What is the Bible? What do you think it is?
Is it a dictionary, or an encyclopaedia? Do you look up a word or a phrase to find out what it means, or for a little information?
Or is it a medical journal? Do you try to diagnose your illness, and look up a suitable cure? Is the Bible there to make things better when you don’t feel well?
Or is it a car mechanic’s handbook? Is it there to show you how things work, and how to use the right tools to fix them when they don’t?
Or are you more up to date than that? Is it a lifestyle manual to improve your job or your fitness or your relationships?
Our expectations of the Bible condition how we read it. I increasingly see the Bible as a musical score. There are two important things to remember about a musical score. Firstly, the score is not the music. The score is an intricate arrangement of lines and dots, which become music when interpreted and played by the musicians. The music of God remains lifeless on the page unless animated and lived by human beings.
Secondly, the vast majority of music has many lines. Listen to just one of the lines and you only hear part of the piece. You don’t hear what the composer intended unless you listen to all the parts.
Nowhere is this more important to remember than when we come to a consideration of the Ascension of Christ. The reason that you and I are thinking about the Ascension at all today is due to one man, a particularly gifted player of the music of God: St Luke. He is the great storyteller of the New Testament; were it not for his Gospel and its sequel the book of Acts, we would not have the stories that we have about the birth of Jesus, nor would we have the chronology that we are following at this time of year, with a period of forty days between the Resurrection of Jesus and his Ascension into heaven, followed by a period of ten days before the giving of the Holy Spirit to the the disciples at Pentecost, thereby empowering them to preach the Gospel. Without St Luke the Christian calendar would be austere indeed.
But we need to be careful with Luke. He tells a good story, and a vivid one too; that is why when somebody mentions the ‘ascension of Christ’ most Christians automatically think of a human body leaving the ground and soaring upwards like some kind of rocket. I might say that there is nothing necessarily wrong with such literal thinking; if it feeds the soul and draws it closer to God, then all well and good. But to leave things there, to sing the tune as Luke alone has played it to us, is to run the risk of not hearing all the notes, of not penetrating the fulness of what the Ascension might mean. We need to listen to others who have heard the music of God as well, and see what they have to say.
The earliest musician to write down his notes was St Paul. For him the resurrection of Christ is both the inauguration of a new age in the here and now and also the exaltation of Christ to the right hand of his Father. Paul’s writings are a riot of images circling these two themes: Christ is exalted, raised up to the heights of heaven. And yet at the same time he is ‘in’ those who love him and they are ‘in’ him. This kind of writing is beyond the boundaries of the literal.
St Mark, the first evangelist, has no story of the ascension. In answer to the question ‘Where is Jesus now?’ he suggests that he is risen and has gone before his disciples to Galiliee. Is this literal or metaphorical language? We cannot know. Matthew too proclaims that Jesus is risen and exalted, but also that he is with his disciples until the end of the age. No comfort for literalists here!
For John, Jesus has come from God and goes back to God, descending and ascending. He goes to the Father in the glory of the Cross; what we take forty days to celebrate in church, John truncates into the events of Good Friday. The lifting up of Jesus on the Cross is his exaltation – in all senses of the word. Where is Jesus now? John replies that he is with his Father. But he is also with his disciples through the Paraclete, the Spirit who seems for John to be indistinguishable from Jesus himself. Jesus is both here and there, with us and not with us. No attempt is made to explain how this might be.
The Letter to the Hebrews again places Jesus at God’s right hand, this time comparing Christ entering heaven to the High Priest entering the holy of holies in the Temple on Yom Kippur. It is for us to follow where he has led.
So there is some of the music of God that is available to us if we have ears to here. The trouble is that so much of that can be blotted out by the vividness of Luke’s narratives. And then if we are not careful the Ascension comes to be seen in terms of Jesus literally going up away from us.
Let us be quite clear about the theme for this final part of Eastertide: CHRIST IS IN HEAVEN, AND WE ARE IN CHRIST. That is a complete description of what today is about, it is as simple and as complicated as that. It is complicated because the music of God, like all great music, is difficult to understand all at once, there is too much to take in. There is a richness to the counterpoint that does not reveal itself that easily. But the underlying melody is reasonably clear: Christ is in heaven and we are in Christ.
To concentrate solely on the proposition ‘Christ is in heaven’ is to focus on an interesting, edifying and essential piece of information. But it is only to hear half of the Ascension music, the Lukan half if you will. We need to listen to other versions of the Ascension music as well, like the ones St Paul composed, the ones that say ‘we are in Christ’. They remind us that the Ascension is not about Christ being exalted away from us; it is about Christ breaking of of the constrictions of time and space to be closer to us, it is about the in-breaking of divine glory into human affairs and what that might imply. To say ‘we are in Christ’ is to say that we are in heaven, for that is where we say Christ is. As St Augustine has it: ‘Christ, while in heaven, is also with us; and we, while on earth, are also with him.’
This is difficult music. Worthwhile music always is. Live with it.
Peter McGeary
St Mary’s Cable St E1