(44) he ascended . . .

Christ began his ascending in this physical world of ours after three days’ work among the dead. He was not satisfied to remain a disembodied spirit. He didn’t leave his fleshly corpse behind him in the tomb. He didn’t discard his broken body as vile, useless, irrelevant, or unimportant. Everything in this whole world was destined to ascend along with him. So he took up even the bodily side of his human nature into the new kind of being. His body was transposed, as it were, into a higher key. The risen Christ was neither a mere ghost nor a revived corpse, one who would sometime die again. In his resurrection and for days afterward Christ was being glorified, becoming a spiritual body. He was still entirely the same person whom his disciples had formerly known. His voice carried the same wonderful overtones of love for them. After a miserable night’s unsuccessful fishing, he had a nice hot breakfast ready on the shore for his wet, tired disciples. Jesus’ hands still bore the scars of the nails, which he would wear forever, the sign of his willingness to suffer for those he loves. But his bodily presence had already changed so remarkably that they would hardly have known him. Doors could no longer shut out his body, although that body still had substance. He could appear anywhere anytime, then disappear at will. Jesus knew that Thomas had blurted out his doubts, even though Thomas had no idea that he was present at the time. He was ascending to another order of being—as when the dead, poisonous stuff in garden soil is taken up into the tissues of a living plant with its higher functions of growth and beauty and fruitfulness. Dead plants, which are not me but only my food, become part of the living me after I eat them. The plants then share in what I think is a more interesting and higher kind of existence. What is dead can thus obviously come to life. It is commonplace now to use dead serum from a blood bank for transfusions. Some of the blind may see again by engrafted parts of dead men’s eyes. No one can know for sure that either resurrection or ascension is utterly impossible. In any case, the last phases of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus were utterly unique. Scientific laws cannot be made about the unique, not have we ideas capable of dealing with what is an entirely different kind of being. When I say that Jesus ascended into the highest, I mean that he changed into a far less limited order of being. Once he was visible; now he is invisible. Formerly Jesus was confined to a single place at a certain time in this world. Now he can operate anytime, anywhere, at any level of being right up to the highest heaven. Hitherto his disciples had been following Jesus, learning from their teacher. From now on they would be calling everybody together to worship him and to share in his eternal and victorious life.