I was having a conversation a few days ago on a subject that
I’ll bet you weren’t even remotely thinking about. It was about Jesus’ descent into hell. Someone was telling me that when he was a
young boy he asked his priest what sense it made to talk about Jesus going to
hell. The priest seems to have taken the
question seriously but whatever answer he gave didn’t come near satisfying the
boy’s curiosity. I remember a time when
an adult parishioner asked me a similar question. “What is Jesus’ ascension and how is it
different from his resurrection?” I don’t know that my matter-of-fact answer
was any more satisfying although it was a textbook answer. I said that the resurrection refers to Jesus’
rising from the dead and the ascension refers to his ascending to the
Father. Not necessarily wrong, but many
times those are the stopping places for such questions and such discussions.
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| Icon of the Ascension |
The problem with both of these things is that the very terms
“descent” and “ascension,” carry with them spatial pictures—down and up. They reinforce the idea that hell is “down
there” somewhere and heaven is “up yonder” somewhere. I was in my hometown this week for a
funeral. Conway, South Carolina, is
about as flat as pancake. Yet even in
that flat stretch of coastal plain there is in Conway a section that is historically
known as “the hill.” Driving up the street on which I grew up, I could see in
the distance the land rise. I vividly
remember that when somebody told me at about age 3 that the devil lived in hell
and that hell was below the ground, I imagined that “the hill” must be the
place where the devil was coming up out of the ground to snatch people away,
and a sign that he was getting close.
Spatial descriptions work for the untrained, concrete
mind. But in a few years we learn that
if you travel down through the crust of the earth, you don’t ever run into a
literal hell, and if you travel out into space, you can go forever without
running into a literal heaven. So, if
you’re thinking about the ascension at all, I invite you to loose yourself from
any idea that it is about Jesus going “up there” some place. It is a metaphor, not a map. It is an experience, not a geography
lesson. And it is about a truth, not a
worn-out fairy tale.
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| Typical image of the Ascension. Can you relate? |
What, then, to make of the ascension, if it has nothing to
do with going up? A good place to begin
is with today’s gospel. What is interesting is that this gospel has nothing to do with an ascension narrative as
such. It comes out of that long passage
in the Fourth Gospel that the writer sets in the context of the night preceding
Jesus’ crucifixion. It is in the form of
a long prayer that Jesus is praying for his community as he is about to be
killed. He is going to leave them. Known as “the high priestly prayer,” Jesus is
interceding for his community. Packed
into the passage shaped like a prayer is a mine full of insights about the
nature of God, the purpose of Christ’s community, and the relationship that
Jesus has with both. To grasp the
“ascension” of Jesus we have to let the essential idea of this passage sink
in. And that idea is oneness.
Yet there is a troublesome word that we could well
misinterpret and thereby miss the main point. That word is “world,” or, in the Greek, κοσμος. The key to understanding
what “world” is driving at is to realize that the
entire message of Jesus is a clarion call to live a kind of life different from
the life that human societies and organizations and governments and cultures
frequently construct and promote in this world. It is a life that Jesus called the kingdom of God. Nearly all his
parables and pronouncements were about this different kind of living, marked by
generosity instead of greed; justice in place of domination; radical
inclusiveness in place of religious, racial, gender and ethnic
exclusivity. In short, life in the
kingdom is what you pray for if you take seriously the petitions in the Lord’s
Prayer. It is not about trying to get
God to love you. Nor is it about working
to get yourself ready for an afterlife. And it certainly is not about appeasing an angry God who creates you one
way and expects you to live another. There is a sense in which the systems of the
world, dominated by power and control, indeed hate anyone who dares defy
them. If you have ever been a
whistleblower, you perhaps know that firsthand. Any time the systems of human societies are threatened, they will go
into overdrive to assert themselves.
It is critical to
note that not all systems of the world are corrupt, though all are
corruptible. It’s important to
distinguish between purpose and performance. It’s also important to understand
that not everything in the world of human affairs is counter to the purposes of
God. When religious communities have
taken stands against art, suppressed humor, forgotten how to play, identified
bodily pleasure with evil, the result has been disastrous in nearly every
way, and in the end such renunciation of
many things in this world that make life wonderful to live has led to making it
a sour, boring enterprise. Such renunciation is about as far away from the joy
of Jesus that he continues to say he wants his community to know completely as
anything we could come up with.
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| Another image of Ascension. Where is the Body? |
Have we digressed
from the ascension? It might seem so, but all of this is actually to get at
what the ascension truly is about. It is
about a joyful, caring, generous, accepting God whose very nature is love,
inviting all creation to share the very divine nature. And that means oneness. Jesus is one with the Father. We are one with Jesus. Therefore we are one with the Father. And because we are one, “we” include every single person on the
planet. “That they may be one even as we
are one” does not stop at the twelve disciples, nor at the thousand, nor at the
edge of this, that, or the other church. It is a re-writing of the old Covenant first made with Abraham—that the
community of God might include as many people as the stars in the universe and
the sand on the seashore or in the desert. Jesus “leaves” his community only in the sense that he is no longer
physically present. His mission is
fulfilled when the divine life that he manifests is the life that the entire
human species recognizes in itself.
C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere
Christianity that we are to be “little Christs.” As one of the great Fathers of the Church,
St. Maximus the Confessor, put it, “What he is by nature, we become by
grace.” The Ascension is actually about
our discovering that instead of the physical presence of Jesus of Nazareth, the
physical presence of God is in us. We
become the sacrament of God: the outward, visible signs of the divine life, one
word for which is “grace.”
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| The Body of the Ascended Christ |
Perhaps, in the end, the old metaphor of “going up” is not
so bad after all, if by it we mean that Christ has lifted us up from the bogs
in which we’ve been stuck to a higher, more beautifully joyful life than we’ve
ever been able to construct on our own.
A sermon for the Ascension of Christ based on John
17:6-19
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018
