Well no, I don’t.
I myself happen to believe most of the miracles attributed to Jesus. But I don’t have to believe them to consider myself a Christian. The list is actually quite short. You have to believe in these: that he was born of a virgin, through the power of the spirit; that he rose from the dead. And that he ascended into heaven.
And perhaps oddly enough, it’s the Ascension that I always have to work on.
Here’s why. With miracles in general I find myself caught between two extremes–the fundamentalists and the modernists. The fundamentalists want to make everything in the Gospels or rather in the whole Bible literally and historically true and factual, and I can’t see that at all: there are many things I think are meant symbolically or allegorically or parabolically, starting with the Six Days of Creation. But then the modernists do the very opposite. They want to explain it all away, to water down every miracle, up to and including the Resurrection. They explain that as “he lived on in their memories.” Listen–if that was all he lived on in we wouldn’t be here today. I have several friends who have passed on who live again in my memories–but I don’t go about telling others that these have risen from the dead.
So on the one hand, I have trouble imagining the literal ascension. I don’t know why but somehow it just seems awkward, somehow unfitting. So I can’t quite do what the fundamentalists do, which is take the story as undiluted history. They simply see no problem with the Ascension: he went up, my old Webster’s Seven says “to move gradually upward,” and that’s what he did. I don’t even like the few pictures of the Ascension that have been I think perhaps that is why it has not been one of the great New Testament scenes in art–how many Ascensions can you think of? We can think of Raphael’s Transfiguration, that Bishop Grein likes so much, and Della Francesca’s Resurrection, and any number of Nativities, Annunciations, and Crucifixions–but who painted the Ascension? The really good ones are outside the western art tradition. Andrei Rublev’s, the Rabbula Gospels. At least those work for me, and I believe it’s because they seem to say “this is not what it looked like this is what it meant.”
On the other hand I certainly can’t say with the Modernists, “he ascended in a sense.” I have read that. The Ascension simply meant that he had a consciousness of heaven, not that he literally rose. Or that the Apostles had a sense of him being absorbed into Heaven. Or some other lame excuse for a rational explanation that our boxed-in logic can handle. Well, I will take Hans Memling’s picture of Jesus’ feet dangling from a cloud over that.
But I don’t like that. I have to work on belief in it. It is very simply part of my faith.
One thing I find helpful is this. I believe it whenever different threads in Scripture start coming together, for me that is very convincing. And this is one of those occasions: the great Prophet Daniel, the greatest of the Hebrew Prophets for looking far ahead, proclaims that the Son of Man will come victoriously in a cloud–which is exactly how the story says he ascends, and the angles promise he will return. In Exodus Yahweh God moves about with the Children of Israel in the cloud by day and the fire by night. When Jesus was Transfigured, there again was that cloud. The Divine presence seems to like the Cloud. I believe it, and yet I don’t quite see it, I suppose that’s the best way to put it.
But if instead of trying to imagine it I ask what does it mean, what does it matter, then I discover something. Then I don’t care how it looked but I care very much that it happened. For what it means and why it matters is this.
He represents us in Heaven; we represent him on earth.
First, Jesus represents us in heaven. Represents us, because he truly is one of us. The Incarnation did not end with the ascension. Lots of people, even Christians who fully accept the Word made Flesh and the Risen Christ, start to separate the two. I mean, I think many picture it this way or understand it this way: he came down from heaven he assumed human flesh and lived among us, then when he went back to Heaven he became as he was before. But that’s not what the story says. He remains human when he rises from the dead, and he takes his flesh with him when he ascends into Heaven. What the Ascension means is that there is one fully enfleshed, solid, resurrected human being in the Kingdom of Heaven–that it is not all ghost and spirit.
And we says the story experience what he did–the Holy Spirit has descended upon us, just as it did with him at the start of his service. Now at the first Pentecost the same happens to the Church.
Now here we run into the problem of actually doing what Christ says. In the Gospels this is a recurrent problem. Jesus will heal someone, Jesus will order the man to tell no one, then the man will go off shouting the news to anyone who will listen. Jesus will explain something in a parable, and the Pharisees, or his own disciples, or the crowds, will take him literally.
Two men–Luke doesn’t say they are angels but there is a creative blur between humans and angels now and then–two men tell ask them, why are you standing there looking up into the sky?” Forth days before, two men at the Tomb asked a very similar question of the female disciples who appeared there: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The angels at the tomb add: didn’t you hear what he told you? Don’t you remember what he said? That same question goes unspoken at the Ascension: didn’t you hear what he just told you, just seconds ago? You are looking up into the sky because you expect his return, but 1 you have been told that nobody knows when that will occur except for the Father and 2 you have been given directions what to do in the meanwhile–why not go do it?
Why not go and spread this Good Mews, baptize nations, show the world your example of sibling love, and celebrate the Eucharist? A student asked me why we Christians don’t just do foot washing or something, why do we eat the Body of Christ? She said to her it seemed so “creepy.” Well I did what I could about the creepiness. But the answer to her question was, because he said so.
I find the Ascension very helpful right now. If what I have said is valid and correct, that the Ascension means we have in the Kingdom of God a fully human incarnate representative, and that he has in us his fully incarnate representatives ringing that kingdom in on earth, it gives us a kind of heavenly balance. For I am caught between two other extremes in the matter of heaven: I do not believe with the modernists that it is just a sort of concept for peace and justice on this earth. But I do not believe either with the Evangelicals that it makes this earthly life pretty much null, void, and irrelevant and that we should put up with any number of outrages in this life because of the promise of the world to come–that is too much carrot-on-the stick.
The Ascension affirms that both are utterly real–this life and the next, and that our business is to bring them together.
And right now I find our world very much in need of a little heavenliness. It seems the one thing we can count on is being disappointed. A few months ago I remember starting to feel some very positive energy about the Presidential election: the Democratic party seemed about to offer either the first woman or the first African-American as candidate, while the Republicans seemed that they were going to offer the one character in their gallery who seemed to have been an independent thinker, a moral and decent man, and a real instead of an armchair war hero. I went and studied their websites and read their platforms in detail, I felt hopeful. Well, the same three are there, but somehow I feel as though the energy has somehow leaked. I still am hopeful–but only now because I know it’s a virtue and I should practice it. All three somehow seem to have in just a few weeks’ time somehow been weighted down. They all feel to me rather earthbound.
And that is just a glaring example of what I mean. It’s not that we’re plague-ridden or riot-torn or struggling through famine or anything like that. Our western corner of the world is just as unfairly well-off and affluent as ever, or almost. It’s just that everything seems so earthbound right now: the arts. The weather. The economy. The atmosphere. We could use a breath of heavenly air, I believe. We could stand to gaze upward into the skies: the only other thing I see rising sky-high is the price of fuel.
So I welcome this Ascension Sunday. I welcome this hint of heaven, this reminder of our representative alive and well in God’s kingdom.
I have to struggle to see it. But not at all to believe it. And I do recall standing on the Mount of Olives one very sharp spring day and looking at the footprints many believe were his last, and smiling a little. And at the same time, when nobody was looking, I did manage to gaze upward into the sky.
