Ascension just kept happening -
Reading: Acts 1:6-14
1:9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their
sight. 1:10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white
robes stood by them. 1:11 They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."
This Sunday, in this year, is the closest Sunday to the commemoration day of the Ascension of
Jesus. It is celebrated regularly 40 days after Easter. Actually we do not really know when it
actually and exactly happened, because 40 is just a round number like 70 or 120.
From Easter to Pentecost is a long way to go and the commemoration of the capital letter Ascension
keeps happening as a recurring opportunity to try to have a hold on it, year by year.
It is true that the major Holiday in Christianity is Easter Sunday because of the very
resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some people think that resurrection is impossible if you fact-check
it. However if you think about ascension, we arrive at a phenomenon that is even more
completely beyond the human grasp than resurrection.
If we think about the Resurrection, it is still within the human realm because the soul leaves the
body and the same soul may reenter the same body again, like the book of the Acts tells us in
chapter 20 that a certain young man named Eutychus sat in the window, weighed down with
deep sleep. As Paul spoke still longer, being weighed down by his sleep, he fell down from the
third floor and was taken up dead. Paul went down and fell upon him, and embracing him said,
“Don’t be troubled, for his life is in him.” When he had gone up, and had broken bread and
eaten, and had talked with them a long while, even until break of day, he departed. They
brought the boy in alive, and were greatly comforted.”
Paul seems to have returned the boy’s soul into his body. Thus it was a resurrection event.
Some people think that reincarnation is a variant of resurrection.
In theory, though Christianity recently does not support it, reincarnation means that the same
soul enters different body at the occasion of a rebirth on Earth.
Actually the very theory of reincarnation had been a part of the Christian tradition for a long
time, as it is surprisingly still alive in Judaism, and some church fathers like Basilides in the early 2nd century, Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century or St. Gregory who even became Pope in the year of 590, they all openly taught about Reincarnation, as a matter of course.
In the Bible, actually, there is nothing explicitly against reincarnation, on the contrary.
For example it is written in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 16:“When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man (Jesus) is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
It is obvious from the Gospel excerpt that people at that time thought that it is possible that the
ancient prophets, or the already beheaded John the Baptist can spiritually reborn in someone.
Reincarnation as a faith theory became exiled from Christianity only in the 6th century on the
order of Emperor Justinian I. The Emperor's wife before her marriage used to be an entertaining
woman, to put it politely. As a royal wife she asked the astrologers of the court what will happen
to her in the case of her next reincarnation. The chief astrologer told her that very likely she will
be reborn as a pig. The wife, called Theodora, complained to the Emperor thus the Emperor
banned reincarnation from the Christian tradition in 545 AD.
In the Greek part of the Roman Empire, later called Byzantium, just like in England in the age
of Henry VIII, the ruler of the empire was officially the head of the church as well.
Eventually resurrection and reincarnation both need to be proven by science. Until that it is hard
to be really adamant even in church circles that resurrection is real but reincarnation is false,
just to stay Emperor compatible.
Resurrection did not happen very frequently but at least it is understandable how it should work,
or if it is not, at least we can imagine it how the body is enlivening again. If the dead body is
intact, the imagination has an easy task. It is like awakening from some deep sleep.
However there is a famous description in the book of Ezekiel in chapter 37 as Ezekiel was
standing in the valley of the dried bones. He wrote that " as I was prophesying, there was a
noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and
flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then God
said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the
Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they
may live.’ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life
and stood up on their feet—a vast army."
It is hard to imagine how it can happen but it is not impossible to see the event with the eyes of
our faith as it depicted by the prophet.
However, regarding ascension our imagination is stuck a little bit, how a human being is taken
into Heaven without experiencing death at all.
We just can not take a look into Heaven, thus it is hard to imagine what it is invisible by nature, I
mean, supernatural by its own nature. Nonetheless, ascension, though it is rare, it happens occasionally. It happened to an iconic figure, Enoch, in the age of the Patriarchs before the great deluge, as it is written in the book of Genesis, chapter 5: "
Enoch lived sixty-five years, and became the father of Methuselah.
Enoch walked with God after he became the father of Methuselah three hundred years, and
became the father of sons and daughters all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five
years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him."
According to tradition, Enoch was an extraordinary person, ascended into Heaven, seventh
generation from Adam, perfectly righteous in his ways, very much like Abraham later.
The book of Enoch was not included in the Holy Bible, because of its esoteric content, but it was
widely known and read among the sages and in the Jerusalem congregation.
Also the ascension of prophet Elijah is well known among the Bible readers as it is written in the
Second Book of the Kings chapter 2: " After they had crossed the river over, Elijah said to
Elisha, “Tell me what I can do for you before I am taken from you.”
So Elisha answered, “Please, let me inherit two shares of your spirit.”
10 Elijah replied, “You have asked for something difficult. If you see me being taken from you,
you will have it. If not, you won’t.”
As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire with horses of fire suddenly appeared
and separated the two of them. Then Elijah went up into heaven in the whirlwind. As Elisha
watched, he kept crying out, “My father, my father, the chariots and horsemen of Israel!” Then
he never saw Elijah again. "
It looks obvious that the ascension itself is something invisible. It is something like the visible
body transcends into the invisible. It is like the matter is dematerializing.
It is like a person is there in a moment and in the other moment he or she completely
disappears. Not because it is magic trick, but because the person is taken to Heaven. The
physical body can not go to Heaven. It does not belong to there, the body belongs to the Earth,
as it was taken from the ground.
Some people asked, how then the body is not just left behind and after that the soul can fly to
Heaven, once it is freed from the burdening weight of the body.
It is, because it would be called death and not ascension.
In the case of the ascension the body is not decomposing for thousands of years, but it
disappears within a timeless moment, in a twinkling of an eye. The Heavenly logic stays behind
it, that the very cause of the materialization is the flaw in the soul, what we call sin. In every generation we are given the opportunity to come to the Earth, being born physically in
order to repent, to make amendments and to be born again by the Spirit.
That is why the whole human nation, each and everyone, we all need salvation and redemption.
Whosoever does not have a sin at all, whose sin is taken away by God, in that person the cause
of the materialization ceases to exist, thus the body disappears, because its cause of its
material existence disappeared, and the soul goes to Heaven without death.
As it is written in the Psalm 32: “ Blessed is he whose disobedience is forgiven,
whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord doesn’t impute iniquity, in whose
spirit there is no deceit.”
According to the logic of the Gospel, because Jesus had no sin, finally, after everything was
done, he entered Heaven ascending from this palpable reality to the invisible, spiritual realm, we
call Heaven, as it is written in the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke:
" He led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. It
happened, while he blessed them, that he withdrew from them, and was carried up into
heaven."
May The Lord’s name be blessed by every generation and for ever, praising that how marvelous
are his deeds.
AMEN
