If heaven is nothing more than than the goods available in this world, would it be an eternal horror. In our life on earth, we experience joy that we hope is a foretaste of heavenly bliss. The joys of this life are not eternal joys.. . . from sad experience I am too sure that whatever is created, whatever is earthly, pleases but for a time and then palls and is a weariness. I believe that there is nothing at all here below that I would not at length get sick of. I believe, that though I had all the means of happiness that this life could give, yet in time I would tire of living, feeling everything trite and dull and unprofitable. John Henry Newman, Everyday Meditations (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2013), 164.
Jesus, the God-man who we can see, ascends so that the Spirit of God, whom we can’t see will come. The visible prepares us for the invisible. The joys of this world prepare us for some other reality.“the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Acts 1:1-11
They are being prepared for a mission to prepare for a world that they cannot see. The world the Apostles lived in saw heaven and the heavens differently. They thought that the Earth occupied a central location while various spheres containing the ‘wandering stars’ what we call the planets moved against an ultimate sphere that separated them from the empyrean. We look out into the night sky and think of large hunks of, possibly dead, rocks hurtling through space illuminated by giant bags of burning gas. When the ancients would refer to the ‘third heaven’ they would mean the third sphere out from the earth. They thought they saw the way reality really was, we think we see more clearly. What we have gained in particularity, we have probably lost in vision. Jesus performed many signs in his life, his Ascension is one more sign meeting people where they are.When they had gathered together they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” He answered them, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”