The Creed in Slow Motion by Ronald Knox

Author:Ronald Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-02T18:32:00+00:00

XV

HE ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN,

SITTETH AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD

THIS IS IN some ways the least surprising of all the clauses in the Credo. Having risen from the dead, our Lord proceeded to ascend into heaven; after all, he couldn't very well have done anything else. Long ago, when I was a Church of England clergyman, and used to bother rather about what other Church of England clergymen thought, the extraordinary theological views they would produce, I noticed this curious thing-that it was quite common to find people who said they believed in the Resurrection but didn't believe in the Ascension. I used to ask them, but I could never get any intelligible answer, What DID they think had happened? Here is the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ raised from the tomb; we've admitted that. What, then, was its later history? Did they think that our Lord went on, not for forty days, but for perhaps forty years, in hiding; and at the end of that period he died and was buried like the rest of us? Or did they think that our Lord's Body was annihilated, by some special decree of Providence? Unless you believed either one or the other of those two very improbable stories, you were forced to believe that our Lord had ascended into heaven. Even if the Gospels had told us nothing about the circumstances of it, we should know that our Lord had ascended, simply because he isn't here. So let us have no nonsense about that; if we believe all the Credo has had to tell us so far, this new clause in it is as easy as pie. He ascended into heaven; naturally; what else could he do? He is sitting at the right hand of the Father; of course he is; what on earth would be the sense of looking for him anywhere else?

No, the odd thing here, the thing that wants explaining here, is that he should have wanted to wait forty days on earth before he ascended into heaven. It was very fortunate for you, of course, that he did, because it means your getting a nice holiday in the middle of the summer term, just when holidays are worth having. But suppose for a moment that the Gospels had told us nothing about what happened after our Lord's burial, except the bare facts, as the Creed records them for us, that be rose again from the dead the third day and ascended into heaven-if that were all we knew from the Gospels, and if Catholic tradition had told us nothing more about it, what picture should we naturally form in our minds about what had happened? We should imagine, shouldn't we, that he had mustered together all his followersthere were only so few of them, remember, only a hundred and twenty of them-on the afternoon, say, of Easter Day, perhaps in the cenacle, perhaps out of doors on the Mount of Olives or somewhere like that; that

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