Forty Facets of the Ascension: A New Book

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Read the first facet:

§1 How beautiful are the feet

Sixteenth-century woodcuts have something of a comic strip quality about them. You can detect their kinship, despite the passage of nearly half a millennium, with the likes of Krazy Kat or Gasoline Alley. Their power to move is no less for that, whether in tender depictions of the Virgin and Child or satirical distortions of seven-headed enemies. Woodcuts are an evocative medium, well-suited to illustrate, for example, Luther and his colleagues’ 1534 German Bible.

But then there’s Albrecht Dürer’s Ascension.

In this 1510 illustration, bearded men in flowing robes and one woman with a head covering, presumably Mary, cluster around a pointy boulder that hardly qualifies as a mountain. Their hands and faces are upturned in prayer. A ruffle of clouds, almost indistinguishable from the ruffle of a royal robe, drops down from the left corner of the frame and rolls up again to the right. Dead center, at the very top, you see the hem of a garment. The edge of a cloak. And a pair of bare feet, complete with elongated toes and pierced ankles.

Dürer was, of course, only following tradition. There are plenty of images—from Byzantine icons to illuminated miniatures in medieval Books of Hours to elaborate Renaissance paintings—in which the ascending Lord floats over his upward-gazing disciples. In these, Jesus’ feet are the last point of access. Some artists took the logical leap and showed only his feet. Even better than the complete Jesus floating overhead, his feet alone demonstrate how he is ascending to heaven and thus disappearing from before our very eyes.

The foot-last glimpse of God incarnate is a little silly and a little undignified.

But it is one thing for certain: it is bodily. The ascended Lord is not other than the risen Lord, who is not other than the crucified Lord—note the holes in the vanishing feet—who is in turn not other than the incarnate Lord. The feet, those silly protuberances for sandals and socks and stubbed toes, are an unschooled and ordinary witness to the whole work of salvation in Jesus Christ.

How beautiful are the feet!

For us today, though, in the age of the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station, the dangling feet of the Ascension leave us tongue-tied. We can’t but look at the ascending Jesus as a kind of fleshly rocket ship, blasting off from terra firma, achieving escape velocity, and ultimately ending up in outer space where even a risen, ascended body cannot be expected to dwell. And where to from there? Are we still so primitive as to think that heaven is up?

Two things need defending here, one immediately, one later. The first is the intelligence of ancient peoples. They may not have known about the stratosphere or the ozone layer. They may have had a three-tiered cosmology. But they knew as well as we do that bodies don’t go up and stay up in the sky. Just as they knew that virgins don’t conceive and dead men do not resume bodily life. Ancient people no less than moderns were alert to con-men and charlatans, and the category of false miracle was just as robust for them as it is for us.

The second thing that needs defending is up itself. We’ll get there in due course. For now I ask you only not to write it off quite so quickly.

The real truth is that we have far stranger problems to ponder than a hot air balloon Jesus. If that is our principal problem with the Ascension, we have failed to notice a whole lot of things that ought to unsettle us a whole lot more.

Let’s start here: while today we may find the Ascension, of all the christological claims, the hardest to defend and explain, the New Testament finds it the easiest. Compared to the Crucifixion, so dubious a qualification for the Messiah that Mark pioneered the genre of Gospel in order to exonerate it, and the Resurrection, for which we have everything from Thomas’s finger poking in Jesus’ wounds to Paul’s eloquent defense in I Corinthians 15, the Ascension merits but passing apologetics.

Only one New Testament author even bothers to narrate it, namely Luke; which he does not once, but twice; and yet, he does so not to establish a record of irrefutable details, as the extended Passion narratives and Resurrection appearances do, but in a brief three verses apiece, once at the end of his Gospel and the other at the beginning of Acts. And this single author of both versions is utterly unperturbed by the discrepancies between them.

Then consider this: while Luke alone narrates the Ascension, the other New Testament authors assume, infer, imply, and allude to it all over the place. It is as though the Ascension was once encapsulated in a crystal high above the earth, which was then shattered and scattered, its shards landing here, there, and everywhere, glinting out of whatever texts they embedded themselves in.

In this fractured state, the Ascension sometimes clusters around the Resurrection, sometimes around the Exaltation to the right hand of the Father, and sometimes it remains suspended in an in-between state. And sometimes it gets recruited to serve as a metaphor of something both including itself and beyond itself.

Over the course of this book, we will gather up the scattered shards of the Ascension as we find them strewn across the New Testament. But fair warning before we begin: we do not, can not, and (in this life, anyway) will not know what the Ascension is, any more than we know what the Resurrection is.

We can perceive the Ascension’s light and shadow, its echoes and traces, its hints and clues. But what it is remains hidden within the cloud that veiled Jesus from the disciples’ sight. Even the fact of its narration in Luke and Acts is a sleight-of-hand, fooling us into thinking we’ve seen something we haven’t, earning us the same rebuke as the gawking disciples: Why do you stand there staring into heaven? What do you expect to see?

The Ascension is no more exposed to our gaze than the Resurrection. Or, indeed, much of Jesus’ ministry. We never see how he heals the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter or the centurion’s servant at a distance. When Jesus summons Lazarus from the tomb, we don’t hear a command to arise but only the verbless Hither! Out!—leaving us to wonder when, exactly, the dead man was restored to life.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed. But you have to believe in those beautiful feet if you want to see them at all.

Our point of departure will be the twinned narratives of the Ascension. Alone of the apostolic writers, Luke breached the reserve around the departure of Jesus; only he described and depicted it. The obvious question is: why?

Luke has earned his reputation as a historian with good reason. At the outset of his Gospel he gently rebukes his fellow Evangelists. Though they have “undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us” and relied on “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses,” they have not quite succeeded in presenting “an orderly account,” as Luke himself intends to do (1:1–3).

The same rigorous standard carries over into Acts. Those who care to investigate these things have fact-checked both volumes against contemporary sources and found Luke to be eminently reliable. On the rare occasion he falters, it’s over a minor matter.

None of this tells us whether Jesus really rose from the dead or ascended into heaven, of course. You can’t fact-check a claim like that. What it does tell us is that Luke valued accuracy, veracity, and eyewitness testimony. Ancient historians understood their craft to include molding, shaping, heightening, and expanding on their sources—most of all in speeches attributed to historic figures—but they couldn’t just make stuff up. That was a breach of trust. So if Luke the historian recorded the Ascension of Jesus, and twice at that, he believed it had happened, and on the authority of good witnesses.

This in turn alerts us to a pair of further observations.

First, despite his concern for accuracy and eyewitnesses, Luke permitted the discrepancies between his two accounts of the Ascension to stand.

And second, as puzzling, unverifiable, and discrepant as his two narratives of it are, the fact of the Ascension is central to the entire story Luke is trying to tell. Literally central: the Ascension is the centerpoint of Luke-Acts, the pivot or hinge on which the whole history turns, analogous to the function of the Transfiguration in Mark’s Gospel.

Given the importance of the Resurrection as the happy ending to the story of Jesus, and the importance of the sending of the Spirit on Pentecost to everything that will follow in the Acts of the Apostles, it’s all the more striking that Luke neither ends nor begins his two books with these events, but with the Ascension instead, both times. He is suggesting, narratively, that neither Jesus’ story nor the apostles’ can be properly told or understood, alone or in tandem, without the Ascension.

Let’s figure out why.

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