The answer
The ascension of the Lord Christ to heaven in no way implies His absence from the world. He sits at the right hand of the Father (Eph. 1:20), being Lord of the cosmos, the Lord of heaven and earth. His divinity fills heaven and earth. When the faithful gather together, He is present with them (Matt. 18:20). The psalmist says, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? … if I ascend into heaven, You, are there, if I make my bed (sleep) in hell, behold You are there” (Ps. 139:7–8), for He sits at the right hand of the great Father. By His bodily ascension to heaven, He became our predecessor in His resurrection and ascension.
His ascension into heaven opened the door for our hearts to see Him and delight in His presence; but he who rejects Him, deprives himself from delighting in His light. The evangelist says, “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The Lord Christ, for His part, is filled with grace and truth (John 1:14); he who rejects this grace deprives himself of truth and of light.
For the Fathers of the Church, the One God is light without any darkness. St. Isaac the Syrian’s view was that all humanity will encounter the Lord on the day of judgment; some will be rejoice in the divine light, relishing God’s love; but the unbelievers will be tormented because they deprived themselves of divine love, so the light will become a condemnation to them, or judge them.328
St. Isaac the Syrian held that the bitterness that those in Hades taste is the bitterness of the scourging of the love that they reject, saying that there is nothing more bitter than the scourging of love.
The Eighth Article: “And He is coming again in His glory to judge the living and the
dead, whose kingdom has no end.”
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
328 Cf. St. Isaac the Syrian, Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, trans., A. J. Wensinck (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923) Homily 27.