It’s understandable that our readings and Psalm on this Sunday after Ascension should have a mechanical flavour; the recent account of the Ascension itself has a good deal of the feeling of stage machinery about it. Stage directors always have a challenge in getting dead bodies off the set; getting a resurrected body off stage is even more challenging. Classic Greek tragedies often ended with a deus ex machina-a God appearing from above lowered as if by magic (actually ropes and pulleys) to sort out the tragic mess made by mortals. Perhaps St Luke saw the Ascension as the same process in reverse; God as Christ had indeed sorted out humanity and could leave the physical stage.
St Paul is presumably alluding to it as well in his quote from Psalm 68, verse 18;
“When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men”
Curiously Paul uses this quote to imply that if he ascended, God-or Christ- must have descended too, which is doubtful logic and certainly takes a mechanical metaphor too far; God is not a yo-yo. Stranger still is the fact that Paul misquotes the Psalm. The Hebrew is obviously difficult- I say that not because I can read it, but because the translations are wildly different. One thing is, however, clear; when God ascended on high in the Psalm, he received gifts; he did not give them. In Paul’s context, this a fundamental difference. Paul’s argument is that Christ’s coming down to earth bestowed new life on humanity with gifts that made humanity itself divine. Paul might have found a closer parallel in Isaiah and “ownership” that he sees God bestowing n his people, like that of close household.
Albeit scripturally curious, Paul’s imagery is powerful and consistent. He talks elsewhere of gifts enjoyed-and talents enjoined-on different members of the
Christian community. Elsewhere too, this division of labour is compared to the functioning of the human body; indeed it so ingrained in our thinking that we may easily forget that the essential analogy in talk of corporate existence or corporate responsibility, is human physiology. This was not a new idea; Greek philosophers had compared society to a human body and more generally one might say that the concept of civilised life-or society organised for mutual help depends on some members specialising in different essential functions. Paul, however, gives it a new and radically greater significance.
Nor was there anything new in the idea that all our gifts and all our potential comes from God; this is the necessary corollary of creation. We are creatures of God and everything we do comes from Him. This does not mean that all is necessarily well with creation; the slaves working the fields must have wondered what civilised society was doing for them and talented individuals can use their expertise for nefarious ends. We have the unfortunate propensity to distort creation. But Paul offers a vision of creation restored to its proper and ideal functioning.
Even in this divine vision-that of our attaining “to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ”, Paul’s imagery remains mechanical or physiological, as life in Christ is compared to
“…the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly and makes bodily growth and builds itself up in love.”
Some translations of verse 18 of Psalm 68 talk of God leading captivity itself captive, rather than just leading captives up to the heights. Paul may have had something like this in mind when quoting the Psalm. Christ’s achievement in the crucifixion and resurrection was to overcome death; to reverse the
propensity for limiting, distorting and even destroying creation. He shows us at Easter a new world in which we a freshly empowered and motivated. The captivity under which we suffered has been tamed and controlled- not removed altogether. There is still much evil in the world but Christ’s new life shows us we have the power to overcome it.
This is explained by Paul in corporeal language, and that is inevitable as it comes about through the real bodily suffering of a human being and equally by the power of human love realised in Christ. Its significance for us is that we need not despair of our human weakness, nor think our bodies with their failing limbs and organs are not up to the task of building up the body of Christ on earth.
More importantly, however, and this is the real value of Paul’s teaching, we are not only given the potential to build that body, but we are also given the motivation to do so. This is the grace that so essential to Paul. We are freely accepted and loved by God despite our failings and so accepted that we can find our perfection in Christ. Our reaction to the gift of grace should be to strive to become like God, to perfect in what way we can our divine nature and the part we have to play in His creative scheme.
All this is heady stuff and perhaps one of the purposes of Paul’s mechanical and corporeal language is to bring us down to earth; he’s not talking about unattainable theories but the practical actions we can take with the resources we have been given. That, of course is as challenging a thought as it is a comforting one. Amen.