Heaven Has Fallen

Doré brings us now to one of the most overlooked and misunderstood holy days upon the Church calendar: the Ascension! Here he illustrates Mark 16:19—

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.

Luke tells us that 40 days after the Resurrection—40 ever signifying a time of new life and new birth in the stories of the Bible—the Risen Christ returned to Heaven, to the right hand of the Father, by being obscured in a cloud.

For Romans this would surely have brought to mind King Romulus, supposedly taken to Olympus in a storm at the end of his mortal life. Jews would make the connection to the Shekinah, or cloud of divine presence, which descended upon both Tabernacle and Temple; as well as to the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, coming on a cloud.

In fact, this was not the simple return of God the Son to His previous abode, a heavenly hero welcomed home in triumph, but the culmination of His mission and last stage of His conquest. Earlier in this series we reflected upon Christ’s Harrowing of Hell: His descent to the dead and the damned, there to trample down death by death.

What gets less attention is His subsequent and accompanying Hallowing of Heaven. Having proclaimed the Good News on earth by His life, death, and resurrection; having ransomed “the spirits in prison” from the time of Noah, all the way back to Adam and Eve; now Christ ascends to reorder the heavens, to put right that which has gone wrong, and thus to heal the whole of the cosmos.

According to St Paul, the powers and principalities, the angels of the crystaline celestial spheres, have likewise gone off-kilter, marred by sin. These were not the rebels, not the fallen angels—whom Christ has already put in their place—but those tasked with guiding and ministering to a fallen, broken reality. Christ has come to save the angels too.

As the High Priest once a year would pass beyond the veil of the Jerusalem Temple into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God, so now Christ boldly enters the true and heavenly Temple, of which ours here below was but a shadow. Our true High Priest offers Himself, once for all, for the forgiveness of all sin. And thereby has Heaven been remade!

Once upon a time, the Bible pictured Heaven as a courtroom, for in the ancient world the king would decide on matters of the law. Why else would we call it a royal “court”? And Satan, mind you, stood as the prosecuting attorney. That’s literally what Satan means: Adversary, Prosecutor. The defense attorney was the paraclete; and the king, the judge.

But here Christ upends this picture of sacred law. He saw Lucifer fall like lightning from Heaven! He Himself now sits upon the throne. And He has sent the Holy Spirit—the Spirit who is His life, the Spirit who is our God—as Paraclete, as Helper and Defender. In court, then, God the Father is our judge, God the Spirit our attorney, God the Son our codefendant, and no-one is left to accuse!

At last the work of the Christ is complete. He has conquered our hearts with His love. He has conquered the dead by His death, filling up the Abyss with His endlessly offered life. And He has conquered Heaven by taking His rightful place of power, ruling now directly over angels and devils, men and beasts, galaxies and gluons.

Nowhere and no-one now lies outside of His reach. Should we fly up to Heaven, He’s there; should we fall down into the deepest pits of hell, He is there. Mirabile dictu, a human being sits upon God’s throne. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Behold, He makes all things new! As I once ended a sermon on the Ascension:

The Hallowing of Heaven is the apex of Christ’s triumph, the crown of His victory. It is the splitting open of every division between God and His children. It is the flooding of hell and earth and Heaven itself with the infinite, undying, irrevocable and all-conquering love of God.

It is grace inexpressible, grace inconceivable, grace inexorable in its totality. God come down to earth lifts humanity up into Heaven, that God at the last shall be All in All. Only Jesus Christ could make Heaven even holier. And that might be the greatest Easter wonder of them all.

In Jesus. Amen.