He Opened Their Understanding
A Reflection on the Feast of the Ascension of our Lord
Feast of the Ascension of our Lord – (Acts §1 (1:1-12) / Saint Luke §114 (24:36-53)).
Beloved in Christ,
There is a striking and almost easily overlooked moment in the Gospel appointed for the Feast of the Ascension of Christ. After the Resurrection, after the appearances, after the empty tomb and the wounds shown openly to the Apostles, the Evangelist says something remarkable:
“Then He opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.”
Consider what this implies, my friends. The Apostles already possessed the Scriptures. From childhood they had heard the Law and the Prophets proclaimed in the synagogues. More than this, they had walked with the incarnate Word Himself. They had listened to His preaching, witnessed His miracles, beheld His sufferings, and seen with their own eyes the triumph of His Resurrection.
And yet, they did not understand. This alone should give us pause.
For the modern world has become accustomed to imagining the Scriptures as though they were self-interpreting objects, texts to be mastered merely by literacy, private study, cleverness, or force of personality. Yet the Gospel presents something altogether different. The understanding of divine things is shown not as an intellectual achievement, but as a gift granted by Christ.
And note that the Apostles do not seize understanding for themselves, through their own efforts. Rather, their minds are opened.
Nor is this opening merely informational. Christ does not simply provide them with additional data, nor offer them a better method of analysis. Rather, He illumines the whole man. The soul itself becomes capable of perceiving what had formerly remained hidden even while being read aloud.
Indeed, one of the most beautiful and mysterious lines in all the Resurrection narratives immediately precedes this opening of understanding:
“While they yet believed not, and wondered for joy…”
What an astonishing phrase!
They “yet believed not,” not because they did not know Christ. They certainly knew Him. They “yet believed not,” not because they wished Him false, for they knew Him to be the Truth. They “yet believed not,” not because they resisted Him in hardness of heart, for they received Him with gladness when He appeared to them.
Rather, they “yet believed not,” because, as the Evangelist presents them, they were nearly overwhelmed by joy itself. The reality standing before them is so radiant, so impossibly good, that the soul struggles to contain it. The mind hesitates not from doubt but from an excess of gladness.
They wondered for joy.
There is perhaps no faculty more neglected in the modern world than this capacity for holy wonder. We have mistaken suspicion for wisdom and cynicism for intelligence. We are trained to dissect before we adore, to reduce before we contemplate, to explain away before we stand in awe.
Yet throughout the Scriptures, wonder is not presented as the enemy of truth, but often as its beginning.
For wonder is what occurs when the faculties of the soul suddenly converge upon one and the same object and perceive in it the fullness of their desire. The intellect beholds truth. The will perceives goodness. The heart encounters beauty. Desire, intellect, memory, hope, and love all move together toward the same one reality. For a fleeting moment, the inner divisions of fallen man become harmonized.
And this harmony is wonder.
Such wonder is not irrationality. On the contrary, it is often the first truly supra-rational response to divine reality. Then does fear give way to joy. Confusion begins to yield to understanding. Fragmentation gives way to wholeness.
Only then does Christ open the Apostles’ understanding.
This is why the Church has always guarded not merely the text of Scripture, but also the mind through which Scripture is rightly understood. For Christ did not bequeath to the world a book alone. He left behind Apostles whose understanding He Himself had opened, to whom He entrusted both the proclamation of the Gospel and the interpretation of the things written concerning Him “in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms.”
And this same apostolic understanding continues in the life of the Church. It is this reality which we shall celebrate especially in the coming commemoration of the Holy Fathers of the First Council of Nicaea, who defended not merely isolated doctrines, but the very apostolic manner of understanding Christ Himself.
For Christianity is not simply the preservation of ancient religious documents, however sacred. It is the living continuity of illumination within the Body of Christ, transmitted from generation to generation through the unbroken succession of apostolic teaching and sacramental life.
This is why the Ascension is such a paradoxical feast. Christ departs visibly from the earth, and yet the Church becomes more deeply aware of His abiding presence. As the Kondak of the feast proclaims:
“Thou didst ascend in glory, O Christ our God, not departing hence, but remaining inseparable from us.”
He ascends, yet remains. He withdraws from sight, yet opens understanding. He departs bodily, yet becomes nearer sacramentally.
And the Apostles, who moments before “wondered for joy,” now return to Jerusalem “with great joy.” Not merely with new information, not merely with intellectual certainty, but with great joy. For the true understanding of divine things does not produce coldness, arrogance, or self-satisfaction. It produces worship. It engenders humility. It deepens wonder.
For the true understanding of divine things does not produce coldness, arrogance, or self-satisfaction. It produces worship. It produces humility. It produces wonder.
Perhaps this is the great tragedy of so much contemporary religion: not merely that it has lost the Apostolic mind, but that it has lost the very capacity to wonder. We have become a people who know much but marvel at little, who possess information in abundance but lack illumination, who can explain chapter and verse, but cannot perceive the Reality to which they point.
Yet the Ascended Christ still stands in the midst of His Church, still opening understanding to those who approach Him in faith, still blessing with uplifted hands, still drawing fragmented souls into the radiant unity of truth, goodness, and beauty found perfectly and inexhaustibly in His Person.
The promise of the Ascension is not that we are left to our own devices, armed only with written words and our own interpretive ingenuity. The promise is that Christ remains “inseparable from us,” continuing to open the understanding of His Body, the Church, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit whom He has sent.
And thus the Church continues to pray, to sing, and to gaze upward with joy, echoing the Psalmist’s ancient cry:
“Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: and Thy glory above all the earth.”
For in the Ascension, we behold not an absence but a presence, not a departure but a transformation of how Christ dwells among us. He who opened the understanding of the Apostles continues to illumine the minds and hearts of all who seek Him in the communion of His Church, leading us from wonder to understanding, and from understanding back again to ever-deepening wonder before the inexhaustible mystery of His love.
21 May 2026