Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 06:1 (May 2007)
Article: The Ascension
Author: William Norman

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The Ascension

William Norman

Canon,
Preacher to Lincoln ‘s Inn, London

While he blessed them, he was parted from them and was carried up into heaven. Luke 24:51

This world is not all there is. This universe is not all there is. Scientists now speak - in language to me scarcely intelligible - about parallel universes. So how much more readily should those who believe in spiritual realities hold on to the notion of heaven, a place or state beyond our imagining, but none the less real. And the boundary between there and here is thin; for all we know the one may interpenetrate the other, the seen and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal.

Most of us do not pass through that thin veil until we come to die. The scriptures tell us that a few have done so. There is the old story of Enoch of whom it is said that he walked with God- and in these mysterious words - He was not, for God took him. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews uses him as one of the examples of saints of old who exercised faith. Then there was Elijah who was taken from this world in a whirlwind. Possibly there have been some such in modern times - some say that this is what happened to the Sikh saint, Sundar Singh.

There are others who have had extraordinary visions, and have lived to tell of them. Paul says that he knew a man - he must mean himself - who was taken up to the third heaven - and he does not know whether he was in the body or out of it, and there he heard things that no mortal may repeat.

And there are examples too of the dead making themselves visible or audible to the living, in order to encourage or to warn. It does not happen often, but there are well-attested instances of it.

We are not encouraged to try to penetrate the veil between this world and the next; indeed we are warned strongly not to do so, for it is only too likely that we shall be deceived, or even endangered. But that veil is thin.

So when Jesus rose from the dead, he was able to come and go between this world and the other, to appear and to disappear, and this he did, so Luke tells us, over a period of 40 days. But then it was time for him to depart finally. So he gave his friends their last instructions, he bade them farewell, and then he was lifted up - we are not told that he went right up into the sky as in some depictions of the scene - he may only have been lifted a few feet from the ground - and a cloud came down and hid him - and when the cloud vanished, he was not there.

Well, some may say, is not this rather crude - this notion of Jesus going up? Does this suggest a primitive and naive understanding of the universe as consisting of three stories or decks - earth being the middle one...

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