Invisible God: The challenge of the Ascension

In the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, Jesus and his disciples go to Peter’s house, where they find Peter’s mother-in-law prostrated by a fever. Jesus takes her by the hand, banishing the fever, and so complete is the cure that the woman rises from her sickbed and takes up her household duties, offering hospitality to the visitors.  News of the cure quickly spreads, and before long “the whole city was gathered before the door.” Jesus wades into the crowd, and heals many of physical ailments and bedevilments.

In his paraphrase of Mark’s Gospel, Erasmus reflects on the story, commenting that while Christ, the Light of the World, was alive, the fellowship of the church was not numerous, “but after his death, a great multitude of people began to flow towards it from all quarters of the earth,” flocking to his community because of the evidence of Christ’s works — the most miraculous of which is the transformation of sinners. (After all, which is easier— to say truthfully “Your sins are discharged,” or “Rise up and walk”?).  Yet there is something that needs to be added to Erasmus’s comment (something I think he and George Fox would both approve).

The Jesus movement was profoundly shaken when Jesus was taken from their midst — first by his captivity and trial, then by his death, and then at the Ascension, when his human visage and presence were forever withdrawn, except in the memory of his friends and eyewitnesses. It is noteworthy that when the apostles met to find a replacement for Judas among the 12, they felt it was essential that one be chosen who had been with the movement from the beginning, and was a witness to the whole story of Jesus’ mission, death, and resurrection.

Now when they received the Holy Spirit (whether at the Pentecost event, or in the upper room directly from the risen Jesus, as in John’s gospel), these witnesses were fully confident that the Spirit that they experienced was the same Christ that they had know in and through Jesus.

Indeed, the two “versions” of the giving of the Spirit reinforce each other:  The small coterie of associates experienced the gift of the Comforter in intimate conversation with a Jesus whom they knew in three dimensions, so to speak (though his awesome transformation revealed other dimensions they had hardly guessed before, except at the Transfiguration).  When the Spirit descended some days later as if tongues of fire, they recognized it as a renewal and perhaps intensification of what they had experienced with Jesus already. Now, it was not only consolation, but also prophetic commission, and so began the flood of people towards the church.

But this was also a point of great vulnerability for the movement.  It reminds me of the time in the book of Judges (Ch. 2) when Joshua comes to the end of his life, and all his generation, and a new generation arose that had not witnessed the Exodus, the giving of the Law at Sinai, and the vivid presence of their God both in direct action, and through the words and works of his servants Moses and Joshua. Then this generation began to do evil in the sight of God, as the story tells, worshipping other gods, and following practices not sanctioned by the Law.

It is interesting to imagine yourself as a member of this new generation.  Your people have been settled in a fertile land*, and are learning its rhythms and natural characteristics.  No longer a wanderer, you can build a home, a farm and flock, and accumulate enough substance and stability that you can start a family.  You are surrounded by co-inhabiting peoples who know the land well, and whose rising generation are also interested in commerce, farming, and the arts of home-making. To love the land  is to feel its life, to feel its spiritual power, and the personifications of the forces alive in the land would have been cheering and perhaps compelling psychologically.   The intensity of daily work, of learning the land and its language, of finding a partner and starting a family — these good, homely, everyday matters must inevitably have been much more absorbing than a rigorous attention to the Covenant developed, forged, in fire and exile, danger and deliverance — but for you only known at second-hand.  In small steps or large, the Convenant memories were forgotten or rationalized into something that fit better with their reality.  New occasions, after all, teach new duties, right? **

Well, so: When Jesus was ascended, the embodiment of the Christ was the church, made up of living stones, each full of personality, and none as clear as Jesus, except when fully centered in His Spirit. When someone who walked with Jesus was discerning the guidance of a spirit they felt moving in them, they had a great reservoir of first-hand knowledge (tacit or explicit) with which to decide “That’s not the Holy Spirit of Jesus”  or “That’s Jesus!”   But there arose a new generation that did not have that experiential foundation to draw upon.   How easy to reinterpret the message that you had not yourself lived, but learned from the witnesses!  The invisible Christ, who for most people is not as vividly, insistently present as one’s parents, neighbors, companions, rulers, is for that very reason likely to be reinterpreted (re-remembered) in ways that make him/it less threatening or inconvenient.

For like any good teacher, Jesus could be very inconvenient.  As the physically present teacher, Jesus could exert personal influence both by physical acts (healing, praying, walking, eating, suffering), and by Truth-revealing dialectic.  He could ask questions, raise challenges, present thought-experiments, in ways that could open the door to new life.  His teaching and debating could be done gently or harshly, depending on the interlocutor before him.

He could say to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” because they were in a relationship of master-disciple, and the rebuke could shake Peter (for a while) out of complacency. So also when Jesus foretold Peter’s triple denial and his flight in fear from the power of the state; so also when he teased (or challenged) Peter and the others about their preparedness to drink the cup that Jesus was tasting fully, the potion of testing and suffering.  He exerted force to break through protective shells that cramped or prevented growth in the Light.

Yet with others he could be much gentler, though still relentless, as in his conversation with the woman at the well (John 4). Within the embrace of traditional religion, she had yet found plenty of freedom for her own independence from convention.  Jesus confronted her settled opinions, but gradually, and he let her reflect and draw her own conclusions about her condition. And his proclamation to her was not about promiscuity or willfulness, or irresponsibility in relationships (or whatever her multiple partners implied, about which Jesus made no diagnosis).  He spoke instead about worship and abundant life.

He asserted to her the real possibility (nay, the necessity) of a religion based on a living encounter with the Spirit of God, of which he was a witness and mediator. It is in that truth that authentic worship exists, in which the most acceptable offering is a broken and contrite heart (Ps. 51). Drinking from that fountain of life, the acts and beauties of tradition can be renewed, as you yourself are renewed.

Now, when Jesus has been translated upon his Ascension, and leaves his followers to live the truth he showed/taught them, guided in (along the path of) Truth by his spirit in their hearts and in their koinōnia, it becomes a lot easier for those followers to “recall” Christ in a way that tames him, that removes some of the prophetic edge, retires him to a figure of the past, encased in narrative and liturgy and muted — no. longer the insistent dialogue partner and teacher.  Of course, you can choose, or be drawn, to seek his more complete presence, urgent and mysterious, but if you don’t, absorbed by the vivid matters of daily life and imagination, you can drift unchallenged into compromise and lukewarmness, and it is only by grace or prophetic encounter that you can see how far you’ve drifted. In a cocoon of comfort and accommodation, what spirit do you allow yourself to hear?  What gods do you appeal to and rely upon in the course of daily life?

So while the Crucifixion was a great test for Jesus’ followers, and the Resurrection another, the Ascension is in some ways the long challenge, the one that we face through all our days, when God, , once so vividly present in Jesus’ life, words, and works, truly seems absconditus, hidden or withdrawn.

The calling is to find our way back to the true and living Spirit we have met with sometimes, not resting until we find the One that is as quick and challenging as Jesus-in-person, as brisk and shocking and alive as the streams now exuberantly bounding down the hills with the coming of spring.  The path is only to be found again, if it’s grown cold, by minding where warmth stirs in the heart — and in minding it, welcome the times when it brings you discomfort with yourself, whose truthfulness is sealed by the love that accompanies the nudge.

Then that Spirit which is recognizably that of the Logos, the disconcerting Wisdom of God, that Jesus manifested (and so have some of his friends then and since), will unfold the fulness of the gospel as it is being preached in and for  our lives and times.   You are ready, your hands are open to receive, and to become part of the invitation to wholeness that God extends to all folk.

*justified by a narrative that reminds one of the Doctrine of Discovery by means of which Europeans arrogated to themselves the lands and resources of the Western Hemisphere — a doctrine which I must say rests upon a false interpretation of God’s will, even though I am a beneficiary of that false teaching.

** just as there arose in Egypt a generation that knew not Joseph, and whose reinterpretation of the Hebrew presence there transformed hospitality into captivity.