By Neil Earle
Christian writer Colin Duriez has said: “Heaven has come down to earth and our humanity has been taken up to God.”
Well, who wouldn’t want heaven on earth? Christians believe this actually happened for a brief spell in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let’s look at this tonight to see how important all this is for the Christian life.
June 5 is Ascension Sunday for many Christian churches and it is timed to be 40 days after Jesus was resurrected and then went back to heaven. That piece of chronology is recorded in Acts 1:1-3 by the first church historian, St. Luke. Jesus lingered for a while in his glorified body, eating and drinking with his disciples, witnessing to his victory, preparing a barbecue on the beach with his own hands (John 21:9) and then mysteriously departing from them in the clouds on the Mount of Olives. Luke tells this as well (Acts 1:4-11).
So what’s going on here?
Well, it is a characteristic of Christian doctrine that it is – however much some of the concepts may be difficult to grasp – it is a seamless whole. You can’t talk about Ascension unless you have Resurrection and there is no Resurrection without the primary miracle of the Incarnation. Let’s start there.
Incarnation from the Latin in-carnu, “in the flesh,” refers to the events Christians celebrate at Christmas. In fulfillment of the ancient promises and prophecies God sent the world a Deliverer who was paradoxically God himself. The child of Bethlehem took upon himself our full humanity. As the Scottish theologian Tom Torrance explains, this was a momentous step.
“What happens in the incarnation is the union of God with man. At last, in the midst of our fallen humanity, within and in spite of our estrangement from him, God comes in love and binds us to himself forever. God and man meet in Jesus Christ and a new covenant is eternally established and fulfilled” (Incarnation, pages 105-106).
As God had promised Mother Eve at the symbolic fall of the human race into the prison of self-will and self-humiliation and self-disgust (Genesis 3:15), God had sent his Deliverer in the form of a peasant Palestinian villager, Jesus. His whole life would be a demonstration of God’s love and concern for the poor, divided, war-torn creatures of this small planet. “Beginning with his baptism among sinner at the Jordan and ending with his baptism in blood on the cross, again among malefactors when he died,” writes Torrance, “we see the person of Christ at work in a movement of increasing solidarity with his fellow men and women, increasing solidarity with sinners.” (Pages 106-107).
Torrance had been a decorated army chaplain with the British forces in Italy during World War II. Sin and suffering were vivid realities to this cleric who would go on to lead the Church of Scotland. Torrance theology brings the incarnation together with Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection. The life was a complete whole. Torrance disciples point to the cosmic significance of Jesus’ life and death. As the great healer and compassion-giver, Jesus was the greatest prophet that land of prophets had ever seen. But it was in his death that he achieved his greatest victory.
Note this in 2 Corinthians 5:14, a pivotal scripture in getting the Big Picture on what’s going on in the Bible: “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”
In this holistic theology, Incarnation points inexorably to Resurrection. Through the Holy Spirit raising Jesus from the dead, Jesus triumphed over the forces of sin and death (Romans 1:4). When he died we all died with him – we, the whole human race, cosmically, we all descended into the deepest pit with Jesus. But that death of Jesus counted for everything. It paid for the sins of the whole world. So much so that when Jesus was raised the whole cosmos was raised back up with him. What this means, in effect, is that in Christ the whole world has been saved, already, has been reconciled to God already (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). Problem is – they don’t know it yet. It is the church’s job to make that clear through the Gospel. God is not mad at people. The atonement has come. In Christ’s death and resurrection amnesty is proclaimed to the worst of sinners, their forgiveness has been assured. The Church must make this clear by spreading it to the ends of the earth – and what good news it is.
But there is more.
Paul explained to the Ephesians what was achieved through Incarnation and Resurrection: “You were dead in your transgressions and sins…But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgression (see, the human race has been covered already by the blood of Christ)…And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”
Wow. That is quite a text. You might have to reread that to let the lesson sink in. Romans 6, the baptism chapter, teaches us that we are indeed raised to new life in Christ but…to sit in the heavenly realms? How can that be?
It’s possible because Jesus Christ is our brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Yet as the Word of God he never abandoned heaven either. Now this is one of the hardest things to understand. Really, when you think about it, no wonder people have a problem with Christian theology. It is mighty difficult to grasp because we are dealing with the God who is far outside our measures of time and space and not some man-made deity. John Calvin asserted the staggering claim that the man Jesus did not exhaust the depths of the Godhead, of the Word who was with God. As he put it: “The Son of God descended miraculously from heaven, yet without abandoning heaven; was pleased to be conceived miraculously within the virgin’s womb, to live on earth, to hang on the cross, in such a way that he always filled the world as form the beginning” (Institutes, 2:13.4).
This mind-boggling Christian assertion is followed by another. Jesus in his exalted state at the right hand of the Father still bears within his glorified body the marks and scars of his crucifixion, the price paid by his incarnation. This is shown in Luke 24 and in Revelation 5 in the symbolism of “a Lamb as it had been slain,” yet a lamb who shares the throne with the Father.
This is how the resurrected Christ can take us with him to the Father’s presence. The solidarity with his creation ascends all the way to the throne. In spirit we are there already. Paul explained this in a very short but dynamite passage in Colossians 3:3,”For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”
Wow and double-wow!
Where is Christ right now? In heaven, and we are there too, in spirit. Our life as Christians is now integrated into the divine life of the Holy Trinity, one reason this aspect of Christian teaching is called Trinitarian Incarnational theology. We share in the life of the Eternal Trinity through Jesus adopting us as his beloved brothers and ushering us into the presence of God (Ephesians 1:3-11). We have now gone, symbolically speaking, in the spirit, behind the veil (Hebrews 9:19).
‘Can you conceive of a safer place for our spiritual selves to be then in the presence of God, behind the veil with Jesus our forerunner (Hebrews 9:20)?
Now we begin to see how important Jesus’ ascension really was. He took with him to the Father his own blood offering and us along with him. That is, once the Holy Spirit had been sent from heaven to execute and effect our own adopted Son-ship with God through repentance, baptism, faith and the whole Christian experience. We now have blessed fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Spirit.
Christians have always known this (1 John 1:3).
That’s enough for one day. Let’s stop here and take a break.
(Continued next time.)