Mark describes briefly and concisely the forty days that passed from the Savior's resurrection to His ascension, much more briefly than...
Mark describes briefly and concisely the forty days that passed from the Savior's resurrection to His ascension, much more briefly than the other evangelists. And he concludes his account with an equally brief description of the Ascension, reducing it to one sentence, unlike, for example, Luke, who in the Book of Acts wrote a whole account of this event, though a short one. As is evident, for Mark both events, the Resurrection and the Ascension, are connected with each other, and not simply connected, such a connection can also be seen in Luke, but exist as stages of one and the same spiritual process, determined by the dynamic of the Kingdom entering the world.
When viewed from our world, still not transformed by God's breath, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and what we usually call the second coming of Christ are seen as different events, though connected with one another and logically flowing one from another. Being in a world separated from the Kingdom, we perceive the elements of a single process as separate events. In reality there is no break between them. One could say that Jesus rises in order to ascend and then return in glory, but that would be the picture opened to a person looking at what is happening in the Kingdom from outside.
In reality He does not disappear anywhere; we simply, like the apostles on the day of the Ascension, lose sight of Him. We lose sight because we cannot look deeply enough into the Kingdom, at least in our ordinary state. The meeting with Him by the apostle Paul on the Damascus road, for example, testifies clearly: He had not gone away at all. The question is only how much we live the life of the Kingdom, and therefore His life.
Immediately after the Resurrection, during those very forty days, the disciples saw Him distinctly because He had not yet moved far from the boundary that divides the Kingdom and our world, not yet transformed. At that time the Kingdom had only begun to open itself to the world; it was not yet so vast that it could not be seen as a whole, even without crossing the boundary dividing the two worlds. This, however, could not continue forever: the Kingdom had to enter the world in a fullness far greater than what was visible to the apostles in the first forty days after the Resurrection. Accordingly, Jesus, as its King, had to take His royal place in it and disappear from the sight of those who had not yet crossed the boundary. For those who had crossed it, however, He was always visible. Paul, it appears, was the first, but by no means the last, of those who were granted to see Him in this way. And when at the end of time the Kingdom opens in fullness, everyone will again see the Risen One; whether the meeting will be joyful or not depends on the person himself.
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16:19 The Lord - How seasonable is he called by this title! After he had spoken to them - For forty days. Luk 24:50.
16:20 They preached every where - At the time St. Mark wrote, the apostles had already gone into all the known world, Rom 10:18; and each of them was there known where he preached: the name of Christ only was known throughout the world.