May 1, 2008
Up
Ascensiontide Lk 24.44-53
I am told that the astrophysicists have begun to talk about their science less with theories and formulas and more with metaphors. I am glad for that. We churchers have been into metaphors all along and continue to be, so we might at least give our colleagues an ear. Some of them have begun to write about the universe, for example, as “elegant,” even made up of strings. In Genesis, when God admired her creation and thought it was good, I don’t remember her stringing us along, but I know that elegant would have been as fine a word as any.
Ascensiontide is as good a tide as the next if not better to talk about astrophysics. It is so mostly because I don’t really understand either of them all that well. But I can attempt to confuse both us and them.
I cannot think of Jesus’s Ascension without thinking about “up.” Back when he was in the flesh, heaven was always “up,” and it’s pretty much stayed there ever since. That’s, of course, when we only had the three dimensions — up, down, and around. We call it space. We also had time, but not all that long ago, we’ve begun to think of time as a fourth dimension. Add them all together, and for lack of a better name, we call them space-time. This leaves us not only with up, down, and around, but with up, down, around, and on-the-go. That’s about as much as anybody could even think about, let alone understand. But now, those in the know believe we could really have not only four dimensions, but as many as eleven to fret over and maybe even another universe alongside this one. If all that’s a fact, that puts a whole new perspective on the Ascension, like, which way did Jesus really go?
The problem with getting preoccupied with that is to risk missing what really might after all be the point. For to hear Jesus tell it, it is that he went that is important, not so much the way he went. We know that he couldn’t stay around in the flesh forever. Further, he said that his leaving was the condition for our receiving his Spirit, his Holy Spirit, and that there wasn’t room here for the both of them.
We need this Holy Spirit, he said, because that is the way he can best remain with us and give us enough chutzpah to become a church. And also this could give us something special, like another riddle to puzzle over and call the Doctrine of the Trinity. The answer to that mystery is really God’s business and the way God chooses to be. Even if along with astrophysics we don’t understand that, either, and if that’s God’s option, it is surely elegant enough for me.
What if there’d been eleven dimensions back in the space-time of Jesus instead of only three? Maybe it would have been more to the point. For like Jesus said, it wasn’t so important where he went, that we couldn’t go there, anyway. But what was important and remains important is that he went. For now, with the profound help of Holy Spirit, the only up that really matters, is the up that’s up to us.
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