Three impossible things are at the center of Christian faith: the virgin birth, the resurrection, and the ascension. Of these, the ascension may be the hardest to swallow. God is not constrained by the limitations of human knowledge or experience, so Jesus’ birth by the Virgin Mary and his resurrection from the grave are well within the realm of godly action. But scripture records that about forty days after his resurrection, Jesus assembled some of his followers on the Mt. of Olives, and there ascended bodily into heaven. It’s a scene well within human knowledge and experience. There’s a certain silliness about imagining Jesus lifting off like a dignified Superman to ascend into a heaven up there above the clouds. We know what’s up there, and it isn’t heaven.
On the other hand, why not? Ascending is our way of thinking about what is higher and better. We climb corporate and social ladders. We get promoted up, and demoted down. Upward mobility is a good thing, downward isn’t. We celebrate rising stars in every field of endeavor. Higher floors in skyscrapers are favored over lower floors. We want to be above the fray. We sort socio/economic classes from low to high. Nothing gets our attention like a soaring stock market. Things ascending are good (except prices).
It makes Jesus’ ascension into heaven a perfectly reasonable metaphor, except a metaphor is a mere figure of speech, and Jesus went the top of a hill to bodily ascended out of sight. He performed in reality what we normally take as a figure of speech. Where did he go? He went where he said he was going, to heaven. It’s not a place up there somewhere. The best that can be said is that it’s a state of being in God’s presence that exists beyond dimensions of time and space defining the limitations of earthly reality. But he promised to be with us always. How can he do that if he’s not here? Because it’s beyond our limited grasp of time and space, he can be both gone and not gone – gone from view but not from presence. It’s a presence not like a warm memory of what was, but a powerful reality existent in our lives.
What God came to do as the Word of God made flesh in Jesus was accomplished. There was no more to be done through Jesus as an earthly presence. But much remained, and remains, to be done through God’s power that continues to abide with us and is known to us as the Holy Spirit. It’s tempting to put human limitations on the Holy Spirit, and why not? Things spiritual are so ethereal, at least as we experience them. There’s not tactile substance to them. They live in our imaginations and best intentions, and we can sometimes feel them in certain places among certain people. Good thoughts are sent to others, knowing full well they bear no real power. We say we will be with you in spirit, which we hope will excuse our absence. We talk about the spirt of the times, of teams and work groups with only a vague sense of what that means. Talk of spirits surrounds us, but we seldom take it seriously.
We’re amused at the superstitious naïveté of people in former times who believed the spirit world and physical world lived together in the same space. Witches, goblins, demons and such were daily realities for them. Not so for us, we’ve left alf that behind. Perhaps we’ve left too much of it behind. Our sophistication makes it difficult to apprehend the powerful and palpable presence of God’s Holy Spirit abiding with us. Maybe it would be easier to believe if the Holy Spirit would act with authoritative dominance, but God engages creation through enticing love. George Herbert (d.1633) captured it in a famous poem rendered here as prose:
“Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack from my first entrance in, drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning if I lacked anything. A guest, I answered, worth to be here: Love said, you shall be he. I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame: My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.”
Movies, television and popular literature make it difficult to recognize the power and presence of God’s Holy Spirit acting through love because God is not a fairy godmother or genie in a bottle, and doesn’t work through crystals or incantations. God is disinterested in our expectations for how spirits are to behave. God’s Holy Spirit will be among us as she chooses. Jesus ascended, just the way scripture says he did, to be seen no more, but he is always present in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the power of creation itself. There is no other.