Today's Feast: Ascension

[Shakuhachi]

It is a great feast to celebrate with many aspects to ponder. But Jesus is lifted up and into the clouds. What are we to make of that? Literally in the clouds? Above the clouds? Outer space?

I am thinking it has got to be symbolic language for a state of being that is simply “over our heads”. Not up or down or anywhere in the physical universe. Especially since he is also still with us.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Pup7]

Have you seen the movie “Son of God”? It depicted the Ascension the way I’ve always imagined it: a great light that seemed to come from the heavens, a sense of peace, and Jesus just sort of disappeared into the light.

If you haven’t seen it, I think it’s still on Netflix, and I highly recommend it. It brought a lot of aspects of Jesus’ story to life and to light for me. It was produced by Roma Downey and was very, very well done. (She plays an older Mary as well.)

 

[Dan_Defender]

He ascended into Heaven to receive his glory as conqueror of sin and death, to send the Holy Spirit as he promised and to prepare a place for us when we join him.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

I am thinking it has got to be symbolic language for a state of being that is simply “over our heads”. Not up or down or anywhere in the physical universe. Especially since he is also still with us.

Jesus is still with us, but he is not “still with us” in the sense of being a human in human form walking around on Earth eating baked fish, etc. He may possibly appear in his human form from time to time in an apparition, but since these are understood to be private revelations, Catholics are not required to believe he appeared to this or that saint, and the apparitions aren’t the kind of thing where he walks down the road to Emmaus with somebody and joins them for dinner.

I have no problem with believing that Jesus literally ascended up into the clouds and disappeared from view. We’re talking about the son of God who already rose from the dead. Rising up into the clouds and vanishing would just be more of the same miraculous stuff. As for “outer space”, it’s pretty clear that Heaven is not a physical place in the sense that we can understand where it is located, so it matters not whether Jesus passed through outer space or went through all the dimensions up to the 2500th dimension in order to get to Heaven, the point is that He arrived there.

I have no idea what you gain by making this into “symbolic language”. It’s no weirder to think of Jesus rising up in a beam of light and disappearing (“Beam me up, Scotty”) than it is to think of him standing on the ground and vanishing.

 

[Shakuhachi]

I did not suggest the beam of light. What would be the point of going up into the clouds and then disappearing or becoming nonphysical. Why not just do it here then?

 

[Spyridon]

have no idea what you gain by making this into “symbolic language”. It’s no weirder to think of Jesus rising up in a beam of light and disappearing (“Beam me up, Scotty”) than it is to think of him standing on the ground and vanishing.

I picture Jesus literally rising from the Earth until he became a dot in a cloud, then the cloud swallowed him up and he was gone from this realm to sit at the right hand of the Father.

The iconography of the Church has ALWAYS depicted the Ascension in a manner similar to this. I would argue the “beam of light” idea is borderline heretical, as it seems to negate 1500 years of iconograhic tradition.

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[Tis_Bearself]

What would be the point of going up into the clouds and then disappearing or becoming nonphysical. Why not just do it here then?

He went to be with God in Heaven, which is perceived as being both separate from and on a higher plane from the Earth. There are other references in Scripture to Heaven as being a place to which one goes up, ascends by going up a ladder, or going up in the sky. It seems like a pretty normal concept in view of how things were understood at the time; going down into the earth was where people went when they die, rot and decay, whereas going up to Heaven was the opposite of that.