Catholic high school was
the perfect place for would be atheists to laugh off the doctrine they were
taught, dismissing mysteries and children’s tales, and by that logic, the
Ascension is one of the silliest mysteries of all, a child’s story about a man
flying off into space to get to heaven in a cloud.
Since I felt last
Thursday approaching, I’ve known I wanted to write about the Ascension, the
underrated day occurring forty days after Easter when we are told, Jesus,
having risen from the dead, ascended into heaven and returned to the Father. The story is in Mark and Luke, and Luke
considers it an important enough event that he places it again in his book of
Acts. This is really something because the gospels telling this story are named
for two men who were NOT Apostles and who would not have witnessed it.
The Ascension is a
strange event, a mystery which ought to be looked at soberly instead of taught
in a pat way. You know it is a mystery because on the surface the story is ridiculous.
Jesus, having resurrected for the last forty days, now goes to the top of Mount Olivet
The cosmography of the
ancient world was a spiritual one. Depending upon where you were or who you
were places as diverse as Rome , Jerusalem
and Delphi were the center of the world
because they were the center of your
world. Heaven was above you because heavenly things are above you and hell—the
freezing one or the burning one—was beneath you because that is where the place
of death and concealment is. But it is a mistake to think that in creating
these psychological cosmographies, people were ignorant of the actual ones. India was and is and has been for thousands of years
a scientific and philosophical leader and yet that did not cancel out their
myths of Vishnu and the demons churning the world into being from a sea of
milk, or stop them from finding Mount
Meru
One of the things we are
now learning from Indian Brahmans and
Indians who practice religions predating Hinduism is that our first songs and
prayers are pre-speech. This is to say talking is late in the human game. For
the majority of our existence, while we have been fully intelligent actual
human beings and not pre human, we had no speech. We understood the world in
art and in song and then speech came later and when it did it came though tales
and myth. Speech used to explain things in logical ways came last. Some may
think that makes it better, and logic is a good thing, but what it also means
is myth comes first. The rational cosmography of things is vital to our
understanding of the universe, but the mythic is vital to understanding deeper
things, if indeed you believe that deeper things exist.
So return to the story of
the Ascension, where we are told that Jesus is taken up by a cloud into heaven.
What is this meaning? We think—for no good reason—that the disciples were
ignorant fisherman with no understanding of the world—but the cult of Jesus
arose in Galilee, which was far more Greek than Judea to the south. These men,
and we now know not only men and certainly no only poor men, followed Jesus,
would have been exposed to the great Greek ideas as well as the great Jewish
ones, and the two were not mutually exclusive. So we shouldn’t think they would
spread or be hoodwinked by folktales.
We have become so used to
the idea of the Ascension we have inserted it into all of the gospels though it
is only in two of them. Matthew and John simply end with Jesus talking. Mark
has his. Luke has his twice, but Luke is also going onto tell a longer story
and Matthew and John are not interested in sequels. The Ascension creates an
odd time frame
Easter: Jesus comes out
of tomb
Weeks after Easter: Jesus
makes some apparitions, popping in and out, able to walk through walls, but
wholly solid and capable of eating
40 days later Jesus
ascends into heaven
Where is Jesus during
these forty days when he is popping in and out of houses and walking through
walls, and what type of Jesus is this? We are left with a great deal of
questions. But I wonder if the central message of the Ascension is contained in
the first paragraph of this very essay, that it is the time when he returned to
the Father. I wonder if in a mystery we should not simply leave it at that, if
we should not say that all that these stories are attempts to explain something
the Apostles didn’t seem able to explain.
John does not give us an
Ascension, but a a Descension at the very beginning of his Gospel. He tells us
the Word was God and with God and came down from him. John spends several
chapters, replacing the Last Supper with a long dinner lesson, letting Jesus
tell us that he is leaving, but not leaving us orphans, so that the Spirit may
come. But in John’s Gospel when he summarizes the story of Jesus, he says:
He came unto his own, and his own received him
not.
But as many as received him, to them
gave he power
to become the sons of God, even to them that
believe on his name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor
of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,
(and we
beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of
grace and truth…
And of his fulness have all we
received, and grace for grace….
No man hath seen God at any time, the only
begotten Son,
which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him.
For John, who should have
known, the Ascension and the aftermath of the Resurrection are not geographical
matters, but spiritual ones. The Resurrection is an event we can unpack for
several pages, but the Ascension, which comes after is the moment in which,
somehow, a man who walked the earth as a seemingly private person like the rest
of us, somehow returned to the heart of the Divine, and at the same time,
somehow placed himself in our hearts and put God into our very body, breath and
connective tissue. Somehow the return to heaven was the seating of Christ in
the hearts of his people, and somehow heaven and the heart are made one.
That business is far more
than a kid’s story about a man flying into space.
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