The beautiful permanence of God
Ascension Day | Luke 24:44-53
We have now spent six weeks celebrating the resurrection! Easter is our longest season of the church year at fifty days. That’s seven full weeks, like a Jubilee of days. Seven and fifty are essential numbers for the Hebrew people because they remind us of Sabbath and Shalom, of restoration and redemption. On the Sabbath and in the year of Jubilee, all become equal, debts are forgiven, and life is restored. All great things to connect with Easter.
On the fortieth day, which is today, we mark the Ascension. Forty days, like the number of days in Lent, of days Jesus was in the wilderness, and years of the Hebrew people wandering in the desert, offers a different count. A bit of journeying, seeking, and at times, of being lost. But in this is a kind of quarantine, of retreat, of soul-searching.
If we consider these two images against each other, of the wandering in the wilderness and of the year of Jubilee, we might find ourselves thinking a little differently about the Easter season than we were probably taught.
These Images
These images evoke for me Mary’s Magnificat, the song she sings at the angel’s announcement of her divine pregnancy rather than the glorious pronouncements of Jesus’s return, which often sound more like the people’s relief that they don’t have to figure out what to do next than it does true joy.
They also guide us back to the greater picture of what God is inviting the world into; that thing we might call, as Verna Dozier did, the Dream of God, that concept Jesus describes as an alternative kingdom. By returning to the teaching, to The Way of Love, we once again become mindful of our place in a project of ongoing transformation.
That’s why this feels like an antidote to a proclivity toward inactive adoration. Such as that sense of our celebrating because we’re happy or giving because we feel good rather than celebrating because God is good and giving because that makes our neighbors feel good. That we might embody the very conditions of our prayer that we experience heaven on earth.
Then at the intersection of these images is one of the four essential characteristics of the whole Jesus Event. He is born, dies, rises, and ascends. The Ascension becomes the hinge in the Easter season itself, even as it serves as the conclusion of the Jesus story.
If we diagramed the gospels, you would see an opening which begins the rising action, which approaches the climax in Holy Week, at the end of which we have two events which represent the beginning and ending of the climax: the crucifixion and resurrection. Then the stories move quickly toward the conclusion in the ascension and final (for now) departure of Jesus.
Dealing With the Ascension
Many of you know that I like to name the way modern brains struggle to deal with the physical absolutes which complicate the Ascension story. How long the people watch Jesus ascend, how fast he’s moving, where he goes once they see him no longer. It is hard for post-Enlightenment Christians to make sense of it. And it is probably the one event we can’t put in a film. Like, it’s just not going to work.
And this, like thinking about the wandering in the desert, like the whole season of Lent, offers a strange vibe for us in the Easter season and on a principal feast day. In the same way challenging a literal seven-day creation six thousand years ago causes both an existential and spiritual crisis for certain evangelical Christians, I wonder if maybe the ascension is our version of that. Where you and I might find ourselves asking questions of the story we’d rather not and struggling with a more literal reading than we tend to do.
Given all this, why not just proclaim “He is risen!”, ring our bells, and say “Alleluia!” rather than deal with something we don’t understand?
I shouldn’t assume you have the problem with a literal reading of the ascension like I do. Maybe you can reconcile it in a much healthier way. But I know that I struggle with it and trust that I’m also not the only one who does. And maybe, because of this, we might find a place to rest our analytical heads.
Ascension as Defiance
If the ascension is the cross-section where we encounter the wilderness and the Jubilee, it also serves to be a moment of defiance, not just of the laws of nature, but of the exclusive nature of human and divine, which might evolve into literal and metaphor, real and imagined, in which grace overwhelms the permanence of hate and restoration overturns oppression.
The ascension is a divine rebellion that only makes sense as the final element, after resurrection spits in the eye of death, after God changes the rules of creation for the purpose of love, mercy, and the restoration of the world.
So we are invited into something that isn’t just impossible or improbable, but to something that dares you to even try to think this is how the world is supposed to work, that God can’t do anything or that we get to control the facts of creation and not God.
In short, the ascension is punk rock.
Embodied and Disembodied
These final Sundays in the Easter season have us reading from the Farewell Discourse in the gospel of John. This is the place where Jesus offers his followers a way to see what is coming, to know how to trust in God and one another, to love and do the things he has taught them. It is as beautiful as it is practical.
And these teachings sandwich the ascension in our liturgical calendar like a regular reinforcement of a truth we dare not avoid. That the work is love, and that the divine presence goes nowhere. Even as the physical, humanity of Jesus is going away, the spiritual presence remains.
And then, let us further interrogate those very words, pushing back on this exclusive rendering to say that the very physicality of Christ doesn’t so much leave as get distributed into his disciples. That the singular human walking the earth no longer contains the divine project. It has been drawn into an ever-expanding network of followers who do the Jesus work of loving and serving and blessing and freeing their neighbors. A network that keeps expanding through time to include us. And then, as we do the work of loving and serving and blessing and freeing our neighbors, the network keeps expanding through our community and through time itself into an untold future driven by love..
It is embodied in us and disembodied from the exclusive nature of Jesus.
Graduation
In a couple of weeks, my daughter will be graduating from high school. Exciting and horrifying as such a thing is for Rose and I as their parents, it is also a joyous and momentous occasion. And days after they walk in their cap and gown, the’ll move into Waycross to be a counsellor for the summer. And then we’ll see them four weeks before going away to school to be an adult. Gross, right?
And yet, what we explore in Easter and in this Ascension Feast is that strange sense of almost and not yet, of saying goodbye but know they aren’t actually gone anywhere. And even when they go, they won’t be away for ever. And even, God forbid, there comes a time when we can’t see them again on this plain, they are still with us. Memories are echoes of reality.
None of this invalidates our feelings, right? We’re going to be so sad this fall. And excited. Because that’s how this works. It’s going to be both. And they are going to be with us forever. And the people who are near us were created with that same spark, that same divine love as our kid.
All of us are so blessed. With love and witness to everything human and divine.