I CAN still remember the face of the eight-year-old boy as he asked the killer question: “What happened to Jesus when he went into orbit?” I was taking an RE class in a prep school during my gap year before university and trying to familiarise the boys with the Prayer Book collect for Ascension Day. My interrogator had a point, I realised, as I struggled to find an answer.
Later, I went through phases of believing that the ascension should principally be understood symbolically. It was a colourful but naïve representation of Jesus’s “return” to the presence of the Father after the resurrection. I could see parallels in stories of the apotheosis of pagan heroes such as Hercules, who was taken up to join the gods on Mount Olympus. Then there was the biblical narrative of Elijah’s ascent to heaven in a chariot, and the mysterious departure of Enoch as described in Genesis 5.24.
But my young interlocutor’s question has stayed with me, and led me to wonder whether we too easily dismiss the mountain, the cloud, and the disappearance of Jesus in his physical, post-resurrection form. After all, scripture suggests that natural phenomena are the media of divine revelation. Think of the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, and the whirlwind-and-chariot vision of Ezekiel. These are all described as temporary “portals” that open up the divine world to human sight.
We live in a culture supposedly based on scientific materialism, in which nature is often seen as no more than a brute fact. The materialist view implies that everything that exists is a consequence of mathematics. It is expected that the fundamental constituents of the universe will be demonstrated by the latest particle accelerators as they search for the “dark” matter that will finally explain why we are here, along with everything else.
Yet an older and more sympathetic understanding of nature persists, suggesting that there is a mysterious ambiguity about the natural world. While it remains opaque in its materiality, it can, under certain conditions, open up to reveal the sacred. If this is true, everything participates in divinity: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28). There is nothing in science that a priori demolishes this view. Faith suggests that science not only emerges from human wonder at nature’s workings, but may in the end lead us back to realise that we live in a sacred universe in which everything is interconnected.
A mountain in Galilee and a hillside at Bethany are mysterious points of entry and waiting, before the Holy Spirit comes in fire to restore the earth and refresh the human soul. Dust though we are, Jesus shows us that we are loved dust and he will lead us to where he has gone before. The news is good.
