The Glory Departed by the East and the Mount of Olives
Old Testament: Ezechiel 11:22-23
And the cherubims lifted up their wings, and the wheels with them: and the glory of the God of Israel was over them. And the glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city, and stood over the mount that is on the east side of the city.
Old Testament, also: Ezechiel 43:1-2
And he brought me to the gate that looked towards the east. And behold the glory of the God of Israel came in by the way of the east: and his voice was like the noise of many waters, and the earth shone with his majesty.
New Testament: Acts 1:9-12
And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up: and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they were beholding him going up to heaven, behold two men stood by them in white garments. Who also said: Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven. Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount that is called Olivet, which is nigh Jerusalem, within a sabbath day's journey.
The connection
Ezechiel watches the glory of the Lord abandon the Temple, departing "from the midst of the city" to stand "over the mount that is on the east side of the city" (Ezechiel 11:23), the first stop of a glory in exile before Jerusalem itself falls. Chapters later, in a vision of restoration, the same glory returns "by the way of the east" (Ezechiel 43:2), entering by the gate that faces the mountain it once stood upon. The pattern is deliberate: God does not simply vanish and reappear; He departs and returns by the same road. Acts records the same road walked once more. Christ ascends from "the mount that is called Olivet" (Acts 1:12), the very mountain east of the city where Ezechiel's glory once paused, and the two men in white promise the disciples this Jesus "shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven" (Acts 1:11), by the same way He left. Zacharias had already named the place centuries earlier: "his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives" (Zacharias 14:4). One mountain, one road, held open across exile, Ascension, and the day still to come.
Moral sense
The glory that departs is never gone for good; the same road that carries it away carries it back. Grief over God's apparent absence, whether in a dry season of prayer or a literal exile, is not evidence of final abandonment if the road home was never closed.
Anagogical sense
Zacharias's naming of the place is not merely geographical; it is the promise that the departure begun in Ezechiel and continued at the Ascension will end exactly where it started, when Christ's own feet stand again on the mount east of the city and exile itself comes to an end.
Warrant
Jerome sets Ezechiel's departing cherubim on the mount of the Ascension: of Mount Olivet, "from which the Saviour made His ascension to the Father," he writes, "Here also according to Ezekiel the Cherubim after leaving the temple founded the church of the Lord" (Letter 108, 12), though he names the two as holy memories of one mountain rather than calling the one a figure of the other.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 665.
The verses
Ezechiel 11:22 · Ezechiel 11:23 · Ezechiel 43:1 · Ezechiel 43:2 · Acts 1:9 · Acts 1:10 · Acts 1:11 · Acts 1:12
