SECTION X

the ascension

(Mar 16:19-20. Luk 24:50-53. Act 1:1-12)

After the last appearance of Jesus in Galilee in the circle of His disciples, which may be considered as the most open of all His appearances, there followed a quite private one to James alone (1Co 15:7). This appearance is not mentioned in the Gospels. Tradition has erred, certainly in regard to the time it took place, and most probably in regard to the person to whom it was made. According to Jerome, this James was the second of that name in the list of the apostles, and the brother of our Lord. It is said that he took an oath to take no more food after partaking of the Lord’s cup, until he should see Him risen from the dead; and that the Lord freed him from his vow by appearing to him on the first day of His resurrection.¹ It might indeed be thought that this tradition refers to a different fact from that mentioned by Paul. But this is not probable, since Paul makes particular mention of James. Now we can hardly believe that Paul, in the passage referred to, mentioned the appearances of our Lord so much out of order, as to make the one on the first day of Easter the second last in his list; and still less can we allow that James the Less is meant when mention is made of a James in a narrative of Easter. James the Less was one of the last among the apostles, while the elder James was one of the first. He, with John his brother, and Peter, formed the inner circle among the disciples. And even after Pentecost he held a very prominent position in the Church until his martyrdom, which soon followed. For Herod seized him to put him to death even before he seized Peter; which indicates that James was regarded in Jerusalem as the first representative of the Christian Church. At any rate, a tradition of the time of Easter must mean him, when it says that a special revelation of Jesus was made to a James, without saying which James it was. But very probably the motive for this appearance was quite different from that which is given by the legend. We may perhaps discern the motive when we consider attentively this appearance of Jesus in its probable relation to the next following appearance of our Lord.

The last appearance of Jesus to the apostles mentioned by Paul (1Co 15:7) is undoubtedly the same as that which, according to Mark and Luke, found its conclusion in the ascension. The appearance to James might stand in close relation to this latter manifestation. We cannot fail to entertain a strong presumption that this is the case, when we see that the disciples this time went so unusually soon to Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost. They would scarcely have been in Jerusalem ten days before the beginning of the feast, unless by our Lord’s special command. Were it otherwise, they must have been anxious to avoid further manifestations of the Lord; for Galilee was the place specially appointed for these manifestations. This inference, that the disciples went so early to Jerusalem only by our Lord’s special command, is corroborated by what Luke says (Act 1:4), of Jesus being assembled together with His apostles in Jerusalem. This meeting took place in consequence of an intimation which the Lord must have given the last time that He appeared before this. Now this was the appearance to James; so that, in all probability, this commission of our Lord for the apostles to return to Jerusalem was the proximate design of this revelation.²

The actual ascension of Christ is related only by the Evangelists Mark and Luke. The former gives only a general account of it, presenting it in a few outlines; the latter relates it twice-first, with great brevity at the close of his Gospel, and secondly, more fully at the commencement of Acts, and each time in consonance with the aim of either treatise. From the circumstance that Matthew and John say nothing of the ascension, inferences have been drawn against its historical character.³ But, in the first place, this is setting out from a false view, as if the Evangelists designed to give a full description of every important event in the life of Jesus. We have already shown repeatedly how much the peculiarity of the Gospels is overlooked in these suppositions. The decisive fact has also been disregarded, that both Matthew and John, and the New Testament writers in general, proceed in all their views upon the supposition that Christ’s ascension followed His resurrection.

When Matthew at the close of his Gospel makes the Lord say, ‘All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth,’ he must have gone on the supposition that Jesus was just about to ascend the throne of heaven (comp. Mat 26:64). And when John tells us that Jesus announced to Mary Magdalene after the resurrection that He would ascend to His Father, the ascension must have been in his thoughts; as also in the passage (Joh 6:62) where Jesus told the disciples that the Son of man would ascend up where He was before. In the Apocalypse also, John proceeds on the idea that Christ sits on the throne of heaven (Rev 1:5-7).

Peter is not less full of the assurance that Jesus has gone to heaven (1Pe 3:22). Besides this direct testimony from Peter, we may refer also to the account which Luke gives of his first preaching in Jerusalem, as testifying to the same effect (Act 2:31-33; Act 5:31). The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives an equally distinct utterance (Heb 9:24, Heb 10:12). That the Apostle Paul considered the fact of the ascension as the proper culminating point in the glorification of Christ, might be inferred from the history of his conversion; for his conversion was founded on a manifestation of the glorified Lord from heaven. It is worthy of remark, that just that Evangelist who was his scholar and companion in travel—that Luke in the Acts of the Apostles—frequently gives prominence to facts which imply Christ’s exaltation in the heavens; such as Stephen’s vision (Act 7:55) and Paul’s second vision (Act 22:17). We have, besides this, repeated and unambiguous expressions of the apostle himself, which allude to Christ’s exaltation in the heavens as a known fact (Eph 2:6; Eph 4:8; Php 2:6-10). In one place (1Ti 3:16) it is even said that Jesus was received up into glory (ἐν δόξῃ). Those, therefore, who consider Paul as the best authorized witness of the New Testament history, should also be ready to acknowledge the ascension as one of its most strongly attested facts.⁴ Paul, in his conversion, is to be considered chiefly as a fruit of Christ’s ascension.

We could not, however, help thinking it strange that the two Evangelists, who were also apostles, give no historical account of the ascension, if at the same time we were bound to believe that the early Christians distinguished and separated the ascension from the resurrection, and regarded the former as an entirely new kind of miracle; as was doubtless done by the later Church. As Christians, in the course of time, decreased in inward spiritual power, the resurrection lost in their eyes in depth and significance, and in the same proportion the ascension came into view as a miracle detached from it. And when, finally, they fully came to regard Christ’s resurrection as a return into this life, or as a new yet real tarrying in this world, the foundation was laid for the supposition that the most wonderful of all Christian miracles began at the ascension.

But the early Church thought more highly of the Lord’s resurrection. She saw in it not a kind of isolated and passive resurrection, but the one active resurrection simply; not a mere entrance into the new life, but the decisive entrance into eternal life; not merely a preliminary freeing of Christ’s person from death, but His eternal victory over death gained at once for Himself and for the whole world. She thus knew the power of the resurrection, and knew that the ascension was virtually contained in it. If Christ, in His very death, really went with His spirit to the Father, He certainly went into heaven itself—to the Father. Now, after His resurrection, He was raised in soul, nay, even in body, above distress and death, and above the transitory state of things in this world; and consequently, even while tarrying on earth, He had already entered into the higher sphere of life which makes heaven in all worlds, which forms the new and hidden paradise even in the midst of earthly relations. All outward changes which were still to take place in the life of our Lord, were in substance already decided; even His outward ascension was prepared by His inward.

This view agrees also with the expressions with which Christ at His death took leave of the disciples and spoke of His return to the Father as close at hand, and, by announcing it, comprehended in one, His death, His resurrection, and ascension.⁵ Now it is evident that the early Christians with such views could not attach the same importance to the outward side of the ascension as is done by such ecclesiastical exhibitions as fail to present the force and fulness of the resurrection. We grant, on the other hand, that it is an untenable spiritualistic view to think that the early Church made the ascension coincident with the resurrection,⁶ or at least made it follow on the first day of the resurrection;⁷ for it is evident that the Evangelists make a clear distinction between Christ’s resurrection and His ascension. It is true that Christ, as soon as He rose again, was exalted in His mode of being above the earth, and always retired again into the sphere of the invisible, from which He had come forth to show Himself to His disciples. Manifestations in this form, however, cease only with the ascension.⁸ Christ, in His individual form, leaves the earth and ascends a throne in a region which corresponds with His glorified being, and which mirrors forth the heaven of His inner life as the pure sphere of that life. But we must always maintain firmly, that this second change is a necessary consequence of the first. Christ as the Risen One cannot by any possibility tarry on the earth with His disciples as He formerly did; and still less can He again leave earth by death. When He leaves it, it must be in accordance with His new mode of being, in a way conformable to the glorified life.⁹ Hence follows, that the whole history of the resurrection of Jesus bears the character of an ascension. The whole of the resurrection may be compared to a tree, representing His ascension in the wider sense, and its top the ascension proper. The opponents of the historical ascension would have gained nothing even had they succeeded in setting aside the distinctive account given of it. They would only have crushed the top of the tree, or rather broken off one of its branches.¹⁰ Had the history of the last manifestation of the risen Lord not been the ascension, the one before the last would have been so; had this also been doubtful, it would have been the one that preceded it; and so on. And if Jesus had not been seen after He showed Himself to the disciples who went to Emmaus, His vanishing out of their sight in the chamber where He broke bread with them would have been the history of His ascension. Thus this fact is as well established as His resurrection itself, and in this sense the early Church lived in the certainty of the ascension.

But nothing can be inferred from this more general, more ideal ascension, against the more definite historical ascension.¹¹ On the contrary, it gives us the very reason why the apostles did not all relate the ascension proper. For them, the ascension was a matter of course flowing from the resurrection. Matthew, for example, might consider our Lord’s last departure from the Galilean brethren as a preliminary Galilean ascension. So they who have argued against the ascension on the supposition that it could still have been doubtful after the resurrection, have quite lost their labour, so far as its immediate tendency is concerned;¹² their toil and trouble have been useful in stirring others who advance a sounder view. But the fact of the ascension is said to have internal difficulties. According to Strauss (ii. 651), the one main difficulty consists in this, that it must be questionable how a palpable body, having still flesh and bones and partaking of material nourishment, can be adapted to a superterrestial residence; and how it could be so exempted from the law of gravity as to be capable of ascending through the air; and how could God by miracle give the body of Christ a capability so contrary to nature? Ebrard rightly replies (p. 469): The critic here confounds earthly and bodily in too gross a manner. He surely thinks that all corporeity ceases beyond our atmosphere, that the stars exist only in imagination! Besides, the critic might know very well that there are even earthly bodies which are capable of ascending through the air, bodies which have not only bones, but also beaks and talons—eagles, for example. He might know that the law of gravity is essentially conditioned and partially nullified by organization, and that the new corporeity of Christ must be conceived of as an infinitely potentialized organization, as a form of life in which the body has become altogether the organ of the spirit. He might have thought of how the ice which lies heavy on the ground may, by the mere influence of heat, undergo a series of metamorphoses until it quickly disappears as a white vapour up in the blue sky; and from this fact he might have been able to see, how much the earthly material body is conditioned by the inner disposition and tone of life which animates it. And if he would but duly entertain the idea of a second life, and of a transformed body, he could not be far from the thought, that the inward energy which impels man in the other world must be capable of passing over altogether into spirit, since even in this world it can be acted on by the spirit and drawn into its circle and relationship. In all these ways he might have been able to approximate to the idea of a body which, not through an imparted, counternatural (momentary) capability, but by its inward quality as being fully leavened with the life of the spirit and born for the universe from the death of this earthly life, can mysteriously reach the place of its heavenly destination, upborne by the gentlest inward impulse—not by means of an ordinary ascent through the air, but in the way the ascension took place, concealed by a cloud. The critic seems inclined for a moment to dismiss us with the deliverance, that the grosser parts which the body of Jesus still had after the resurrection were laid aside before the ascension, and only the finest extract of His body ascended with Him to heaven as a covering for the soul. He finds, however, that this view puts too great difficulties in the way. And indeed we would have grave doubts at the very outset about accepting this explanation, when we consider that the representation given of the ‘grosser parts’ in reference to the body is quite immature and inadequate. At bottom, all matter is infinitely fine—that is, so far as its laws are determined by the spirit. The contrast of grosser and finer in bodies is first formed from the different relations of the material to the determining spirit. Hence, according to the relation in which they are spoken of, a metal may be called fine, and a hand gross. Now in respect to the body, it would be something odd to describe the sound bones as the grosser parts. We should rather say that the material in the body may be called the grosser, only when it begins to have an inorganic relation to the body. And in this respect the soft white phlegm which the mouth must eject belongs to the grosser parts, while the hard white tooth, of which it has need, does decidedly not belong to them. Now if we think of the body in its glorified state with the full energy of its living power, in which, like a living wheel tranquilly performing its ceaseless rounds, it retains fully everything which properly belongs to its life, while it immediately casts off everything which no more belongs to it, as a person breathing casts off the refuse of the air which he has used to sustain his life; it becomes evident that we cannot talk about grosser parts in such a body. Thus the system of our critic shows that it bears here, as elsewhere, the mark of Manichæan darkness and prejudice against the body. He goes on to say: ‘The other difficulty lies in this, that according to correct views, the seat of God and of the blessed, to which Jesus is said to have risen, is not to be sought for in the regions of the upper air, or indeed in any particular place; locality in this matter belongs to the childish and circumscribed representations of the old world. We know that he who will come to God and the realm of the blessed makes a superfluous circuit, if he thinks that for that end he must soar into the upper strata of the air; and assuredly Jesus, familiar as He was with God and divine things, would not have done this, nor would God have permitted Him to do it.’ Ebrard observes, ‘That the writers of the Old and New Testaments knew as well as Strauss’ (and much better), ‘that God is a Spirit, incorporeal, invisible, and not limited by time and space.’ They doubtless knew much better; for, according to the view of this philosopher, the Divine Spirit is everywhere deeply involved in the process of life, in which He cannot appear otherwise than conditioned by space. It is quite true that God has no seat in a literal sense. But it is an example of the unconscious rapidity of dialectic magic, to set out with identifying the ‘seat of God and that of the blessed,’ and then to maintain by help of this confusion that the latter, the seat of the blessed, must not be sought for in any definite locality. If there be a church of the blessed (and our critic has not done away with that truth), it must have its definite locality, although certainly not, we grant, in the ‘upper air,’ or ‘the higher strata of the air.’ The air is described (Eph 6:12) as the home of the aerial spirits among the evil spirits. It forms no proper locality in the narrower sense. When Scripture points to a higher world in this sense, the higher is not to be understood as referring to space. The contrast between above and below in regard to space disappears even in astronomy, not to speak of religion. But the true above of Scripture is the world in which the life of the spirit rejoices in its transformation, and the true below is a region in which the spirit of the power of the earthly or hellish is still fettered by sin and its curse. Now in order to attain to the conviction that there is a place of the blessed, we need only to know that Christ withdraws in His transformed body from the former proximity to the earth to a distance from it and into a definite locality.¹³ For He is the Prince of the blessed, and the living centre which draws them all around itself. But if there is such a seat of the blessed above, it must be regarded also as the seat of God, not indeed in the literal sense, but in the language of the spirit of religion. We have already seen how the heart and being of Christ have become distinctively the throne of God’s repose. ‘He, as the first-fruits of His brethren, exhibits the filling of the creature with the eternal essence’ (Ebrard). Thus in His new life He is the throne proper of God, as He exhibits in His being the transformation of the world, and perfectly unites or forms into one the creaturely and spiritual life, and mediates by His work and spirit through all the world. But in so far as His blessedness unfolds itself in the blessed who surround Him, this throne of God comes to manifestation, forming a contrast to the lower world, in which God still continues to exercise His rule in a concealed form ‘in the midst of His enemies.’

We have then no difficulty in this, that Christ ascends into a heavenly region, that this region is made through Him the seat of the blessed, and in a spiritual sense the seat of God. But the following is a difficult question: If it is Christ who first forms the centre of heaven, in which the seat of the blessed is, so to speak, first constituted above, how can His departure from the earth be called an ascending to heaven to the Father? And how can even His rest in heaven be represented as a sitting at the right hand of the Father? At any rate, it declares that the sphere of the manifestation of Christ’s glory was formed before His ascension. The habitation was already formed when He went to heaven, although He first made it a place of reunion for His people (comp. Joh 14:2). That is, there was already a heavenly sphere, in the outward proportions of which the inward heaven of His eternal essence had given a pure impression of itself, and in which the Father had given the highest expression of His power and honour. This world is a mystery to us. The fundamental thought, however, of this mystery is, that there is, corresponding to the eternal essence of Jesus Christ, a pure world which is to be considered as the ethereal realization of the ideas of His life, and as the ideal antitype of the transformed world which He will bring into existence on earth. The reality of this thought may be illustrated by the ethereal nature of the higher starry world. That heavenly world into which Christ enters is quite capable, from its purity, of being transformed into the heaven of Christ and His saints in bliss. In its freedom from all that is gross, it is a symbol of the dynamic spirituality and omnipresence wherewith Christ in His state of glory rules over the world. But as it is a body, it is the place of the risen Saviour where He sits enthroned, sharing in the Father’s government.

In contesting the fact of the ascension, the critics again part company,-some, as usual, taking the naturalizing direction, and others the spiritualizing. According to the fancies of those who attempt a natural explanation, Christ withdrew from the disciples, and hid Himself among woods and mists. He was snatched away from them by secret confederates, and then either soon died of debility, or retired into a lodge of Essenes, or finally still lived for a long time, quietly labouring for the good of mankind. But the sense of truth has long ago pronounced that in any of these cases He would have closed His life with a gross deception. Comp. Strauss, 653.

Yet just as little do we arrive at the top of Olivet by the Gnostic-spiritualistic path. According to one, the story of the ascension was formed principally from Old Testament reminiscences (Strauss, ii. 661); according to another, from New Testament misunderstandings and polemical interests (Weisse). In either case it arose from a gradually-formed misapprehension of the ‘spiritual’ nature of the resurrection history and abstract fancies regarding it. Underlying these views is a misapprehension of what is meant by the bodily, the historical, and the actual, similar to that which forms the essential characteristic of a Gnostic or spiritualistic darkened and contracted view of the world.

The Evangelist Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles, first cast a retrospective glance to the time of the infallible proofs by which our Lord showed Himself alive to His disciples after His passion. Luke says that He was seen of them forty days. The more indefinite representation given in his Gospel does not clash with this fixing of the time.¹⁴ We must, however, probably consider the forty here as a round number for forty-two, denoting a space of seven weeks. We are led to this surmise by the above-mentioned passage in the Epistle of Barnabas, according to which Jesus ascended to heaven on a Sunday. (Comp. Ebrard, 466.) This information becomes the more important when we reflect that the former great manifestations of Jesus always took place on Sundays, so that the Church might be brought with certainty, through these great and repeated revelations of her Lord on this day, to celebrate it for all time to come as her festival and Easter day.¹⁵

Luke says that during these manifestations He spoke to them of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. All His appearances show this, and especially that one when He walked with the two disciples to Emmaus, and explained to them the great contrast in the history of the kingdom of God, the basis of which contrast was exhibited in His suffering and in His glorification. It is also shown by the first appearance in Galilee, when He portrayed the future of His Church in the future of her two chief apostles; and by the second, during which he instituted the apostolic office of teaching and baptism in its New Testament form (as a visible institution founded by the Lord ruling in the transformed world).

Even at His last appearance our Lord returned to the things pertaining to His kingdom. The disciples had by His appointment assembled at Jerusalem, and here He again appeared in their midst. (Comp. Luk 24:50, and Act 1:12) He led them once more, as in former days, to the Mount of Olives, and it looks as if Bethany were their destination, as it had so often been before. During this manifestation, in which He disclosed His mind to them more familiarly than He had done since the resurrection, He announced to them that the great and longed-for promise of the Father (which He had communicated to them in His parting address) would be fulfilled not many days hence. The moment of His leaving them was accompanied by a very great risk for them, namely, the danger of separating before the time and commencing His work, partly with immature enthusiasm, and partly with only the courage of a half faith; in either case, without the full unction of the Spirit. He therefore comforted them with the assurance, that not many days should elapse until the Spirit of power from on high would come upon them. With equal distinctness He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to keep together there, and wait for the fulfilment of His promise. To give them a clear idea of the promise, He reminded them of the saying of the Baptist, which distinguished between his own mode of working and that of Christ. ‘John,’ said He, ‘baptized with water, but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost.’ It must have had great influence upon them to be thus reminded of the state of mind in which they had first entered the school of John, and attained to the presentiment of a new life. He promised them a new experience of life, which should surpass that beautiful enthusiasm of their first spiritual awakening as the heaven is high above the earth. They were now to be baptized in the streaming floods of the Spirit of God in His most glorious form and efficacy—as He manifests Himself as the Holy Ghost, and with world-overcoming power leads the heart out of the old world into a new world, which is rendered glorious by the name of the three-one God, and is consecrated to Him.

When the Lord had said to the disciples that not many days would elapse until they should receive the promise of the Father, the hope awakened once more in their hearts, that the time for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel was near. For it seemed to them, that in the great outpouring of the Holy Ghost the fundamental condition was given under which the kingdom of Israel could appear in its ideal form. That they wished for no outward or unspiritual kingdom of Israel, is evident by their inferring the promise of the kingdom from the promise of the Spirit when they asked: ‘Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?’ They were perfectly right in inferring that the kingdom of glory must proceed from the Spirit of glory. The primal elements of the world must have been evil, if the outpouring of the Spirit on mankind should not really produce at last a transformation of the world, a kingdom of heaven in humanity, in which not only the Israelite but also the Christian mind cannot fail to salute in love the real antitype of David’s kingdom in its symbolical signification, and its restoration according to its inmost being. This was not their error; but they were wrong in thinking that the appearing of the holy kingdom must necessarily coincide with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that if the latter soon follows, the former is to be soon expected. But their practical error would have been still more dangerous than this theoretical error, had they really proceeded to apply themselves to the things pertaining to the kingdom of God with impatient longing for its outward appearance. One remarkable circumstance, however, might have greatly contributed to make the disciples venture to ask Jesus: ‘Lord, wilt Thou at this time erect again the kingdom of Israel?’ He Himself seemed to them to have given just then the greatest reasons for expecting it. For He had never walked with them so openly and familiarly since the resurrection. He seemed willing again to devote Himself entirely to their circle in this world. Their feeling therefore must have risen to the highest hope that He would now abide with them. But when He likewise gave hints from which a speedy departure might be inferred, and consequently anxious forebodings mingled with their joy, they were still more brought to the resolution of gently insinuating to Him their wish that He would abide with them.

The Lord took occasion of this utterance of theirs, to bring them back to a due consciousness of that to which they were appointed, according to which they should live devoted to the establishing of the kingdom, without expecting its appearance with calculating impatience. ‘It is not,’ said He, ‘for you to know the periods or the epochs¹⁶ (we might say, the times of concealment or fulfilment), which the Father hath put in His own power.’ They ought neither to know nor wish to know in regard to this point. One thing they should know, that the times of the development of the kingdom of God, what retards and what furthers its future appearance, are special secrets of the Father’s power, because He, in His power as Creator and Father, settles, sees through, and guides the grand developments of the creation, of the earth, of mankind, and of the family of the elect as it conditions the process of the development of the kingdom of heaven. The opinion is well founded, that the Son in His state of glory has perfect insight into this secret of the Father, and even, from time to time, makes partial and special disclosures of it to His people;¹⁷ only we must hold firmly, that the peculiar and essential office of the Spirit of the Son is to guard against the premature and alien appearance of the kingdom, in order to further the laying of its eternal foundations in and through His followers. And with this intent the risen Lord continues His discourse: ‘But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you; and ye shall be My witnesses!’ This saying seems to lower their expectations, but in reality it leads them far beyond these expectations. They are not to know of the kingdom as of an object standing before them, but they themselves are to have in the Holy Ghost the fundamental power of the kingdom, so that they are in the kingdom and the kingdom in them. They are not to look out, gazing for the kingdom with unfree and calculating longing, as if they were still essentially without it; much rather are they themselves to help to found it by becoming witnesses of the life, death, and victory of their Lord. They are to become His witnesses, His martyrs: this word signifies the strongest contrast to the appearing of the kingdom. The Lord also enounces the law in accordance with which the appearance of the kingdom must everywhere be founded upon a testimony to Him which braves the threat of death. The appointment is in these terms: ‘Ye shall be witnesses into Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.’

This expresses, in the first place, the certainty that His cause would advance until its completion, and then the order in which it must proceed, that is, in a theocratically organic way faithfully following the historical preparatory workings of the Spirit of God through the Old Covenant and all other divinely appointed means, through which, in the most various forms, He has prepared and still prepares the way. It also implies the necessity for His Church always continuing a Church of patiently enduring witnesses, and that His cause must advance through martyr-fidelity until the end of the world, and consequently until the end of time. Lastly, these words express the assurance, that through these means His kingdom would, according to theocratic promises, spread from Jerusalem through all the world, and would therefore finally appear, even in its revelation, as the actual kingdom which proceeded from Zion.

Thus the Lord gave His disciples a promise of the kingdom which far surpassed their expectation, and led it back into the right path—the path of humility, faith, patience, loyal service, and calm, strong, and invincible hope. He had to see them in this position before He could take leave of them; for the very fact of His departure should signify that much must intervene between the outpouring of His Spirit and the visible manifestation of His kingdom. So the time had now come when He could leave them as to His bodily appearance, that He might soon fill them with all the spiritual power of His being. He prepared the disciples for His departure, not only by the tenor of His last instructions, but also by the solemn manner in which they were expressed. He spoke to them with uplifted hand, as one bestowing a blessing. And now they observed that He always retired farther and farther from them with His face still towards them, and blessing them. He no longer walked with them, but soared away from them. They had by this time certainly gone beyond the top of the Mount of Olives; Bethany lay before them.¹⁸ But Christ, when withdrawing from them, seemed to take the direction towards the summit of Olivet. Here the great contrast in the appearances by which the risen Lord had shown Himself to them, rose to its utmost height. His hands still beckoned to them, bestowing blessings and inwardly enlivening them; His words of consecration still sounded into the depths of their hearts; but the fashion of His appearance was changed into a soaring celestial form. A cloud mysteriously gathered around Him which gradually quite veiled Him, and vanished with Him out of their sight over the top of Olivet.

The disciples seem to have been drawn towards the Lord from the further descent of the mount to its summit. Here they still saw Him soaring on high. They sank down in adoration, and looked stedfastly up to heaven. Their outward beholding became more and more an inward one. It was with them as if they had been taken up with Him into the triumphant kingdom of their Lord. We infer from this, that they were first brought to themselves from their enraptured gazing by the appearance of two angels. But this was now to them a secondary sight, an occurrence belonging to the lower reality, in comparison with the last view of their glorified Lord. The two angels in white apparel necessarily bore to them mainly the appearance of two men. They became aware of the presence of the angels only when these stood close by them. It was as if this vision of angels were the first thing to recall them into the circle of ordinary consciousness, so high had their souls flown, gazing in rapture after their Lord. The words of the angels were, ‘Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who is taken from you up into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.’ The disciples understood this heavenly message. They now knew that their Lord had risen from this world of earth by the impulse of His own being as well as by the attraction of heaven, and was seated at the Father’s right hand in the kingdom of glory. They were reminded of their calling, and of the words by which Christ had consecrated them to it. The ascension was set for them as a sign and a seal of a certainty of their Lord’s return in glory, and at the same time it gave them the promise that they should then rejoice triumphantly in the fulfilment of their longing and of their work through the appearing of His kingdom.

The pain of separation was swallowed up in the sublime and spirit-like frame of mind in which they now saw the course of their Lord closed by His glorification. They returned from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem, having their hearts filled with imperishable joy. Their path led by Gethsemane; and perhaps in passing they thought of the great contrast which has since moved and comforted so many a Christian heart. A little while before this, Christ had, from love to His people, descended to the pains of hell at the foot of this mount, and now from its summit He has ascended to heaven.¹⁹

This frame of mind was the living testimony to the truth of the ascension. In consequence of it they walked through the world as men who had breathed the air of heaven, and been penetrated by the spirit of eternal triumph. They went through the tribulations of this world with the lofty bearing of citizens of heaven.²⁰ Thus their life gave evidence, in the first place, that Christ’s ascension is not only attested by the effects which still flow from it, but also that in these effects it still abides on earth, that His ascension decides also the ascension of all believers.²¹

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Notes

(Act 1:12) The Evangelist Luke describes Olivet as a mount which is from Jerusalem a Sabbath-day’s journey²² (two thousand average paces). Its top may be reached in a quarter of an hour. It got its name from the olive-trees covering it, especially on its western declivity; only a few of these trees now remain. It stretches from south to north, and consists of three detached eminences. The southmost, at the foot of which lies the village of Siloah, is called the Mount of Transgression (of Offence, Mons offensionis), because it is thought to be the hill on which Solomon offered to Chemosh and Molech (1Ki 11:7). On the northern peak there was once a tower called ‘Viri Galilæi,’ because the two men in white apparel (Act 1:10-11) stood there during the ascension. The middle eminence, about 300 paces from that tower, is, according to the legend, the place of the ascension, on which are the remains of the Church of the Ascension, built by the Empress Helena, and a Turkish mosque, an octagonal building with a cupola. There is shown here a footprint in the rock, said to have been impressed by our Lord; the Turks are said to have taken the second into their great mosque. V. Raumer, Palästina, 304. Regarding the Mount of Olives, comp. Schubert’s Journey, ii. 520.

1) See Sepp, iii. 705.

2) Comp. Ebrard, p. 468.

3) [Meyer, inconsistently enough, only goes the length of inferring, that it was not visibly witnessed.—ED.]

4) Even those of them who, with Baur's arguments, hold the most of Paul's Epistles to be spurious, are not at liberty to disregard the close connection of the apostle's conversion with the supposition of the historical glorification of Christ.

5) See Kinkel.

6) Weisse (ii. 377) quotes in support of this view the passage in the Epistle of Barnabas, chap. xv.: Διὸ καὶ ἄγομεν τὴν ἡμέραν τὴν ὀγδόην εἰς εὐφροσύνην, ἐν ῃ καὶ ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀνέστηέκ νεκρῶν καὶ φανερωθεῖς ἀνέβη, εἰς τούς οὐρανούς. Weisse, however, in his argument overlooks the fact, that the author of that epistle was, as is evident from the context, nowise concerned about showing that Christ rose and ascended to heaven on one and the same Sunday (even if this were the case) ; but that he only wished to show that the day of the ascension, like that of the resurrection, was a Sunday. The ὀγδόη which he refers to is not that particular Sunday of the resurrection, but simply the Sunday as Christians still celebrate it. Besides, the two propositions, καί ἀνέστη, &c. καὶ ἀνέβη, &c., clearly form a contrast. The φανερωθείς, moreover, points to what took place between the resurrection and the ascension. See Ebrard, p. 466.

7) See Kinkel, 620. Kinkel grounds his view, 'that the ascension took place between the morning and the afternoon of the day of the resurrection,' on a false interpretation of John xx. 17. He afterwards modifies his view to this: 'That Christ ascended to heaven many times; that He ascended after each appearance to His disciples, often so that He only disappeared from them, and often visibly ascending before their eyes; so that the ascension on the fortieth day conies into special prominence only because the regular appearances and communications to the disciples ceased with it.' The true in this hypothesis is its antithesis to the gross representations which make the Lord dwell again in the proper sense on this earth after the resurrection; the false consists in overlooking the distinction between the mere retirement of Christ into the heavenly condition (which took place after every appearance), and His entrance into the heavenly region, which was appointed for the first revelation of His sovereign glory.

8) Paul, it is true, places the revelation of the risen Lord to himself on the same level as all the earlier revelations of Him after His resurrection, as a real and objective appearance of Christ; yet it does not follow from this, that he would have denied the distinction, as to the nearness and externality of the appearances, between the earlier revelations of the Lord and the later revelation which he received himself.

9) See Neander, 485 [Bohu].

10) See Olshausen, iv. 317.

11) As Strauss supposes, ii. 660.

12) Oleum et operam perdiderunt.

13) ['When we say, Christ ascended, we understand a literal and local ascent, not of His divinity (which possesseth all places, and therefore, being everywhere, is not subject to the imperfection of removing any whither), but of His humanity, which was so in one place that it was not in another.' Pearson on the Creed (art. He ascended into Heaven).—ED.]

14) As Strauss thinks, 591. For the opposite view, comp. Ebrard, 465.

15) [Witsius (Exercit, in Symbolum) remarks, that as forty days after His birth our Lord was presented in the temple, so forty days after His resurrection, in which He was acknowledged the Son of God, He was presented in the temple not made with hands. The whole treatment of the article on the Ascension is masterly and comprehensive. ED.]

16) Χρόνους ἢ καιρούς.

17) See Olshausen, iv. 343.

18) Lachmann reads Luke xxiv. 50, ἕως πρὸς Βηθανίαν, not ἕως εἰς; and so the pas sage may be well rendered: to a point opposite Bethany.

19) [The nearness of Christ's deepest humiliation to His highest exaltation is thus exhibited by Archer Butler (Sermons, ii. 190): As His last step on earth was upon that mount which had witnessed His agonies in the garden, so even beyond the clouds did He bear us, and our sorrows, and their remedy. The very imprint of suffering upon hand and side is still visible to all heaven, and bids many an astonished angel cry aloud (as the Jews of old), Behold, how He loved them!'—ED.]

20) See Fredrika Bremer, Morgenwachen, 48; Ullman, Historisch oder Mythisch, 3

21) ['The great value of this transcendent fact is, not merely that it is an example of our future ascension, but that it is our ascension begun,—we in Him having risen to heaven, we in Him being at this time present before God, we in Him being united with the eternal plans and procedures of heaven, so that we are for ever blended with Christ, His property, His purchased possession, the very members of His body. Archer Butler s eloquent and profound Sermon on the Ascension, ii. 189.—ED.]

22) Bethany, though two or three Sabbath-days' journey from Jerusalem, was on the Mount of Olives, whose roots sprang about a Sabbath-day's journey from Jerusalem. There is therefore no discrepancy between the statement in the Gospel and that in the Acts.—ED.]