Commentary on Scripture by the Holy Fathers

The Ascension of Our Lord

Thursday, Sixth Week of Pascha

LUKE 24

⁵¹ Now it came to pass, while He blessed them, that He was parted from them and carried up into heaven.  ⁵² And they worshipped Him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, ⁵³ and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God.  Amen.

Commentary by St. Leo the Great.  The Tome, 4. B#7, p.367.

But after the Resurrection of the Lord - which was in truth the resurrestion of a real body, for no other person was raised again than He who had been crucified and had died- what else had been accomplished during the interval of forty days than to make our faith entire and clear of all darkness?

For a while He conversed with His disciples, and dwelt with them, and ate with them, and allowed Himself to be handled with careful and inquisitive touch by those who were under the influence of doubt; and this was His purpose in entering into them when the doors were shut, and by His breath giving them the Holy Spirit and opening the secrets of Holy Scripture after bestowing on them the light of intelligence, and again in His selfsame person showing to them the wound in the side, the prints of the nails and all the fresh tokens of the Passion saying, 'Behold my hands and feet, that it is I Myself; handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see Me have;' that the properties of the divine and human nature might be acknowledged to remain in Him without causing a division, and that we might in such sort know that the Word is not what the flesh is as to confess that the one Son of God is both Word and flesh...'Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (that dissolves Jesus) is not of God.  And this is the spirit of Antichrist'(IJohn 4:2,3).  Now what is to dissolve Jesus, but to separate the human nature from Him, and to make void by shameless inventions that mystery by which alone we have been saved?  ...For if he does not think the Lord's crucifixion to be unreal...let him acknowledge His flesh also, and not doubt that He whom He recognizes as having been capable of suffering is also man ...since to deny His true flesh is also to deny His bodily sufferings.

St. Leo the Great.  The Tome,5 B#7, p.367.