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Ascension of Christ 6/13/2013
Forty days following the Resurrection, our Saviour accomplished what He had promised from the beginning. He returned to His Father in order to send His disciples the Spirit of Truth. Ever since Christ is seated at the right hand of His Father. His return to the Father is a public act: it happens before the eyes of the apostles. Christ is taken up in the air and a cloud receives Him to carry Him heavenwards. The last instructions He gives them are preparations for Pentecost. „Do not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the Promise of the Father, which you have heard from Me; for John truly baptised with water, but you shall be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying: Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And He said to them: It is not for you to know times or seasons which Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses of Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth“ (Acts 1:4-8). And immediately, while they watched Him being carried up, two men in white apparel, in fact angels, brought forth the gospel of the Second coming of Christ on earth. In spite of the instruction not to reckon about the times of these events, which are in God’s authority, in the first years and even centuries after the Ascension, the Christians lived in an unrepeatable eschatology and as they could not overlook the seal of those Divine events, expected then already to be personal witnesses on earth of the glorious Parousia of the Lord.
