Advent And The Ascension
What does the season of Advent have to do with the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ into heaven? On the surface, it would appear, not much. Yet, as is often the case in matters of depth, if we dig just a bit we can see that Advent and the Ascension have a lot more in common than would appear. It needs to be stated that the doctrine of the Ascension is one of those doctrines that has been neatly tucked away under the"what does this have to do with anything" file, stored away in the filing cabinet. When we encounter the Ascension we usually are left with more questions than answers and the answers we usually get are not very satisfying. So where does the season of Advent fit with the reality of the Ascension? When our Lord descended from heaven in great humility to take on human nature, He did so that in His Ascension He would exalt our human nature. Our Lord lowers Himself in becoming Man in order that He might raise Man back to his proper dignity as the image of God. The Ascension is often understood as pointing toward our Lord's identity as God. Yet, our Lord, pertaining to His Divine Nature, did not need to be exalted as God. What needed to be exalted was our Lord's human nature. In the Ascension of our Lord, humanity begins to exercise dominion over creation as God intended from the beginning. This dominion is exercised "In Christ" and by the Spirit. As Douglas Farrow has pointed out in his book on the Ascension, reflection on the Ascension had led to some allowing our Lord's humanity to be swallowed up by His deity. We must always be careful to remember that our Lord is fully God and fully Man. As has been pointed out by many theologians, Jesus is both the manifestation of the faithfulness of God and the faithfulness of humanity. In Jesus there is God's "Yes" to man, and man's "Yes" to God. Thus, in the one person Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Word made flesh, there is manifested both the reign of God and the reign of humanity. In Jesus God exercises his reign as God and in Jesus humanity exercises their reign as the image of God. In Jesus God rules his world and orders all things and brings them to perfection as He always intended from the beginning through His image, which is humanity (Psalm 8; Heb 2). In Jesus' Ascension to the Father's right hand we can say, without any reservation, there is a Man in heaven, ruling and reigning and fulfilling the mandate of creation, and in the sending of the Holy Spirit, we His people participate in His Ascension (Col 3) bringing about in our bodies the realities of Jesus' reign over the world. Thanks be to God for the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. And thanks be to God for the 1st Advent of our Lord, who in great love and humility, shunned not the Virgin's womb and became Man for our sake, so that in Him we might be exalted. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, Amen.
posted by Cruciform Catholic | 2:07 PM
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One of the first themes of Advent is hope. It also is related i think to the Ascension. Christian hope may be described as the desire for God’s future along with the confident expectation that it will be obtained. It belongs to those who those who dare to lift their eyes toward the ultimate end of things and have a settled belief that Jesus not only lived, died, resurrected but also now reigns and will fully consumated that reign in his second advent. This should not be confused with escapism although it may look like “pie-in-the-sky” to our nose-to-the-grindstone culture.
Short-Sighted Investments
A world without any hope at all results in the unlivable condition of utter despair. In place of true hope our world will create counterfeit hopes. So we all know people who desperately cling onto the strong desire for some loosely conceived ‘better life’ and strive to make it a reality. Christian hope should not be confused with such vague sentiments of optimism nor expressed in the dreamer’s words of “I wish” or “wouldn’t it be nice if. . .”
As Christians, for the most part, have some long-term perception of what the world will be like and the doctrine of Ascension grounds it in an unshakable certainty that it will be attained.
Our hope is closely related to the character of God. The foundation of hope rests upon a holy, wise and powerful God who makes promises of salvation, fulfills them in Christ and begins to make it manifest through the ascended Christ by way of the Spirit.
In Advent we typically keep an eye on the past (the promises of salvation in the O.T. and the first advent of Christ) and one toward the future (watching and waiting for the full consumation of those promises).
By looking at First Century Church I think it interesting that the manifestation of hope is made tangible by the Spirit bringing about a new unified humanity (Ephesians 4:4). So for the first Christians, the clearest tangible sign of this Advent hope was with the existence of the spiritual commonwealth we call Church. The earliest Churches were often populated by quite diverse people from many different backgrounds and languages. Because of Christ, these tiny communities sprang up everywhere in the Mediterranean world. Going beyond the various divisions that kept people apart from one another, these men and women lived as brothers and sisters, as God’s family, praying together and sharing their possessions according to the needs of each person (cf. Acts 2:42-47).
When they prayed, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” they were affirming that the life of heaven should have an appropriate earthly parallel. And so they understood their citizenship to not be in the fallen world but from heaven (cf. Phil 3:20) and so, much like a colony in antiquity, the Church existed to manifest the values and structures of the homeland- heaven. From the very beginning, Christian hope kindled a fire on the earth which could be seen in the life of the Church.
Advent whets our appetites by looking toward a beatific future which, though hard to attain, is not only possible of attainment but by the grace of God is set firm because of the ascended status of our Lord. This- not some millennium scheme- is the fundamental premise of Christian eschatology as I see it. Hope, thus, draws our attention beyond our present surroundings and incomplete existence.
Our hope- firmly fixed- is what provides confidence in implementing the values of heaven on earth during the present.
The spirituality of Advent, thus, calls us to start our journey with a focus upon the ultimate telos of all things as it will be fully consummated in the work of Christ. In it we look to a time when the powers of evil will be put away forever, the earth will be restored and humanity brought into glory.
True hope then encounters us as the great promise of life: nothing will be in vain. It says to us that the evil of this world is doomed and that the ultimate word in history will be the everlasting rule, reign, and triumph of God.
Hope says yes to God's promise
We are claiming, in the face of all that suggests to the contrary, that Jesus is still alive, still Lord of this world, and, because of that, 'All will be well.'
Hope says yes to God's promise and then, without denying the condition of this world, lives out a vision of life based upon that promise. To paraphrase a repeated line from "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" the hardest thing in life can simply be living it.
Nevertheless, hope dares to live life and fight for the life of creation.
Do I dare to see the future through the eyes of the one who came to redeem the world from the power of evil and now sits entroned at the right hand of God? Such a question is not easy to answer. Contemplation, intention, a steadfast committment and above all, a soul nourished by Christ in his Church is needed. Such is, I believe, the spiritual life growing out from Christ and commemorated in the Spirituality of Advent.
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