Later this week, Catholics and many Protestants will celebrate the Ascension of Jesus, and you may hear these readings from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians:

May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know … what is the surpassing greatness of [God’s] power … which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come. [Ephesians 1:18]

What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended into the lower regions of the earth? The one who descended is also the one who ascended far above all the heavens,
that he might fill all things. [Ephesians 4:9]

Half a century ago, I was involved in a silly joke at my Protestant seminary on Ascension Day. Our Dean was hosting a meeting that was called “The Consultation on Church Union” (COCU). There were national leaders of several Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Congregational—discussing possibilities of merger. It was considered an honor to have such a high-level consultation at our school.

But some of us students disapproved of this meeting, and we set about to mock it by staging our own event: we bought several large helium balloons, on which we wrote the Name of “Jesus,” and released them on the chapel lawn just as the distinguished clergy were processing into Evening Prayer to celebrate Our Lord’s ascension into heaven. We cheered and applauded noisily as the balloons went up. Our Dean, who was an exceptionally dignified and proper man, was not amused.

Our juvenile attempt to embarrass the authorities represented a juvenile understanding of this feast of the Ascension. It is not about Our Lord disappearing into the clouds; that is figurative language to describe a mystery, which we might think of this way: Our Lord’s Ascension is the completion of His Incarnation.

In the Creed, we profess that the eternal Son of God the Father, “God from God and Light from Light,” came down from heaven.  He was conceived as man by the power of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary; he assumed our human nature into His divine Person. Then, having completed his life on earth, the Son of God suffered death upon the Cross, offering Himself in sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins, and on the third day rose in His human body from the dead. According to St. Luke, Jesus spent forty days with His disciples, appearing in various ways to them, and instructing them about the Kingdom of God, which His death and resurrection was opening to them and all who would believe in Him through them.

Now, Our Lord’s Resurrection was a stage of His Ascension, as He said to Mary Magdalene: “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

[John 20:17] Mary was trying to embrace His human body. In all of His appearances to those who loved him, Jesus made the strong point that it was His humanity, our nature that He made His own even unto death that He was bringing back to heaven. It is as man that He is returning to the Father—His Father and our Father—to be seated “at his right hand in the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come.” In that sense, Our Lord’s Ascension is the completion of His Incarnation.

But our Lord’s Ascension did not begin with His resurrection. It began from the moment of His death, when He “descended into Hell.”  “Hell” here simply means the realm of the dead, the lower regions of the earth, the place of departed souls. Our Lord’s death, like ours, involved the separation of his soul and body; His human soul entered that “underworld” (as the ancients thought of it), a kind of “dungeon”; but remaining united to His divine Person, the soul of Jesus entered that shadowy realm as its Lord, and freed those who were imprisoned there. This accounts for a mysterious passage in Matthew’s account of Jesus’ death, in which he says that “the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.” [Matthew 27:52-53]

St. Paul to the Ephesians confirms that testimony, when he says, “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended into the lower regions of the earth?” In His death, our Lord took possession of the realm of the dead, removing it from Satan’s dominion. So, it was first the dead who acknowledged Him to be their Lord. Then, after His resurrection, He prepared his disciples to proclaim His Lordship to the living—first to Israel, and then to all the nations. Then, during the disciples’ nine days of waiting in prayer before Pentecost, Our blessed Lord in His humanity passed through, and took possession of, all the orders of the angels; St. Paul names four of the traditional nine orders when he says that God the Father raised His Son to His right hand, “far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come.” And finally, when Jesus reached His Father’s throne, the Holy Spirit was poured out to begin the mission of the Church: “He put all things beneath His feet, and gave him as head of all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all things in every way.”

So, you see, Our Lord’s Ascension is about so much more than His disappearance into the clouds. It is about the Son of God, one with us in His humanity, ascending to the throne of God, taking possession as its Lord of every order of creation. St. Paul writes to the Philippians, “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ [as man] is Lord.” [Philippians 2:9-11]

For Catholic Christians, the Incarnation is the central article of faith, but apart from the Ascension, it is incomplete: God “came down” to “raise us up.” He showed us God His Father so that we could call God Father too. He came to share our humanity so that we could share in His divinity. The Lord of all creation rules everything that He has made as man. His Providence, which guides our lives, is mediated through a human mind and heart. That is an amazing truth, unique to Christian faith. At Pentecost, this truth “came home” to His disciples, gathered in the upper room to pray with Mary the Lord’s mother, the first one to believe it: may her prayer help us to believe it too!