By Neil Earle
I want to begin today by reading from page 191 of Gerrit Dawson’s stimulating book, Jesus Ascended – The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation. Dawson is a Presbyterian pastor-theologian with a knack of driving home a brisk summary of the true meaning of Jesus Christ’s ascension and present activity for us in heaven:
“Jesus Christ passed through the heavens. Against the surge of darkness, he drank the cup of obedience and went to the cross. Amidst the crackling jeers of the evil ones at his bloody defeat, he rose from the grave. The earth cracked, the tomb opened, and Christ came forth triumphant.”
That much is known and well preached. What follows after is far less widely understood – even by Christians. Says Dawson:
“Then he returned to the Father. Still wearing our flesh, he passed through the heavens. The principalities and powers were disarmed. He led captivity captive – humanity, long captive to sin and death, rode in his train of glory as he made his way. Then, Jesus entered within the veil, into the Holy of Holies, the direct presence of God the Father. He entered, Hebrews 6:20 tells us, as a forerunner for us.
He appears there now, wearing our humanity, on our behalf. He is the new and living way to God.”
Where is Dawson getting this last part from?
Actually from a host of well-attested texts that were much cited by the early church of the first few centuries. Some of them are Psalm 68 (Let God arise!), John 20:17, Luke 24:36-39, Philippians 3:21; 1 John 3:3, Psalm 24, Colossians 2:15, Revelation 5:6.
Since all good doctrine can be shown to start even in the Old as well as the New Testament, Psalm 68’s exhortation to “Let God arise” pushed far beyond the notion of an Israelite victory parade to the Temple to commemorate some anonymous battle. The original thought of a congregation ascending to the Temple Mount to give God thanks for deliverance undergirds Ephesians 4:7-10. Paul’s text sheds light on the neglected doctrine of the Ascension, Dawson argues. Psalm 68:18 says, “When you ascended on high you led captives in your train.” The KJV is much more picturesque “You led captivity captive,” but the thought is the same. Namely this: Christ’s resurrection was followed by his ascension and triumphant welcome in heaven. Psalm 24 also foreshadows and hints Jesus passing through the heavens victoriously to present himself and us before the Father’s throne, clean and justified, precious in God’s sight (Ephesians 4:7-13).
What? Us too?
Yes. Hebrews 6:20 shows even our very hope of a future life takes us beyond the veil, the symbolic barrier between God and humanity which Jesus penetrated by means of his bloody sacrifice. “Even in the ceremony on the Day of Atonement the High Priest of Israel would enter the veil of the temple carrying the names of the twelve tribes on his breastplate. This wonderfully describes Jesus taking us into the Father’s presence, Dawson told an interviewer. Jesus went through the veil in heaven, symbolically, to act as our forerunner (Hebrews 10:19-22). By the victorious celebration that marked his heavenly ascent – foreshadowed in Psalm 24 – he turned the Roman cross, that brutal symbol of worldly power, into a symbol of God’s victory over all empires and powers.
This is the background to such statements as Colossians 2:15 where Jesus triumphed over the very symbol of the brutality and cruelty of the Roman Empire – the cross. The Romans crucified 6000 victims along the way to the city after the defeat of Spartacus’ slave revolt about 100 years before Jesus’ own death. Death became transformed by Jesus rising from his grave and ascended to his Father as the King of Glory. Rome could not subdue him and the grave could not hold him.
Thus, says Dawson, the ascension completes the resurrection.
Historians tell us the early Christians went to their deaths singing and with a look of victory on their faces. Men, women and children faced the snarling, ravenous beasts in the arenas with a courage that ultimately helped undo the very games themselves.
What vision inspired them? What was it that was implanted in their brain? Probably something similar to what the first martyr, Stephen, saw clearly in his dying moment – a vision of the exalted but still humanly recognizable Jesus Christ seated at the Father’s right hand. Dawson quotes a host of early church fathers to show that this martyred church understood how Jesus took his glorified human body with him (Philippians 3:20-21). He still bears the marks of slaughter upon him (Revelation 5:6) and he will for all eternity. When he returns people will “look on him whom they have pierced” (Zechariah 12:10) and it will convict many that Jesus was who he said he was – and whom his faithful servants testified that he was all along.
That is only one of the many implications of what has been called “the vicarious humanity of Jesus.” Gerrit Dawson quotes from Irenaus in the 200s to the 1646 Westminster Confession to show how the Christian church has always known of the continued humanity of Jesus in his glorified body in the heavens. Irenaeus wrote: “As our species went down to death as a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one.” Hippolytus (d. 236) was very blunt: “He offered himself to the Father and before this there was no flesh in heaven.” The Westminster Confession of 1646 states that “on the third day he rose from the dead with the same body in which he suffered, with which he also ascended into heaven.”
The vicarious humanity has been little preached in our era.
For Dawson and others in the Thomas Torrance school this teaching of the bodily ascension and presence in heaven of the Son of Man/Son of God is the best news possible It is a call to check the worldliness and creeping heresies about Jesus becoming a developed “God-consciousness” only at his baptism or the New Age-type belief that he was more a spirit than a physical presence. “The Son of God became what we are and would not give it up. Rather then forsake us he took that humanity to heaven. United to him by the power of the Holy Spirit we share in his incarnate life at the right hand of the Father.”
At the end of a series of sermons on the ascension at First Presbyterian in Lenoir, North Carolina, Dawson asked some of his members to consider the implications of what all this meant. Here are a few of their answers:
Good comments one and all. How else could we react knowing that Jesus who was always God is now God and man and is our representative head in heaven who actively intervenes for us with the Father as we petition him as our older brother. Jesus has taken us to God within the veil; he is not ashamed to call us brethren and to present us faultless before the throne covered by his glorified body. It’s a bold statement in Colossians 3:1-4 that says our life ended at baptism – spiritually speaking (Colossians 3:3) – and we now we live in and through him to receive full sonship from the Father and all its benefits.
There is more, much more, in Dawson’s book, but today let us thank God for Jesus’ ascension and all that that means and to Christian teachers who labor to make that meaning clear.