By Fr. George Dorbarakis
1. The Completion of His Saving Work
With His Ascension, the Lord completed His redemptive and saving work on earth. His ascent into Heaven was the continuation of His Birth, His Baptism, His teaching ministry, His Crucifixion, and His Resurrection. What the Lord began when He came into the world reached its fulfillment through His divine Ascension: He united mankind with the Triune God. According to the Kontakion of the feast, which summarizes its essence, the Lord ascended in glory, “having fulfilled the divine plan for our sake and united things on earth with things in heaven.”
This glorious Ascension does not mean that the Lord rejected His physical body and returned as God alone to the right hand of the Father. The Lord ascended into Heaven, “where He was before,” together with His holy body, which means that the incarnation of God was not a temporary episode in His life. Such temporary appearances are seen among the “deities” of the ancient Greeks and other peoples, when some “god” appears in human form in the world to accomplish a specific mission and then returns to his normal state. But the Son of God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate as man, assumed human nature, and retains it forever. If humanity was healed from the wound of sin, it was because God, moved by infinite love, united His life with ours. Forever now within the Godhead there also exists human nature. And this means that in Christ, man has “conquered” heaven. Already we exist within the Kingdom of God in the person of Jesus Christ. “I go to prepare a place for you,” said the Lord (John 14:2).
This great truth reveals not only the love of God, but also the value possessed by man. Man is not a being randomly thrown into the world. Nor is he merely one among the many creatures of the world. By being assumed by God and eternally retained within Him, man’s infinite value was revealed. Yet this value is not something man possesses on his own, but comes from his connection and relationship with his Creator. God is the One Who gives value to man, not something man inherently owns. In reality, it is the “image of God” within man which Christ purified by coming into the world and brought to its highest fulfillment as “likeness” through His glorious Ascension. Otherwise, by ourselves, without God, we are what all the saints of every age proclaim: “earth and ashes,” “food for worms and stench,” literally nothing: “Without Me you can do nothing,” as the Lord Himself said (John 15:5).
Consequently, the value God gives to man condemns every racist mentality and transcends every aristocratic understanding of human groups. No one is superior to another. Whether white or black, poor or rich, educated or uneducated, young or old, all possess the same value given to us by God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Thus the Ascension of the Lord, beyond completing God’s plan for the salvation of the world, also signifies the great worth of mankind.
2. The Ascension and Pentecost: The Founding of the Church
Although the Lord completed His work on earth through His Ascension, the world was not yet saved in actuality. What He brought had to become the personal possession of each individual. What was general and objective had to become personal and subjective. This work of personally appropriating salvation occurred through the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.
At Pentecost, the third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, undertook the ministry of the common activity of the Triune God: to reveal Christ in the hearts of men and to accomplish their sanctification. Just as God the Father ministered the common energies of the Godhead during the time of the Old Testament in order to prepare humanity for the coming of His Son, and just as God the Son ministered the common energies of the Godhead during the New Testament era through His entire redemptive work, so also God the Holy Spirit ministers these same divine energies from Pentecost onward: He reveals the Church as the Body of Christ and makes man a member of Him (cf. John 16:13–15).
From this perspective, the Ascension of the Lord points toward the event of Pentecost. Without Pentecost — without the descent of the Holy Spirit — the Ascension, as well as the entire earthly life of the Lord, would have remained completely inactive for us. Without the presence of the Holy Spirit, Christ would remain a stranger to us. It is perhaps like the electrical wiring of a house without switches to distribute the current. Without the switches, the existence of electricity is useless.
The hymnology of the Church strongly emphasizes this dimension of the Ascension: “The Lord ascended into the heavens in order to send the Comforter to the world.” The sending of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is understood as the purpose of the Ascension for the reason already mentioned: so that man might be enabled to know Christ, to partake of the gifts He brought into the world, and to experience the blessing and greatness of being His member.
In a word, Pentecost as the continuation of the Ascension gave us the possibility of becoming the extension of Christ in the world — Christ acting through us. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Thus the Lord departs from the world only to return in another manner: through His Spirit. The life of the Church in the Holy Spirit is the continual presence of the Lord in a different way from how He was present here on earth. The establishment of the Church in the Holy Spirit, and of course her invisible governance by Him, is the continuation of Christ’s Ascension. According to His own words: “It is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you. But if I depart, I will send Him to you” (John 16:7).
3. The Ascension and the Second Coming
The Ascension does not point only to Pentecost. It also points to the Second Coming of the Lord. The words of the angels to the astonished disciples at the moment of the Ascension are characteristic: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing into heaven? This same Jesus, Who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
The glorious return of the Lord a second time is the continuation both of His first coming — whose culmination was the Ascension — and of His mysterious presence in the Church through the Holy Spirit. The Second Coming is the expectation and hope of Christians. Christians are nourished also by the future. “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20) is the cry of the believer whose heart burns for the “Beloved” (cf. Eph. 1:6), Jesus Christ.
The Second Coming, however, will also bring the final judgment of mankind. In that judgment and in what follows it — the eternal Kingdom of God, in which the Lord will reign completely — we see the definitive and final expression of the royal office of Christ, of which His Ascension is also a part. Christ the King is Christ the Victor: victorious over sin, over the devil, over the passions of man.
“For He must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet... And when all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to Him Who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:25, 28).
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
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