Dear Judas
Thank you, brother, for your question!
When the pope spoke of the “cloud” being “theological language”, he was suggesting that the sacred author was employing the usage of a stylistic metaphor common throughout the Jewish Tanakh rather than recounting some kind of more physical event, when he related this experience. In the Hebrew Bible, a cloud often expresses two things:
- God’s Glory (ie the “Pillar of Cloud” in Exodus 13:21)
- The Shekhinah (“manifest presence”) of God (ie Hebrews 1:2-3)
God spoke to Moses out of the pillar of cloud in Exodus 33#, assuring him that His Presence would be with the Israelites. A “cloud” in biblical terminology, can thus have the spiritual significance of highlighting God’s “glory” and “divine presence”. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the dwelling place of God’s glory. In Christ, we see the visible manifestation of God Himself in the second person of the Trinity.
As to what the disciples “saw”, I would say that the Bible is telling us that they beheld Jesus in the fullness of His Glory as the Lord of all creation, exalted above the heavens. It is possible that to demonstrate this, Jesus might have “physically” lifted up off the ground, however this is not the primary significance of the event and would be a secondary or concomitant element of this experience for the Apostles. Other interpretations are possible and the use of that “cloud” in the story practically invites a less literal interpretation of what they “saw” happen to Jesus.
We don’t know how Jesus will “return” and appear to all human beings, just as we do not really know how he “ascended”. The accounts of Jesus’ ascension describe a miracle that is beyond human words to describe, and the attempts at describing it use literal, physical happenings such as “clouds” and Jesus ascending into the sky. We cannot comprehend what truly happened, what the Apostles truly saw/felt/experienced. It was a profoundly spiritual event which the Apostles witnessed: seeing their Lord departing from the physical universe and residing in his pre-existent Glory beside God the Father, in his full glorified Body, yet still being present to them because He is at “the right hand” of the Father beyond place and time; God being the ground from which all existence comes and depends on.
Christ ascending into the sky and hidden behind a cloud, this is biblical
lingo for saying that the apostles beheld Jesus in all the fullness of his Glory, exalted above all creation, as the very “tabernacle” of God, in whom all the fullness of Divinity was pleased to dwell.
The words “caught up in the clouds” are used to illustrate how quickly things will transform at the Second Coming of Christ: “
We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (
1 Corinthians 15:51-52). 1
Thessalonians 4:13-18. Verse 17 says, “
Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
When Jesus comes again we will be “caught up into the clouds” like he was at his Ascension into Heaven, not so much “literal clouds” but rather in the Manifest Presence of God in Heaven, in the New Creation. That is, we will all - by an immanent, immediate, sudden, drastic change - be surrounded by the Divine Presence and enter into the World to Come and the New Heavens and the New Earth. The human mind cannot right now comprehend how Jesus will return at his Second Coming and how our physical universe, the reality we know, will be utterly transformed in what Saint Paul calls “the twinkling of an eye”.
What the Apostles would have seen is incomprehensible to human imagination. The biblical account is trying to put it in intelligible language using symbols that we would understand.
Jesus being lifted up from the earth and being “caught up in the clouds” means to tell us that Jesus is the link between heaven and earth. He is God made flesh and through him we, the human race, can ascend to God. He has repaired in his broken body on the cross, the gulf that existed between the physical universe corrupted by sin and heaven, that is the spiritual universe.
In him, in his Human-Divine Body, Heaven and Earth are brought together and the relationship between God and Mankind which was broken by the Fall, has now been repaired in Jesus Christ, the Only Son of God.
“
God became man, so that men might become God” said St Athanasius.
The Ascension of Jesus is the moment when this truth was divinely revealed to the Apostles. The disciples received the divine knowledge straight from Christ that he was the link between God and man, that he had departed from the physical universe and was now in glory with God the Father.
(continued…)
Therefore, you simply believe that Jesus died on the cross but his soul went to the spiritual world and this passage of his Spirit to the other realm is His “ascension”. This is the “ascension” for members of the Baha’i Faith that Baha’u’llah, according to your feast day under that name and Abdu’l-Baha, also experienced. It is not what we understand by “ascension”.