A Ramble About Ascension

Daniel Jackson: “Maybe I've done something good every now and again, but nothing I've ever done seems to have changed anything.”

Oma Desala: “These tasks of which you speak were great challenges, perhaps even impossible to achieve.”

Daniel Jackson: “Does that absolve me?”

Oma Desala: “Do you feel you journey must continue until you have found redemption for these failures?”

Daniel Jackson: “Nope. Not anymore. Not if I'm dead.”

Oma Desala: “Exactly true.”

Stargate: SG-1, “Meridian”

This dialogue is from what is perhaps my favorite episode from the series “Stargate: SG-1”. The episode is also my wife's least favorite because in it a much loved main character dies horribly from lethal radiation exposure. But in those moments before death he is visited by someone he had met before, an old friend you might say. She is a member of a race of people that learned to shed their physical form and “ascend” to a higher plane of existence as pure energy. This particular ascended being had then spent thousands of years helping others to do the same thing when they were ready to die and leave their mortal existence behind, and now she was here for Daniel in his final moments to help him. In other words, she was there to help him ascend and become like her.

But Daniel doesn't believe himself to be worthy of it. Part of the journey of ascension for him is that he must release his burden, and for him, this means letting go of his guilt and perceived failures as well as letting go of the mortal life he clung to so he could follow her in ascension. Eventually, she does guide him to the understanding which allows him to let everything go and follow her, becoming a being of pure light.

This idea of the need to die and release everything you're clinging to in order to achieve salvation isn't new, and it isn't confined to science fiction:

“Because whoever would wish to deliver his psyche will destroy it; and whoever would destroy his psyche for mine and the Gospel's sake will deliver it.” (Mark 8:35)

This saying is found, almost word for word, six times in all four Gospels. Twice in Matthew (10:39, 16:25), Twice in Luke (9:24, 17:33), once in Mark (8:35), and once in John (12:25). By anyone's definition of textual criticism, liberal or conservative, this would mark this as something that Jesus Christ not only actually said, but that it was so important to them, the Gospel writers repeated it again and again. (Though not well known, “psyche” is the transliteration of the Greek word used in all six occurrences, and is the most accurate translation of the word as well because, in its strictest sense, it encompasses the emotions, the reasonings, the soul, the memories, and the physical being of the person, and not just the mind or the soul.)

Submission to death and the letting go of the things of this mortal life are fundamental concepts of the path of Jesus Christ. St. Paul wrote about it several times in his epistles, beginning with the letter to the Romans:

“Or are you ignorant that, as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into His death? We were therefore entombed together with Him through the baptism into His death, so that just as Christ was awakened from the dead through the glory of the Father, so also we should walk in newness of life. Because if we have become grown together in the resemblance of His death, but also will we be of His resurrection; knowing this that our old human being was co-crucified so that the body of the sin disorder would be abolished, for us to no longer be enslaved to the disorder; because the person who died has been acquitted from the sin disorder. And if we died together with Christ, we believe that we will also live together with Him, knowing that Christ having been awakened from the dead is no longer mortal, death has dominion over Him no longer. So also you figure yourselves to be dead indeed to the sin disorder yet living to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:3-11)

Death acquits a person from sin. The dead man no longer worries about the guilt and failures in his life. He no longer worries about what he did wrong or right. The sentence for his mistakes in life has already been carried out. Death has absolved him. As Sirach says in 41:4 “There is in Hades no inquiry into your life.” (SAAS) Yet in spite of this, the dead man must still face the natural separation from the things of life he clung to, being unable by nature to sense or recognize the God who surrounds him with His love. Thus Jesus Christ, and His death and resurrection.

St. Paul's argument is this, those of us who were baptized were grafted into His death on the cross. We therefore shouldn't continue in the way we lived before this baptism, being subject to the sin disorder, because we died when we were baptized, and the person who died has been acquitted from the sin disorder. But his argument goes further in that just as we were joined to the death of Christ, so would we be joined to His resurrection. Just as Christ was raised immortal, so would we be raised immortal, if we died with Him; if we accepted our death, and let go of this world and stopped clinging to it.

This thinking was central in St. Paul's understanding of what the path of Jesus Christ was all about. In his letters to the Galatians and the Colossians, he brings it up as the lynchpin of his arguments which all of his instruction hangs on:

“I was co-crucified with Christ; and I live no longer; but Christ lives within me; and that which I now live in the flesh, I live by the Faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself over for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

“But let there be absolutely no boast for me except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world is crucified to me and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)

“If you died together with Christ from the basic elements of the world, why are you dogmatizing as living in the world? Don't handle neither taste neither touch, all of which is for the decay to consumption, according to the commands and teachings of human beings, which things are a word indeed having wisdom in self-made religion and humility and severe discipline of a body, not in anything valuable against the gratification of the flesh. If then you were awakened together with Christ, look for the things on high, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God; be mindful of the things on high, not the things upon the ground. Because you died and your life has been hidden together with Christ in God; when Christ your life is made to appear, then you will also be made to appear with Him in glory.” (Colossians 2:20-3:4)

In his letter to the Philippians, this death is implicit in his rejection of all the benefits of status which his ancestry and formal education brought him as he says:

“But the things which were profit to me, I lead these things loss because of Christ. But rather I also lead everything to be loss because of the superiority of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, through whom I lost everything, and lead it crap, so that I would profit Christ” (Philippians 3:7-8)

St. Paul knew that it is absolutely important that we accept the sentence of death which has been carried out on us through our union with Christ in baptism, and which is brought to completion in the death of the physical body. We must live as though already passed out of this world. It is nothing less than accepting the original sentence passed on Adam instead of futilely trying to fight it. We must be as a corpse is to the things of this world: unfeeling, disinterested, detached, unmoved, and focused upon the center of our existence, our God and Savior Jesus Christ, paying only the attention we have to in order that Christ might live His life out through us. Accepting that we no longer live, and releasing the things of the world we cling to so tightly is the only path to being joined to His resurrection.

If we reject this sentence of death and cling to our life and things of this world, we incur judgment to ourselves, not because God is cruel or because He wants to condemn us, but because after death the object of our clinging has ceased from our experience and we go insane, or rather our insanity is brought to its culmination, total separation from everything else but God, and unable to welcome or recognize God Himself.

Jesus Himself pleads for this and warns about it in the Gospel of John:

“Stay in Me, and I within you. Just as the branch isn't capable of producing fruit from itself except it should stay in the vine, so neither you if you don't stay within Me. I am the vine, you the branches. This person who stays within Me and I within him produces a lot of fruit, because without Me you are not capable of doing anything at all. If anyone doesn't stay within Me, he has been thrown out as a branch and has been withered and they gather them together and throw them into the fire and they are burned.” (15:4-6)

We see this acceptance of death in the lives of many if not most of the lives of the recognized saints. The more one accepts this death with Christ and turns away from the things of the world, the more Christ-like one becomes and the closer to His resurrection one gets. The more one welcomes the things of the world, clings to them, and fights against death, any death, the farther from Christ one becomes, and the farther from His resurrection. It is movement one way or the other. If you welcome your death with Christ you are absolved of your disorder. If you turn away from it, your disorder grows with all the consequences thereof.

The only path to ascension, as Daniel discovered, was by letting go. The only path to resurrection is by accepting one's death.

(Except where noted, all translations from Scripture are mine.)