Rescuing Jesus From Outer Space
M. Michael Morse
May 16, 1999
Text: John 17:1-11; I Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
In the ecclesiastical calender, this is known as Ascension Sunday. The Apostle's Creed speaks of Jesus descending to the dead, rising again, then ascending into heaven to be seated at the right hand of The Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead. Since I was a teenager, I've been more than uncomfortable with most creeds, including this one. It is archaic, sexist (as are almost all creeds of the church), and, if taken literally, almost totally incomprehensible and irrelevant at the end of the 20th century. Besides, what's wrong with the left hand of God?
Paul Sherry, President of the United Church of Christ, wrote recently that creeds are not tests of faith but testimonies of faith for people in the United Church of Christ. The problem is, as Paul Sherry well knows, that virtually all creeds were originally written as tests of faith. They were written to include certain ideas and certain people, and to exclude certain ideas and certain people. They were written to provide direction and substance, but they were also written in order to control what people could or should believe, and what they should not and dare not believe. The institutional church has often gorged itself on the addicting narcotic of control in the name of protecting the faith from heresy. It has enshrined concepts and constructs of the past, worshiping them in spite of the fact that new knowledge has proven them false. It has often forced its thinkers and visionaries and prophets to cower in fear of punishment or exclusion. For example, in the 16th century, Galileo was absolutely convinced that Copernicus had been right when he asserted that the earth revolves around the sun. The Church forced Galileo to recant. In 1991 the Roman Catholic Church officially apologized to Galileo for its mistake. It only took four centuries!
What I have just said is not unrelated to Ascension Sunday. The notion that Jesus has gone somewhere, especially to sit at the right hand of The Father, and that he will come again to judge the living and the dead, is, literally speaking, absurd. Or, equally absurd from a literal perspective, as Jesus says in the Gospel of John in his High Priestly Prayer that he is now about to go to the Father. The very apocalyptic passage we read this morning from I Peter is also literally absurd in terms of its notions about the end of the world and joining with Jesus in some glorious place.
Through the years, when I have asserted such things, some people squirm and then exclaim, "But Mike, you're throwing out the faith." My response has been, "No, I'm not. What I'm trying to do is restore it to something that is credible, sensible, powerful, and vibrant. We do not need to check our brains at the front door when we come to worship." And then I continue to explain, just as I'm going to do right now.
Our Jewish friends understand much better than we something very basic about the Scriptures. It is this! Virtually all of what we call Holy Writing is EXPLANATION of a RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. What we call the Bible is for the most part EXPLANATION of a variety of experiences that people have tried to capture in the form of words. The mistake that fundamentalists and literalists make is that they have enshrined the explanation without understanding, and often forgetting about, the experience. The problem, of course, is that the explanation tries almost always to do something that is impossible-namely, capture the essence of something that is mysterious and beyond simple explanation. But words are all we have, we human beings! The words we use always reflect our mind set, our frame of reference, our understanding of the world in which we live. The problem with interpreting the Bible literally, or treating any of the Church Creeds literally, is that they were written by people who lived a long time ago, some in the first century and before, and by people whose understanding reflects the mind set and constructs current during their life-time.
Let me illustrate. The prevailing view of the universe when the creation stories were written, and even when the Gospels were written was of three decks. The earth was in the middle, covered with a canopy, a place underneath, sometimes referred to as Sheol, and a place above, called heaven. People and creatures live on earth. Just above the canopy was the dwelling place of God. At night, one might see stars, thought of as tiny slits in the canopy where God might peer through and see who was behaving and who was not. According to this construct, it made perfect sense, if one sets aside the experience for a moment, for people to think that when Jesus ascended into heaven to be with God, he traveled a short distance to that place just above the canopy.
Copernicus knew this was not possible. Galileo confirmed it. Carl Sagan used to amuse some of us by suggesting that if Jesus ascended, literally, and traveled at the speed of light, even after 2000 years, he would not yet be out of our own galaxy! And, as Sagan would say, "There are billions and billions of galaxies in space." Astronomically the whole concept makes no sense anymore. Theologically it makes even less sense. It puts Jesus out there instead of right here. It envisions a God who is removed and remote, who somehow looks down from above. This God is not primarily indwelling, but is waiting for that opportune time to intervene with some kind of judgment.
If, however, we try to look again at the experience of the people who told about the resurrection, the ascension, and later Pentecost (because the three are really intertwined), then the picture is very different, indeed. The experience was conditioned by their understanding of the Elijah saga, so we cannot really have a deep appreciation of it all without looking at it through Jewish eyes and Jewish tradition. Elijah is second only to Moses in the hierarchy of great historical figures. He is the prophet who provides the defining identity for the Jewish people. In brilliant midrashic form the Gospel writers weave through the story of Jesus the presence of Elijah. We see him underneath the story of the widow's son at Nain being raised to life; we see him in the story of the feeding of the multitudes; we see him, of course, in the story of the transfiguration. We see him in the question put to John the Baptist: "Are you Elijah...?" And we see him in John's ministry as he railed against the wickedness of Herod just as Elijah had railed against the wickedness of King Ahab.
Now, do you remember the very end of the Elijah saga? Elijah heads toward Bethel (it was Bethany for Jesus) with his disciple Elisha. They talked together, but at some point Elijah asks Elisha to turn back. Elisha refuses to leave. They come to the River Jordan and Elijah removes his cloak and strikes the water with it. It parts and they walk through. If you see a repeat of the Moses story and the Red Sea, you're supposed to! Because the point is that the God who was so powerfully with Moses is now with Elijah guiding, strengthening, empowering. Elisha then makes a peculiar request. He asks Elijah, "Will you give me a double portion of your spirit?" Elijah doesn't know if that is possible, but he replies, "If you see me when I am taken up, you will receive it." There is a great whirlwind, a chariot pulled by horses of fire, and Elijah disappears forever. Elisha does see and he returns to the Jordan and splits it open with the same cloak. He then meets with fifty prophets who confirm that he has the spirit of Elijah. They also look for Elijah, but they do not find him. Elisha continued his ministry, supposedly with twice the power of the very human Elijah.
Jesus also ascends into God, so to speak. There is no chariot, there are no fiery horses provided by God. Jesus doesn't need that because he has his own divine power. The disciples and others waited for divine power, not human power, to come, and when it did, it was not double-fold, but a thousand fold. The spirit of Elijah was given just to one person, Elisha. The Holy Spirit of God was given not just to one, but to the whole gathered community of believers. And it was a spirit not confined by time or space. It was, as Luke had put it, Emmanuel, God with you, God in you. God was in the flesh of Jesus. Now God was in the flesh and spirit of the gathered community. And the body of believers would know precisely who they were and what they were intended to become as they gave the love of that same God away to "the least of these." They would know the Christ when they saw his face in the lives and in the suffering of people to whom they were sent to help. And it was not just certain people, but, as Matthew suggests in his closing words, all of the world.
Ascension is powerful metaphor when we know that the experience of those who believed was that they were now empowered in a new way with the gift of Christ's spirit in their hearts. They could not go where Jesus went, if we play out the metaphor, because Jesus had already returned to their midst. He would be found in the weak, in the terror stricken, in the child, the widow, in the war torn refugees, in the immigrants, especially in the dispossessed, the homeless and the hopeless. The overall and powerful testimony of faith is that Jesus was not diminished by abuse or even a cruel death, nor was he gone after the resurrection or the ascension, but became present in a new way for all eternity. He is not out there. But he is in here. He is you and me, and in every creature of the earth. Think about that! Paradoxically, the experience of ascension tells us that!