The Ascension, Salvador Dali
Ascension
Fr. Tony’s Meditation
for St. Mark’s Episcopal Church’s
weekly “Paw Prints” e-zine
May 27, 2022
Yesterday, Thursday, was the Feast of the Ascension, 40 days after Easter and ten days before Pentecost. It is a Greater Feast of the Church, and commemorates the end of the 40-day ministry of the Risen Lord to his disciples after his resurrection. Many churches observe the Ascension on the feast day itself; some honor it with the Feast’s readings on the following Sunday.
Many of us are uncomfortable with Ascension because it seems to use a view of the universe that is so contrary to our modern scientific view. The story of the Ascension assumes an ancient way of seeing things: heaven and God are up there somewhere, we are down here, and Hell and the Underworld are somewhere down there, far beneath our feet. In this view, reflected in the Creed, Jesus “came down from heaven” and became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human. He descended to the dead (in the grave or the Underworld), then rose again, and ascended into heaven where he is now seated at the right hand of God the Father.
But we don’t see the universe in this up-down sort of way: as the BCP Eucharistic Prayer C says, the universe is a great expanse of interstellar space, even intergalactic space, and the earth is a single tiny fragile planet, our “island home.” We don’t take the up-down language literally at all. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin came back from the first human orbit of earth in 1961 and USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev said that commander Gagarin hadn't seen heaven or God up there, most of us thought it a rather silly thing to say since so few of us still see such a three-tiered universe as an integral part of faith in God. (Apparently, Gagarin himself might have agreed: he had his daughter baptized in the Orthodox Church just before he set off for the flight, and kept icons in his home.)
We thus do not see God as up there, or even somewhere out there, but rather, behind and within all things. The up/down language has always been seen in Christianity as a metaphor. The idea is expressed well in a trope of ancient Greek philosophy taken up in many Medieval and Renaissance Christian writings: “God is an infinite circle whose center is nowhere, and whose circumference is everywhere.”
The idea of an ever-present but always transcendent God suggests another metaphor for those troubled by Ascension Day as being about some kind of divine elevator: Jesus came out of the Ground of Being when he became flesh, and returned to it at the end of the 40-day ministry. In this sense, Ascension Day is a “Return to the Ground,” a "Retreat to the Horizon," or a “Re-absorption of the Water of Life into the Earth” Day if the start or end point of the movement or process is the Ground of Being.
Ascension thus is a symbol of Jesus’ return from mortality and limited humanity to the transcendent God, and perhaps a hopeful hint of the ultimate intention of God for all his creatures. As T.S. Eliot writes in “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end. … Love is most near itself when here and now cease to matter. … In my end is my beginning.”
Grace and peace,
Fr. Tony+
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