Through Your Glorious Ascension (Part II)
By the Reverend John Breck
By His incarnation, Christ deified the flesh, the body with its human nature, and thus He restored it to the perfection and glory for which God originally intended it. As the First Adam, the archetype of all human existence, and as the Last Adam, the Author of Life who gives life to those who dwell in Him, Christ ascends in his “divine flesh,” exalting newly perfected human nature with Himself. The throne is the image that symbolizes that exaltation. By placing His deified flesh on the throne at the “right hand” of the Father, God the Son makes the ultimate sacramental gesture, offering our own fallen yet restored nature to Him who is the Source of all life, both human and divine. Because of our incorporation into the life of the Son, we can hope to join with the saints, the host of the saved. Yet this hope is already partially realized, insofar as we partake of that divine life here and now by participating in the Holy Eucharist.
A further refinement of this theme is offered to us by the great Byzantine mystic, St Gregory of Sinai (+ 1346). In the chapter from the Philokalia known as “Further Texts” (Alia Capita, PG 150.1300), St Gregory describes in eloquent terms the correspondence between the descending, ascending movement of Christ and spiritual growth in our own life. The passage is worth quoting in full:
“Everyone baptized into Christ should pass progressively through all the stages of Christ’s own life, for in baptism he receives the power so to progress, and through the commandments he can discover and learn how to accomplish such progression. To Christ’s conception corresponds the foretaste of the gift of the Holy Spirit, to His nativity the actual experience of joyousness, to His baptism the cleansing force of the fire of the Spirit, to His transfiguration the contemplation of divine light, to His crucifixion the dying to all things, to His burial the indwelling of divine love in the heart, to His resurrection the soul’s life-quickening resurrection, and to His ascension divine ecstasy and the transport of the intellect into God.”[2]
To most of our contemporaries, this kind of interpretation of the events in Christ’s life seems odd if not scandalous. It strikes them as pure allegorizing: taking the historical events of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, and reading them as metaphors to describe our inner spiritual state, the condition of the human soul.
To those of us who, in these past days, have sung out, “Let God arise!” and have tasted the heavenly gifts of his glorified Body and Blood, who have embraced others and been embraced with reconciling love “even by those who hate us,” this correspondence between the events of Christ’s life and our own is self-evident. Yesterday we were crucified with Him; today we rise with Him in glory. Yesterday He descended into the lower parts of the earth, into the darkness of our own life; today we ascend with Him in newness of life, in a potentially deified flesh, in order to take our place with Him at the right hand of the Father and in the midst of the communion of saints.
By His glorious ascension, Christ has already spoken to our deepest longing and fulfilled our most fervent hope. He has taken us as He took the hand of Adam, as in the paschal icon of the descent into hades. He has raised us up with Himself, out of the grave of our own making, and ascended with us into the awesome and blessed presence of His Father. He has transported into the very presence of God our “intellect,” our spiritual perception of transcendent life and being. And in so doing, He has led us—even in the mundane affairs of our daily existence—into the joyful and healing state of “divine ecstasy.”
[2] “Further Texts” 1, in The Philokalia vol. IV, ed. by G.E.H. Palmer, Ph. Sherrard and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 253.
~Taken from the website of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), http://oca.org/reflections/fr.-john-breck/through-your-glorious-ascension.
