There are many images of the Lord’s Ascension to heaven through history, and rightly so. With the Annunciation, the Ascension is perhaps the greatest of all the Feasts of the Lord and for our own humanity. Imagine! Our humanity, taken into an indestructible bond with the Lord’s divinity at the Annunciation, with the Ascension is seated – RIGHT NOW – at the right hand of the Father.
Now HE. Later WE.
The Ascension is an article of the Creed and it behooves us to reflect on it.
The depictions of the Ascension I like the most are the medieval illustrations which show the Apostles, often with Mary, looking upward as a pair of lordly Feet at all that remains to be seen.
Who better to turn to for some insight into this than Ratzinger?
From the site Ignatius Insight, providing an excerpt from “The Ascension: The Beginning of a New Nearness,” from Joseph Ratzinger’s Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (Ignatius Press, 2006 – UK HERE). My emphases and comments:
You are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they?
We are reminded, first of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers, following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him; praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him.
When we read the Church Fathers something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us.
In the readings for the Sunday after Ascension, what does Peter teach us? Charity covers a multitude of sins!
Let’s have a few more images of the Ascension of different styles, animi caussa!
From the Parisian Missal
With footprints on his blasting off pad.
And there is the more, “It’s a bird! It’s plane!” style.
Note the reactions…
Getting a helping hand. Christ is carrying a scroll. What could be written on it? It must mean something.
Here’s 15th c. Flemish version where we see Christ getting to the right hand of the Father. Nice!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/amthomson/30133799640
The Church’s patrimony is amazing!! I never knew I needed floating feet paintings. THE BEST!
I literally LOL’d. I actually laughed out loud.
ooooooh. Thanks for the images. I’ll download them to my religious pictures collections. I do think about the Apostles standing there staring at the sky – grief? Where did He go? What’s going on? …waiting…
Then the angels: stop standing there and get to work!
And they run and hide for fear of the Jews… This is also a worthwhile consideration of how the hierarchy is going to behave when the Church looks extinguished, as the Church is undergoing its Passion now. Imagine, as Jesus is finishing up, about to return to the Father, the Apostles are STILL asking “NOW are you going to restore the kingdom?” haha. They still didn’t get it. Just like us here, we are looking for temporal restoration, ignoring the big picture of all that is really happening.
Jesus, as if to comfort His followers on His departure, paraphrased: I will send the Holy Ghost, if I don’t leave, the Holy Ghost won’t come, and you still won’t ‘get it’.
DON’T FORGET THE NOVENA TO THE HOLY GHOST, starts Friday after Ascension Thursday. Honors the nine days of prayer in that room of fear and the only real official novena of the Church. Oh, this novena is so important, represents so much, asks for so much.
Many thanks!
“The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him.”
In schola today, practicing for Dominica infra Octavam Ascensionis, the richness of Psalm 26:8 in the Introitus struck me – “tibi dixit cor meum quaesivi vultum tuum vultum tuum Domine requiram” – as Messianic – the Face of the Son as Totus Christus in his Humanitas rising to the Father; as referring to the disciples – knowing they must seek above (and eschatologically), and to us in that same and Pope Benedict’s sense.
In further keeping with your post, I was also stuck by the delightful use of Psalm 46:4 in the Offertorium verses (as found in Ott’s Offertoriale) – “subiecit populos nobis et gentes sub pedibus nostris” – in the sense ‘our’ of the Humanitas which He has taken and the suggestion of watching those Feet ascend.
Salvador Dali’s version, with the ”sunflower” atom and the weeping Gala, is a favorite of mine. https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/ascension