Sounding

For it says:

When He ascended on high, He took prisoners into captivity;

He gave gifts to people.

But what does "He ascended" mean except that He descended to the lower parts of the earth? The One who descended is the same as the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. And He personally gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the training of the saints in the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God's Son, [growing] into a mature man with a stature measured by Christ's fullness. — Ephesians 4:8-13

Ascending doesn't happen without descending. There is no rising apart from being down. There is no exaltation that is not proceeded by humbling. The concept of ascending and descending as two aspects of a single, full process is familiar to all reader of One Cosmos. His thirty-three year stay on earth was, for Jesus, just the passing through, as a cliffdiver must pass through a medium or two on his way from the heights to the bottom in order to rise in triumph.

The dive Christ made into hell opened a way out of it for those who would follow Him. We'll have to cast aside the cliffdiver image. Once the dive is made, it is a long climb back to the top of the cliff. For our Last Adam, the Ascension is a given. He must rise. For Him, the plunge was the hard part.

This is the essence of the gospel. When you are at the bottom, there is no where to descend to. The only way out is up. I have struggled with "crucifying the flesh", with putting self to death — admittedly with little success. Oh, wait, doesn't it say somewhere something about my being "dead in trepasses and sin"? For us the hard part is not getting to the bottom, it is realizing we are already there. The triumphant ascension of Christ from the abyss of death did not liberate only the physical dead. Some teach that Jesus moved paradise from a compartment in sheol (hell, the grave) to heaven. It seems to me to be a poetic depiction of all spiritually dead humanity being set free from their chains. As we need to realize we are dead apart from Christ, we also need to realize that we are, with Christ, risen indeed.

I think I understand this but I may not be able to say what I know.

Christ rose to "fill all things". He "fills" all in a sort of topdown way, having ascended back to heaven. He is in all and through all, as we noted in an earlier verse from this same chapter. He is readily available to us — something that was not the case before the Cross.

Let's go back to the idea of a being rising bouyantly above a water surface, breaking through the surface tension, shattering perhaps an otherwise calm layer of reality, throwing bits of it here and there like a leaping dolphin. Imagine that being growing ever larger as it rises. Now much more of the surface is disrupted and disturbed. Now it seems to be a mountain pushing ever higher and wider. Water runs off the sides in great frothing rivers. There is no longer a body of water, no longer depths, rather the depths have become heights.

That is less a picture of Christ than it is a picture of His Church. As Christ descended, so His fullness descends giving us a matrix into which we are able to, and may, ascend in order to fill.

Mostly we have not attained that mature stature. God knows that. We don't grow simply in numbers to fill the matrix. We grow into unity — each of us — and all of us. Christ provides the template into which we are to grow, and He provides, through all the gifts He liberated, the means for us to grow.

What are those 'gifts'? Our brothers and sisters — some of whom are apostles, others are prophets. Some bring us good news and words of encouragement in dark times, others teach us who we are and how to live, or they stand watching over us to lead us, to give us direction and to battle the rulers of the darkness on our behalf while we grow.

And you and I, we are gifts to someone else, or to one another.