What is the Ascension?

 Consider Easter (another earthquake, a gravestone rolled away by an angel who then sits on top of it, the empty tomb, multiple appearances of Jesus to Mary Magdalene, Thomas, to two then to eleven disciples, in whose presence he eats some grilled fish or passes through locked doors). There are so many accounts whose strongly mythological character should prevent us on the same logic from celebrating such suspicious “events”. Then we consider Pentecost, with its violent noise and tongues of flame resting on the heads of the believers in Jerusalem…

We don’t really know how to make our faith loyal to the mould – the cultural ideas and context – in which it was formed. In itself, this mould is neither Gospel nor Christian: it maps onto a vision of reality which is no longer ours. Useless to cross out whole chunks of Scripture on the grounds that they contradict what science teaches today: to cut out of the Bible everything which goes against our current vision of the universe, to purge and censure it in the name of reason, is to reduce it to a caricature. The purpose of reading the Bible isn’t so much to see what the text said, as what it means and what it can still tell us today at the level of our faith. A biblical passage, even as part of a vision of a world now dead, can still carry a meaning which is far from dead.

We could conceive of many possible meanings for this elevation of Jesus into the sky by considering it from the point of view of various opposites: presence/absence, earthy/heavenly, visible/invisible, departure/return, stillness/movement, etc. A very common interpretation along these lines comes from Colossians 3. 1-2: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” But removed from its context, this passage could lead us to a bloodless, rootless spiritualism, a sort of religious opposition to life, prioritising heaven, the eternal and the soul to the detriment of the world, the here-and-now and the body. Such an elitist vision has little connection with Christianity, which is above all a religion of incarnation. Our faith, as Albert Schweitzer showed again and again, is composed simultaneously of involvement and detachment, of ethics and mysticism: involvement in the world created by God through acts of active charitable love and justice; detachment because we look towards the Kingdom of God and the active hope which fuels our time on earth implies that we are not completely and solely a part of that world.

Jean-Noël Aletti writes that this passage from Colossians does not indicate “a flight from the realities of the world or a starry-eyed utopian ethics.” A significant biblical verse, a sort of warning against this type of mystical approach, is Acts 1. 11: “Why are you standing there looking into heaven?”

It would be better, faced with the ascension of Jesus into heaven – with all the symbolism which we hear in the word “heaven” – to see that Jesus goes beyond us, that he is not in our power. We have no control over Jesus or God. God, the First, the Transcendent, is unattainable. We cannot box him in with words or definitions, however correct and orthodox they may be. God surpasses us infinitely.

The Ascension was used by the Protestant Reformers, first Zwingli, then Calvin, to oppose the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For them, this was the key factor to be learned from the Ascension: if Jesus’ body is in heaven, it cannot at the same time be present in bread and wine. This doctrinal matter set Zwingli and Luther at loggerheads, even if Protestants of all stripes (Calvinist, Lutheran and Radical) agreed that the sacrifice of the Mass was to be rejected. Catholic–Protestant debate centred for centuries around differences of opinion concerning the Lord’s Supper. There is a valid interpretative point here for the way we see the Ascension. Speaking of the presence of the body of Christ in the supper in his Expositio fidei of 1531, Zwingli criticises the error of thinking that the body of Christ is given to us via the signs of bread and wine. He writes: “the body of Christ is no longer with us in this world from the moment it ascends into heaven.” So when Jesus says “This is my body”, he speaks of his own body on the verge of death as the sign. To eat the supper in the same way today would be completely “unreasonable”, because recognising that Jesus is in heaven implies that he now has an “immortal and incorruptible” body, which cannot be consumed. To eat a mortal body, human flesh, would be for Zwingli something “cruel, savage and brutish”.

Another way of understanding the Ascension is suggested by the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which sees the Ascension as symmetrical with Christmas, with Easter lying in the middle. At Christmas, God comes down to us in Jesus; at the Ascension, it is humanity which goes up to God in Jesus. We see in the Gospels a humanisation of God as well as a divinisation of Mankind. God must be born in Mankind and Mankind be born in God. The divine Incarnation and the exaltation of humanity frame the Gospel story like book-ends. God has become human so that humanity may become divine.

We see here an interpretation which abandons a theology which crushes Mankind under the weight of the divine and which reckons that in the end God is all and that we are nothing. In Jesus, we can never reduce Mankind to the nothingness of his mortal and sinful condition. God is not so great that humanity is rendered useless; God does not require our abasement in order to be fully God.

The Ascension becomes the magnificent origin of a Christian humanism: in Jesus, God does not exist without humanity, nor humanity without God.

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