He Ascended into Heaven, and Sits at the Right Hand of the Father
Second Glorious Mystery
↑️ The Ascension
He Ascended into Heaven, and Sits at the Right Hand of the Father
He died, He rose again, and forty days later He ascended into Heaven (Acts 1:3). As a continuation of His risen teaching, He showed again and again that He was truly risen in body and not merely in soul. He ate and drank with His disciples while teaching them of His heavenly Kingdom.
His bodily resurrection is a figure of the resurrection we will one day experience, in which our souls and bodies will be fully united and the soul will hold certain powers over the physical. Christ possessed these powers without needing death and resurrection, since He is God (CCC 232, and see the Athanasian Creed), yet in His risen state He showed us what we shall be like. St. Thomas treats these gifts of the glorified body in the Supplement to the Summa, q. 82.
Tertullian, a Church Father of the late second and early third century, wrote on this very matter of Christ's fleshly state, and on how He truly rose in the flesh, in answer to the heresies of his day. Each of these teachers denied the reality of Christ's flesh in one way or another.
Notice what all four have in common: a horror of matter. It is the same error the Joyful Mysteries answer in the Incarnation and the Luminous Mysteries answer in the sacraments. If Christ did not truly take flesh, He did not truly die; if He did not truly rise in the flesh, our own flesh has no future. The whole hope of the resurrection of the body hangs on the reality of His.
And so it is defined doctrine that Christ, after His Ascension, sits at the right hand of the Father in the flesh; it is Christ who is there bodily, not the Father. See the Tome of Damasus, on the Trinity and the Incarnation, article 15, numbered 73 in Denzinger's The Sources of Catholic Dogma (see p. 31, or p. 63 of the PDF).
The fleshly resurrection was essential to His teaching, for it demonstrated the necessity of both the material and the immaterial in a glorified creation. And each aspect of the mystery answered an error abroad in Israel at the time.
After forty days of teaching on the heavenly Kingdom, He ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father. But His Ascension was not without promises; He made two.
First, before He left He said He would send the Paraclete to the Apostles, the disciples, and His Mother, as they prayed and waited in the upper room in Jerusalem, the same room where He had instituted the Eucharist, and from which Judas Iscariot had gone out to betray Him to the Sanhedrin. Second, by way of His messengers the angels, He promised that He would come again.
"Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
Mark the words: in the same way. He will return in the very flesh in which He ascended. The Second Coming is not the arrival of a spirit or an idea but of the risen and glorified Man who is God, and this is one more proof of the powers and permanence of the glorified body. The flesh He took from His Mother He carried into heaven, and in that same flesh He will come to judge the living and the dead.
The fruit of this mystery is hope. Christ has gone before us in our own flesh, and where the Head has gone the members are meant to follow. To meditate on the Ascension is to lift our eyes past the cares of this world toward the place He has prepared, and to live now as citizens of the Kingdom to which He has ascended.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria. (Scripture here follows the RSV-2CE.)
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