Part of this, I think, has to do with our contemporary discomfort talking about the Ascension as an event; as someone noted in The Text This Week , what do you do with an Ascension? In choosing artwork for this blog entry, I decided upon a detail of the Vanni painting, not the entire piece, because it just looks too comical -- Jesus is flying through the air, cape flapping behind him like a Marvel superhero, with his arm outstretched: "To infinity -- and beyond!"
I personally am of the Something Happened school -- the Jesus who was killed did not seem to stay dead...appeared to both individuals and groups of his friends in surprising ways over a short period of time...then these visitations stopped; but in a way that left his friends with the understanding that their relationship with him was still going to be a real relationship,lived out in a different way. One of my friends on Beliefnet quotes someone as describing Jesus' Ascension as Jesus entering into the very heart of God and thus making himself accessible to all; I couldn't find a good illustration of that to post here, but I think the image works better for most of us than "Beam me up, Dad."
And, from a specifically Lutheran perspective -- as Garrison Keillor describes in the weekly news from Lake Wobegon, we Lutherans want to be a useful people. Baking casseroles for funeral dinners is more our discipleship style than contemplative prayer. At heart we're more comfortable with "Get back to work" sermons than "Celebrate the Mystery" sermons.
But I think Mark Allan Powell, whose book Loving Jesus I've been reading lately, would approach the Ascension from another perspective. In his book he spends a great deal of time talking about the paradox of Christ's simultaneous presence and absence. Of course Christ is present for us in the revealed Word of Scripture, in one another and in the Sacraments. But at the same time, Powell notes, we live in a state of "confident sadness." We miss Jesus' face-to-face, unmistakable presence. Powell notes, in talking about the Eucharist's foretaste of the feast to come, "Enough with the appetizers! I want the feast!" We live, as Christians, in a constant tension between the now and the not-yet. Our Love is here, yet not here.
Continues Powell: "Confident sadness allows us to live with faith that does not deny reality, faith that recognizes that life in the world is hard, and indeed, not as it should be...we are in love with a bridegroom who has gone away."
So perhaps an answer to the question, "Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" is: Because we're happy. Because we're sad. Because we're expectant. Because we're impatient. Because we're in love.
And all of that is okay.
Detail, "Ascension," Andrea Vanni
2 comments:
Pastor Paul Bosch wrote:
"The metaphors associated with this day could be problematic for many modern people, since we in the Twentieth Century have come to regard the primitive acceptance of a 'three-storied universe' as hopelessly quaint and pre-scientific. Are we compelled to accept this primitive metaphor--that in the Ascension, Jesus goes 'upstairs' to God--in preaching or teaching or prayers? No. There must surely be other, more contemporary, more intellectually-satisfying interpretations of this profession of faith for modern believers. Theologically, the Ascension functions in a satisfying and necessary symmetry with the Virgin Birth: the Eternal Word, having entered human life in the birth of Christ, now returns, at the Ascension, to take up again the majesty of Godhead.
"But the credibility of Christian faith certainly does not stand or fall with either profession. Neither Virgin Birth nor Ascension is an essential article of faith. In scripture, Paul knows nothing of either; so also with Mark; so with John. We could describe both Virgin Birth and Ascension as pious but venerable Christian 'myths' (in the technical sense), or metaphors, if those words did not so puzzle--and enrage!--some sensibilities.
"Yet how else can the Gospel even be explained, without access to such metaphors? We are justified in becoming 'like little children' at this point. With Job, I am willing to 'lay my hand upon my mouth' in humility, and confess the Creeds wholeheartedly with the simplest souls among us! But in Bible studies, and in preaching in the presence of others with sturdy faith and searching intellect, we might want to say more, as above."
Tom: I have found that discussing the Jewish Scriptures under the tutelage of a rabbi has helped me attain that childlike/Joblike ability to "'lay my hand upon my mouth' in humility" -- it's a whole 'nother way of reading/working with Scripture that I find provides a helpful, almost mystical counterpoint to the thinky German-academy approach.
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