But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?…worse than the world’s ignorance of Jesus’s absence…is the Church’s failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension itself but the ascension and parousia together, constitute the Ecce Homo! which in the eucharist is heard and repeated. Martyrdom, as the Apocalypse teaches, is the truest manifestation of Jesus’s heavenly session. A doctrine of his departure that is not a doctrine of his impending return is a doctrine capable of converting absence into presence without martyrdom.
Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia.
Farrow’s book is in my top ten. I haven’t yet found anything like it, and it informed a great deal of The Eschatological Economy. Andrew Burgess The Ascension in Karl Barth or Gerrit Scott Dawson Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation are more introductory, and Burgess has a chapter on Farrow.
