Theological Journal – May 20 Ascension Day: The God Who Completes

Tomorrow is Ascension Day. Ascension Day is about the God Who Completes. So far in the liturgical year we have met the God Who Calls (Advent), the God Who Comes (Christmas), the God Who Confronts (Epiphany), the God Who Cries (Lent), the God Who Confounds (Easter) and now the God Who Completes (Ascension). The rest of the year we’ll celebrate the God Who Comes Again (Pentecost), the Christian God (Trinity Sunday), the Cosmocrator (Christ the King Sunday) before starting anew with Advent next year.

But what does Ascension Day complete?

It completes God’s work through Jesus, as the reflection below shows.

It’s the Feet that Matter

In Acts’ account of Jesus’ ascension we read “as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (1:9).  Presumably, as the story goes, Jesus’ feet were the last part of him his apostles could see.

After receiving their commission to be Jesus’ witness throughout the world, the apostles’ feet remained nailed to the ground. “Two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’”

This being “rooted to the spot” characterizes the disciples’ response to moments of divine revelation in Jesus’ ministry. At his Transfiguration, Peter wants to build dwelling places so Jesus, Moses, and Elijah might remain on the mountain (presumably with the three disciples). The women at Jesus’ tomb stand transfixed looking into Jesus’ empty tomb for him. And we have just seen the apostles staring into heaven as Jesus ascended.

It would be too easy to riff on such rootedness and draw lessons about how our feet need to be in motion rather than remaining stationary. But that may be too easy and too cheap a response.  Maybe it’s not our feet we need to be focused on in the first instance. Mike Angell introduces us to two artistic works that give us insight into Jesus’ feet as he ascended and what we might glean from them.

The first is Jose Clemente Orozco famous murals in the central dome of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico. There we see “The Man of Fire” as he ascends into the heavens. As we gaze toward the dome we see a figure who appears to be dancing and twisting his way upwards. But standing beneath and viewing the mural we see the figure’s feet more than anything else.

This glorious figure (which is not Jesus but Orosco’s vision of human potential) is beautifully and provocatively portrayed. Yet in its prominent feet one sees (and feels) pain. The figure heading for glory bears the scars of its struggles and wounds. As do the feet of the ascending Jesus. The last sight of him his apostles have is his scarred feet. With this they are reminded once again that “greatness is not about ascent. Jesus often talked about this counter-intuitive greatness. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. As you do unto the least of these, you do unto me. For Jesus, there was a clear identification not with the exalted, but with the downtrodden” (Angell).

The second work of art, far poorer a work than Orosco’s, is in a chapel in Walsingham in Norfolk, England. To its low ceiling is attached an odd sculpture. A pair of life-sized feet, scarred, stick down through the sky over the altar. It’s so low one could reach up and touch them.

The message is similar to Orosco’s though perhaps with even more, grittier, theological realism. The glory of God to which Jesus ascends is a glory that descends into the pain, hurt, and oppression of the last and least, bears it to is own hurt, and lifts that pain and those people up to God.

And that’s what gets our feet moving rather than standing put in the hope of luxuriating and enjoying a faux glory. Jesus’ ascension calls for participation not passivity. Jesus’ feet “on the move” to the heavenly throne room catalyze our feet to move out into the world he now rules with the same upside-down passions and practices that he did.

The Practice of Ascension

The Boston Marathon Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed in a shootout with the police, was refused burial by every cemetery contacted for three weeks after his death. Paul D, Keane, a Christian and graduate of Yale Divinity School, made the following offer:

“I am willing to donate a burial plot next to my mother in Mt. Carmel Burying Ground to the Tsarnaev family if they cannot obtain a plot. The only condition is that I do it in memory of my mother who taught Sunday School at the Mt. Carmel Congregational Church for twenty years and taught me to "love thine enemy." (http://theantiyale.blogspot.com/2013/05/offer-to-tsarnaev-family.html)

Debra Dean Murphy observes:

“It is surprising how surprising Keene’s simple, straightforward gesture seems. But it strikes me that part of its beauty is that it invites us to remember what crucifixion-resurrection-ascension make possible:  the overcoming of our violence and our need to scapegoat and exclude. In Jesus’ living and dying, in his rising from death and his ascension into heaven, a new social order is opened up to us–God’s new creation–in which enemies are loved and we are free to relinquish the cherished fiction of our innocence” (http://www.ekklesiaproject.org/blog/2013/05/ascension-and-embrace/).

James Alison adds: “We can imagine retaliation, we can imagine protection; but we find it awfully difficult to imagine someone . . .  generously irrupting into our midst so as to set us free to enable something quite new to open for us.”

And that, friends, is the essence of ascension. God has completed his work in Jesus Christ and through him spreads that completed work in the world today, tomorrow, and every tomorrow God grants till kingdom come.