We can only wonder at, and try to recapture for ourselves, the insight shown by the early Christians and by Christians down to the beginning of the second millennium, who placed the Christ of the ascension in the dome of their churches. When the faithful gathered to manifest and become the body of Christ, they saw their Lord both as present and as coming. He is the head and draws his body toward the Father while giving it life through his Spirit. The iconography of the churches of both East and West during that period was as it were an extension of the mystery, of the ascension throughout the entire visible church. Christ, the Lord of all” (Pantocrator), is “the cornerstone which the builders had rejected”; (5) when he is raised up on the cross, he is in fact being raised to the Father’s side and, in his life-giving humanity, becomes with the Father the wellspring of the river of life. (6)
The ascension of the Lord was thus really the new space for the liturgy of the last times, and the iconography of the church built of stone was its transparent symbol. (8) In his ascension, then, Christ did not at all disappear; on the contrary, he began to appear and to come. For this reason, the hymns we use in our churches sing of him as “the Sun of justice” that rises in the East. He who is the splendor of the Father and who once descended into the depths of our darkness is now exalted and fills all things with his light.
Our last times are located between that first ascension and the ascension that will carry him to the zenith of his glorious parousia. The Lord has not gone away to rest from his redemptive toil; his “work” (Jn 5:17) continues, but now at the Father’s side, and because he is there he is now much closer to us, “very near to us,” (9) in the work that is the liturgy of the last times. “He leads captives,” namely, us, to the new world of his resurrection, and bestows his “gifts,” his Spirit, on human beings (see Eph 4:7-10). His ascension is a progressive movement, “from beginning to beginning.” (10)
Jesus is, of course, at his Father’s side. If, however, we reduce this “ascent” to a particular moment in our mortal history, we simply forget that beginning with the hour of his cross and resurrection Jesus and the human race are henceforth one. He became a son of man in order that we might become children of God. The ascension is progressive “until we all … form the perfect Man fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself” (Eph 4:13). The movement of the ascension will be complete only when all the members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to life by his Spirit. Is that not the meaning of the answer the angels gave to the disciples: “Why are you Galileans standing here looking into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way as you have seen him go to heaven” (Acts 1:11). The ascension does not show us in advance the setting of the final parousia; it is rather the activation of the paschal energy of Christ who “fills all things” (Eph 4: 1 0). It is the ever-new “moment” of his coming.
