BonoVoxSupastar said:
"9For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. 11In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature,[a] not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, 12having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead."
If you want context you should quote the whole passage. Analogy, analogy, analogy... Were you really buried with him? Will Jesus really circumsize you?
Analogy.
BVS - the Gnostics had a view similar to this. That the Jesus story was an anology of our lives.
Here are a few paragraphs that summarize what many Christians today believe about this:
In Acts 1:9, we are told: "After Jesus said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight." I would like to address a simple question: why? Why was Jesus taken up in this way? But before we get to that, let's read the next three verses:
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." Then they returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city. (vs. 10-12)
This passage makes two basic points— that Jesus ascended into heaven, and that he will return. Both of those items are important in the Christian faith, and both are included in the Apostles' Creed, for example. First, Jesus ascended into heaven. This is commonly known as the Ascension, which is celebrated each year 40 days after Easter, always on a Thursday.
The second point this passage makes is that Jesus will return— he will return in the same way that he ascended. I believe that this latter point is the reason that Jesus ascended in a visible way— to emphasize that he will return in a visible way.
It would have been easy for Jesus to simply tell his disciples that he was going to his Father, and that that he would come back — and then he would simply disappear, as he did on other occasions, just this time never to be see again. I don't know of any theological reason why Jesus would have to ascend in a visible way. He did this to make a point, to teach a particular lesson, to the disciples — and through them, to us.
By visibly going up into the air, Jesus made it clear that he wasn't just disappearing— he was going to heaven, and there, he would be at the Father's right hand to intercede for us as our eternal High Priest. As one writer put it, Jesus is "our Man in heaven." We have somebody in heaven who understands who we are, understands our weaknesses, understands our needs, because he is a human. Even in heaven, he is still a human as well as being God.
Even after the Ascension, Scripture calls him a man. When Paul was preaching to the Athenians at the Areopagus, he said that God would judge the world by a man he has appointed, and that man is Jesus Christ. And when he wrote to Timothy, he called him the man Christ Jesus. He is still a human, and he still has a body. His body rose from the dead, and his body ascended into heaven.
Which leads to the question of just where is that body right now? How can a God who is omnipresent, not limited to space and matter, also have a body that is localized in a particular place? Is the body of Jesus floating somewhere in outer space? I don't know. I don't know how Jesus appeared behind locked doors, either, and I don't know how he could ascend into the air, contrary to the law of gravity. Apparently the laws of physics don't apply to the body of Jesus Christ. It's still a body, but it doesn't have limitations that we think are part of having a body.
That still doesn't answer the question of where the body is right now, but that's really not the most important thing we need to worry about, is it? We need to know that Jesus is in heaven, but we do not need to know just where that is. It is more important for us to know about the spiritual body, the way in which Jesus is living on earth right now in the church. And he is doing that by means of the Holy Spirit.
When Jesus ascended bodily into heaven, he was giving a visible sign that he continues to be human as well as divine. That gives us assurance that he is a high priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses, as it says in Hebrews. So the visible rising into heaven makes this point: that Jesus didn't just go away — he continues his ministry in a different way, as our high priest, our intercessor, our mediator. - Michael Morrison
