And that is why the Apostle Paul called Christ “the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (I COR. 15:20).

So, while we “see” the Risen Lord through the eyes of faith, we also claim that the historical investigation into the reliability of the evidence for the resurrection, narrated and developed in the New Testament, cannot refute that belief in any way. In Christianity, there exists a mutual interpenetration between theology and history. Thus, theology and history remain in an unbreakable bond of mutual support and clarification. Basically, Christians cannot make theological claims that are historically untenable or refutable. This is due to the foundational claim that God acts decisively on behalf of humankind and the world within the historical space and time of our created world. With this in mind, we can say that there are three essential components to the New Testament’s proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that together present a reasonable defense of that claim that is simultaneously consistent, coherent and convincing: 1) the discovery of the empty tomb; 2) the appearances of the Risen Lord to His male and female disciples; and 3) the transformation of the disciples into the apostles who boldly proclaim the Risen Christ to the world, and the beginning of the New Testament Church.

Read the complete article in PDF format...

NYT Op-Ed: Red Family, Blue Family - Navigating Post Sexual Revolution America

Dear Parish Faithful,

Christ is Risen!

Here is another solid and balanced editorial from one of my favorite practitioners of the genre, Ross Douthat. In this one, he addresses a very contemporary social issue concerning the interrationship between marriage, sex, childbirth and abortion.

Fr. Steven

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OPINION | May 10, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist: Red Family, Blue Family
By ROSS DOUTHAT

When it comes to marriage and teen pregnancy rates, there's more than one America.

Fifty years ago, American family structures were remarkably uniform. The rich married at roughly the same rate as the poor and middle class. Divorce rates were low for the college educated and high school graduates alike. Out-of-wedlock births, while more common among African-Americans, were rare in almost every region and community.

That was a long time ago. The intact two-parent family has been in eclipse for decades now: last week, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2008, 41 percent of American births occurred outside of marriage, the highest figure yet recorded. And from divorce rates to teen births, nearly every indicator of family life now varies dramatically by education, race, geography and income.

Continue reading . . .

The Challenge of Easter - with elaboration...

Dear Parish Faithful,

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Pascha: The Thirty Third Day

Human beings know in their bones that they are made for each other, made to look after and shape this world, made to worship the one in whose image they are made. But like Israel with her vocation, we get it wrong. We worship other gods and start to reflect their likeness instead. We distort our vocation to stewardship into the will to power, treating God's world as either a gold mine or an ashtray. And we distort our calling to beautiful, healing, creative many-sided human relationships into exploitation and abuse.

Marx, Nietzsche and Freud described a fallen world in which money, power and sex have become the norm, displacing relationship, stewardship and worship. Part of the point of postmodernity under the strange providence of God is to preach the Fall to arrogant modernity. What we are faced with in our culture is the post-Christian version of the doctrine of original sin: all human endeavor is radically flawed, and the journalists who take delight in pointing this out are simply telling over again the story of Genesis 3 as applied to today's leaders, politicians, royalty and rock stars.

Our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.

Humans were made to reflect God's creative stewardship into the world. Israel was made to bring God's rescuing love to bear upon the world. Jesus came as the true Israel, the world's true light, and as the true image of the invisible God. He was the true Jew, the true human. He has laid the foundation, and we must build upon it. We are to be the bearers both of his redeeming love and of his creative stewardship: to celebrate it, to model it, to proclaim it, to dance to it.

From The Challenge of Easter, by N. T. Wright

Fr. Steven
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Added May 7, 2010:

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

Christ is Risen!

As a follow-up to the passage I sent out earlier this morning from N. T. Wright, someone asked me to provide some further context for some of Wright's phrases or expressions. I did this below, and thought to share this with the everyone else.

_____


Dear Father Steven,

He is Risen Indeed!

Could you please provide context or interpretation to the following statements? What grabbed my attention most was the last sentence in which Jesus is referred to as ‘the true Jew, the true human.’ I had an interesting conversation with my sister recently about Jesus, a Jew and the Son of God. What is it that makes him the ‘true’ Jew?

In Christ, John

Humans were made to reflect God's creative stewardship into the world.

We are to care for the world on behalf of God, not exploit the world. This unique role for human beings is first clearly stated in Gen. 1. This is our human vocation as being created "in the image and likeness of God." We our rational, creative, and loving beings. Pollution and environmental disasters are a result of neglecting those gifts and our responsibility before God and manipulating the world around us for our selfish gain and desires. From within the Church we can renew this vocation as the stewards of God, and nurture the world in a non-exploitative manner. This is the role of a "steward" acting on behalf of a higher authority; in this case God Himself! This is a basic "Orthodox environmentalism" that is not linked to any given political agendas "left" or "right."

Israel was made to bring God's rescuing love to bear upon the world.

Israel was formed by God to be His chosen people through whom, eventually, and "in the fulness of time," the Messiah/Savior would appear bringing a universal gift of reconciliation and salvation. This was Israel's vocation as the chosen people of God. The prophets understood this, and always spoke the "word of God" - as chastisement or consolation - to Israel when it strayed from its vocation, so as to bring Israel to its senses. Israel would even have to"suffer," if need be, to complete that God-given vocation. Understood in this wider perspective as serving God by serving the world, and not its own nationalistic or ethnic goals, the Law/Torah of Israel was a "custodian/guide" preparing for the coming of the Messiah.

Jesus came as the true Israel, the world's true light, and as the true image of the invisible God.

The image of light pervades the Scriptures as an image of freedom from the darkness of sin and alienation from God. Jesus is that light - "I am the light of the world" as we hear Him declare in the Gospel According to St. John. Through the risen Christ our minds and hearts can be illumined by that light and, again, slowly be liberated from the darkness of evil impulses and sin. As the "image of the invisible God" (COL. 1:15), the Son of God is eternal and of one nature with His eternal Father. Jesus is the eternal Son of God become flesh (JN. 1:14). To "see" Jesus is to see God. He makes the invisible visible.

He was the true Jew, the true human.

Jesus is the "true Jew" for He totally and absolutely embodies the vocation of Israel - fulfilling the Law in total obedience to His heavenly Father as the Suffering Servant of God. Salvation became universal following the death and resurrection of the Messiah Jesus. Gentiles and Jews are no longer divided, but now united in the one Body of Christ. In a sense, Jesus was Israel's "gift" to the world, in fulfillment of God's eternal design for the world's salvation and eventual glorification. Jesus is the "true human" as the sinless Son of God. To see Jesus is to see the human face of God in the incarnate Son. In Him, the divine and human natures were united once for all, thus restoring our lost communion with God. All of human nature is now healed. Thus, Jesus is the "last Adam," or the representative man - embracing all men and women - who healed the failed vocation of the first Adam. He is also the "first-fruits of them that have fallen asleep" (I COR. 15:20). The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead anticipates the resurrection of all human beings at the end of time, the final destruction of the "last enemy" - death - and a transformed and glorified cosmos in which God will be "all in all" (I COR. 15:28)

I hope that proves to be of some help.

In Christ,

Fr. Steven