After asserting our belief in the resurrection of our Lord, we continue in the Creed to profess our belief in His ascension. This doctrine of the Church is clear alike from Scripture and tradition. After the forty days during which He still lingered on the earth, He gathered the apostles around Him, upbraided them all with their slowness to accept the fulness of His teaching, commissioned them to go forth to preach and to baptize, and then was withdrawn from their midst. His sacred Body by virtue of His own divine power was itself transported to Heaven, where it takes precedence of all other created nature, and exercises for ever the atoning purpose for which He came. In His own human species, that is, in the outward semblance of humanity which had been visible to the apostles and the people of Palestine, He has dwelt at the right hand of the Father, in the possession of His unlimited power over all creation. To Him is also committed the judgement of the world. He is present, indeed, on the altars of the Church, body and soul alike not, as is evident, in the visible form of His manhood, but under the appearance of bread and wine: as man He is in the highest place in Heaven. This bodily presence must be insisted on as part of the Christian faith. There, alone, is the material body still, no mere phantom, but the true and proper figure of life indeed. He is perfectly human, and humanity requires the double existence of soul and body. The Church has always frankly professed this and never allowed the idea that things of corporeal matter are unfitted for the majesty of God. With all her intense asceticism, she has unswervingly taught the doctrine of the "human form divine."
His continual work, therefore, of interceding for the children of men goes on unabated, since the marks of the wounds appeal unceasingly to the Father. His power is a power, not of destruction, but of salvation. The older painters with their high contemplative talent expressed this in their own picturesque way. Florentine or Fleming or Venetian, they made no effort to suppose that the Crucifixion and all that it entailed was some past event. For them it was an eternal act which was as true and as present to their own day as it ever had been; hence you find that the soldiers of the Passion are dressed in the garments of the artist's own fashion. The towns and architecture that are at the back of the picture are nearly always the familiar scenes of their life. Nor is it to be thought that the appearance of contemporary modes was due to an ignorance of Palestinian custom: they had, indeed, the unchanging East ready at hand, and with the extensive commercial connection that Venice and the other cities of Italy kept up with the Byzantine Empire, there was plenty of opportunity for them to find out how things were done. As well as we, and better, they could and did know the dress and architecture of the Holy Land. But it was a deliberate attempt to make the Life and Death of Christ an ever-living event of eternity rather than of time. Hence, too, in the frescoes of Fra Angelico one sees in the corner a saint contemplating some scene of the Gospels, present in spirit at that far-off tragedy. Nor are these things mere whimsical fancies; they are the sober truths of the faith. Christ is always being born, always dying, always at the right hand of the Father.
Let me realize what this means. It forces me to view the life of Christ as unending and unended. It means that Christ our Lord is now in Heaven at His Father's side "ever living to make intercession for us," as Saint Paul expressly notes it. The promise of divine assistance till the end of time, the never-failing springs of grace which the sacraments continually conduct to the soul, and the abiding presence of Christ in the hearts of them that love Him, show, indeed, that these events are not far off, but continuous. Just as Mass can never be a repetition, but only a continuation of Calvary, so Calvary itself can never cease, since the risen Saviour, wounded and glorified, is for ever before the majesty of the Father. The redemption becomes a fact that is linked, not to a date, but to a person who is our soul mediator, since no other can be needed. This mediation was not the work of a time, but of eternity. Christ is risen indeed and is at the right hand of the Father. Now it cannot be too often repeated that the main safeguard to the spiritual life is the constant realization of the living facts of the spiritual world. Never to be blind to the vision is the best possible way of assuring ourselves that we shall not neglect the vision; hence we have to be reminding ourselves unceasingly of the daily meaning of the Mysteries of the Faith. It is just this that the presence of our Lord at the right hand of the Father memory tends to produce. It makes me see that the work of redemption is still carried on, in that the appeal of the Wounds and outpoured Blood cries without ceasing to the Father. Let me make myself for ever conscious of the eternal value of the facts of the Incarnation.
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.