Today is Ascension Day, the final moment in Jesus’s time on earth. He was born a human, lived as a human, died as a human, raised as something more than human, and finally returns to God the Parent as that resurrected human. In many churches and for many pastors, the ascension is an afterthought; but I think Jesus’s ascension is far more important than we give it credit for, because it sums up God’s purpose for the entire Incarnation: being with humanity.

Being With

It all begins with “with,” which is itself contrary to how most people think about why Jesus came to earth. The majority view among Christians is that Jesus came to fix the sin problem: humans screwed up, and God had to fix humanity’s screw-up. (The fancy term for this is an Infralapsarian Christology—”after the fall.”) But there is a minority view, one that I hold, that the Incarnation was always God’s intention, and fixing sin was a side-effect rather then the primary intent. (This one has a fancy term, too: Supralapsarian Christology—”before the fall.”)

This is a paradigm explored by a few theologians lately, such as Kathryn Tanner, Samuel Wells, and, one of my own seminary professors, Edwin Chr. van Driel. Especially in the works of Wells and van Driel, the idea is that an infralapsarian Christology is more transactional: God is ‘working for’ humanity to resolve a problem. Supralapsarian Christology is more relational: God wants to ‘be with’ humanity first; God becomes a human so that humanity may be transformed and resurrected like Christ and ‘be with’ God forever.¹

What’s Ascending Got to Do With It?

God-with-Us to Us-with-God

So with this in mind, what does Jesus’s ascension have to do God’s purpose to “be with” us? The ascension is the moment in which humanity (in one of the mysteries of faith) enters into the Triune God. If that seems odd, that’s because it is! When Jesus rose from the dead, he rose in body—he isn’t just a spirit or a ghost, but a whole soul with body and spirit; even though his resurrected body appears to be significantly different in a number of ways from his original human body.

At the ascension, Jesus went bodily back into the presence of God. As the Son of God and Second Person in the Trinity, he brought his body with him. Humanity is now a part of divinity in a way that it never was before: Jesus is the first human to be with God in this way, because whatever happened at the resurrection gave him a human body that was able to fully be with God. His ascension makes it possible for all of humanity to be with God after a bodily resurrection, but that takes a few more steps to get there.

Fixing Sin

One of those steps is resolving that pesky issue of sin, not because that was God’s primary purpose (as in supralapsarianism) but because sin is a barrier to “with.” Sin is all of that wrongness of the world, all of the stuff that is unloving and breaks relationships, so in order for humanity to be with God something has to be done about sin.

So the ascended Jesus—in another of those pesky mysteries—works out our atonement, fixing the sin issue, an reconciling humans to God. This is why when we confess our sins and repent of them (when we agree with God and one another that we have done wrong and seek to act in a more Christ-like way), our sin is forgiven and our relationships are restored. Jesus, having returned to God, is doing the things that need to happen for that reconciliation to be possible.

Guess Who’s Back?

Eventually Jesus will return, and part of his returning is that all humanity will join in his resurrection. We will share in divinity through Jesus Christ and be raised with a body like his, one that makes it possible for us to fully be with God just as Jesus is with God. This isn’t because we become “little gods,” or anything like that, but we participate in the Trinity through Christ as we share in his resurrection. (If you hadn’t guessed, this is yet another mystery of faith.)

Humanity and Divinity

All of this together—Jesus’s bodily resurrection and ascension, his working out the reconciliation of all things, and his return and our participation in his resurrection—is what brings about the “with” that is God’s primary purpose. Because of and through Jesus, God with us, we are able to be with God and be fully loved by God even as we fully love God and one another.

I don’t know entirely what this kind of life will look like. It’s so far outside what our experience is that even the best experiences of love that we have are far from that perfect love of God. But we have some hints. It’s a love that loves and welcomes all, offering hospitality and community to everyone. It’s a love that acknowledges the differences between us but those differences are opportunities for hospitality and mutuality rather than causes for division. It’s a love that ensures everyone has enough resources instead of hoarding them for our own self-interest.

All of those are things that Christians are called to live out right now, existing as the body of Christ, the Church: a loving community which bear witness to the resurrection future that we don’t yet see. The ascension is the beginning of this, along with the sending of the Holy Spirit and the continued presence of God through her in our lives. And that’s why today is important to celebrate and remember. It’s the beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning, as we await the fulfillment of these mysteries of faith that will meet their completion in God with us and us with God.

1. For more information, see Edwin Chr. van Driel, The Incarnation as God’s First Intention: Supralapsarian Christology for Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025), especially pages 2–9. ↩︎