Christ's Suspended Glory
After a thirty-three year trip, with a detour to Hell, the truly prodigal Son now returns to the Father. (For “prodigal” does not mean “wicked’ or “wandering,” but “lavish in spending,” and Jesus was truly lavish in grace.) He Who departed from the heavenly courts in order to become man has now ascended back to His home.
This is a simple way to describe today, but too simple, and so simple as to be wrong. “Does He abandon the cherubic throne if He receives worldly birth?”1 No, He does not: in His fleshy birth, He is still with His Father, and even “when Your body was in the tomb and Your soul in Hades, when You were in paradise with the thief, You were also seated upon the throne with the Father and the Holy Spirit.”2 (How does that ever-presence in heaven mesh with His declaration of abandonment by the Father on the Cross? A harder question, one that we won’t tackle now.)
Not only did He not fully depart—for full departure requires separation, abandonment from the home—but, now, He is not fully home. For the fleshless Son is certainly at home in heaven, but He is no longer so now He is enfleshed, and enfleshed forever, and the flesh needs earth. That is why, at the Resurrection, we will regain flesh in a new earth. In returning to heaven, He also does not fully depart from earth, for He is still present, bodily, in the Eucharist, not to mention His countless presences by grace.
If these departures and returns are so un-clear-cut, how can we describe the splendor of this day? Pierre de Bérulle focused, not on His presence in one place or another, in one plane or another, but on Christ’s glory.
On earth, “in this humble state of abasement, the divinity of the Father was in Him, the love of the Father was in Him...But the glory of the Father was not yet established in Him. He was in the love of the Father, but not yet in the glory of the Father...the Father, giving His divinity to the humanity, giving, in it, the Person of His Son, suspended the giving of the entire and perfect state of His glory, as we see through the course of His life, in that He leaves Him, for a time, in infancy and in powerlessness, in the swaddling clothes and the crèche, in the persecution and the flight, in the known and unknown life, in the Cross, in death, in the sepulchre.”3 So it is after the Son’s “second birth”—His birth from Mary, distinct from His “first birth” from the Father in eternity—but what about after His “third birth,” His arising from the tomb?4
Surely, after His Resurrection, Jesus is glorious? After all, the Resurrection is “the first moment of His accomplished glory,” when He is rendered the glory due to Him, “which His Love had suspended and arrested for so long.”5 But—a strange wonder—this is not fully so; for, upon His Resurrection, His love, “in abandoning Your body to its glory, even suspends the place of this glory, and Jesus is living between heaven and earth, conversing on earth for the space of forty days.”6 For “heaven is the place which ought to properly receive You in this blest birth into the state of glory,” yet “the love of Your apostles, of Your disciples, and of Your Church again arrests this last effect and this last birth for some time, and Your entrance into heaven is differed and suspended by a miracle, and a miracle of love performed by Yourself upon Yourself, suspending, not the state of glory, as elsewhere, but the proper place for glory”: “O love triumphant, and triumphing over Jesus, even in the triumph of His glory!”7
The Son set aside His glory when He “emptied Himself” (or, as Bérulle likes to say, “nullified Himself,” “nothinged Himself”) to become man;8 upon His Resurrection, He regained that glory, yet, for forty days, His glory is not in its proper place. This is all due to a “separating love,” a love that keeps things in tension, in suspension, for a time, before uniting them. (This strongly recalls Bérulle’s discussion elsewhere of St. Mary Magdalene’s “crucifying love” and “separating love,” when she herself was “suspended” in the time between Jesus’ Ascension and her own death.)9
“The Scripture represents two voyages of the Son of God for us: the one through which He departs from the Father and comes to the world through the mystery of the Incarnation: A Deo exivit [From God He departed]; the other, through which He departs from the world and goes to the Father: Ad Deum vadit [To God He went] (Jn 13:3). The one is accomplished through the Incarnation and through the human birth of Jesus, the other is accomplished through the glorification and through the glorious birth of Jesus.”10 It is this second voyage that ends today, when Jesus heads to heaven’s port, this voyage that began forty days ago, at His birth from the sepulchre (a “glorious birth,” for it was His birth into the state of glory).
Then it seems the journey is over, that there-and-back-again is finished. The Son gave up His state and place of glory to become man; as man, He regained His state of glory in the Resurrection, and His place of glory in the Ascension. What more is there to say? What further tension can there be?
But, of course, the story is not over yet. If “the glory of God is man fully alive” (St. Irenaeus), then surely the more fully alive men God has, the more glory He has? So, though He is back in heaven, “augmented,” we might say, by His glorious flesh, which He shall always have (“as long as God will be God, God will be man, and this body will be, for a forever, the body of a God”),11 His full glory, the glory of His Church, is still suspended. Until time has come to a close, and the redeemed enjoy their new flesh in the new earth and new heavens, Christ’s glory is still suspended.
The Ascension is not meaningless, though: if, even after gaining His “place of glory,” Jesus’ glory is still suspended, the Ascension gives the means for its fulfillment. For the Ascension was needed to sanctify and glorify the Church: “it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7 RSV-CE). “The Lord ascended into heaven, that He might send the Comforter to the world”; so we sing, in expectation of the glory we will receive, “O radiant children of the Church, receive ye the fiery dew of the Spirit, the delivering cleansing of sins; for now from Sion hath gone forth the law, the grace of the Spirit in tongues of fire.”12 From this Fire, Christ awaits His suspended glory.
1 St. Proklos of Constantinople, Oration 6.11 (PG 65:741B).↩
2 From a troparion of the Paschal Hours; see The Paschal Hours (Pittsburgh, PA: Metropolitan Cantor Institute, 2020), 4.↩
3 Pierre de Bérulle, Discourses on the State and on the Grandeurs of Jesus VIII.X, in Œuvres complètes de de Bérulle, ed. Jean-Paul Migne (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1856), 306. This volume is henceforth abbreviated OC↩
4 Bérulle discusses these three births in Discourses X-XII. In the first edition of the work, these three were combined into one enormous, tripartite Discourse X. ↩
5 Bérulle, Discourses XII.I (OC 391).↩
6 Bérulle, Discourses XII.II (OC 392).↩
7 Bérulle, Discourses XII.II (OC 392).↩
8 More specifically, Bérulle says that “love separates, in Your voyaging life, glory from the state of glory, and the glory of the soul from the glory of the body” (Discourses XII.II, OC 392). So Jesus had glory, in some way, before the Resurrection; after the Resurrection, He gained the state of glory; after the Ascension, He gained the place of glory.↩
9 See my article “Magdalene in the Desert,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review, 2/24/2023 (https://www.hprweb.com/2023/02/magdalene-in-the-desert/), consisting of excerpts from my later full publication of Pierre de Bérulle, Elevation to Jesus Christ Regarding Saint Mary Magdalene (Independently published, 2024). In particular, see Elevation X.V, 124-126, esp. 124, n. 66.↩
10 Bérulle, Discourses XII.III (OC 396).↩
11 Bérulle, Discourses XII.V (OC 400).↩
12 Stichera from Vespers of the Ascension, then katavasia of Canon II, Ode V, from Matins of the Ascension: see The Pentecostarion of the Orthodox Church, tr. Isaac E. Lambertsen (Liberty, TN: The St. John of Kronstadt Press, 2010), 228, 235.↩
Text ©2024 Brandon P. Otto. Licensed via CC BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.
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