Images of Hope
Page 5
Ascension
Greek icon from the seventeenth century
The Ascension
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The Beginning of a New Nearness
The evangelist Luke weaves into the history of Christ’s Ascension a comment that never ceases to surprise me as often as I have tried to clarify it theologically. Luke says in his Gospel that the disciples were full of joy when they returned from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem. That does not quite correspond to our normal psychology. The Lord’s Ascension was the last appearance of the Risen One. The disciples knew they would no longer see him in this world. To be sure, this departure is not to be compared with that of Good Friday, when Jesus had apparently failed and all previous hopes must have appeared to have been greatly mistaken. The departure on the fortieth day after the Resurrection has in contrast to Good Friday something triumphal and reassuring about it. Jesus has indeed gone away this time, not into death, but into life. He is not defeated; but rather God has justified him. So there are without doubt grounds for joy. But even if intellect and will are happy, the feelings may still not necessarily join in. Even while understanding Jesus’ victory, there could be emotional suffering from the loss of human proximity. The fear of being abandoned could increase, and especially in light of the immense task that still lay ahead: going out into the unknown and giving witness to Jesus to a world that could see in the disciples only unhinged persons of little account.
But here we have, as an unshakable fact, the mention of the great joy of the homecomers. We will never be able completely to unlock the meaning of this word if we understand so little the joy of the martyrs: the song of a Maximilian Kolbe in the starvation bunker, the joyful praise to God that Polycarp spoke on the funeral pyre, and so many others. In the saints of charity, we find the same great joy particularly in moments when they perform the most difficult services for the sick and suffering—and praise be to God these are not only stories of the past. We can sense from these experiences something about how the joy of Christ’s victory not only meets the intellect, but also communicates itself to the heart and only then is thereby truly received. Only when something of this has also arisen in us have we understood the feast of Christ’s Ascension. What has happened here is the arrival of the finality of the redemption in the heart of man so that knowledge becomes joy.
We do not know in detail how that may occur. But Sacred Scripture gives us a few clues nevertheless. Luke tells us, for example, that Jesus revealed himself in the forty days after the Resurrection to the eyes and ears of the disciples by explaining to them the things of the kingdom of God. He then adds a third word by which he interprets the experience of being together in these days—a somewhat strange word that the German Ecumenical Bible translates as “common meal”. Literally, however, it says the Lord had “eaten salt with them”. Salt was the most precious gift of hospitality and so became synonymous with hospitableness. So one would have to translate rather: he received them in his hospitality, in a hospitality that is not just an external event, but rather means a participation in one’s own life. Salt is, however, also a symbol of the Passion. It is a seasoning, and it is a preservative that counteracts decay, counteracts death. Whatever the mysterious word may say, the intention is reasonable clear: Jesus had made the mystery perceivable to the senses and to the hearts of the disciples. It was no longer a mere idea. It still contained very little of understandable knowledge, but they were physically touched by the core of it. They knew Jesus and his good news no longer as something external to them but rather it lived within themselves.
Yet a second note of the evangelist strikes me as important. He says that Jesus extended his hands and blessed them. In the blessing he disappeared. His last image is that of his extended hands, the gesture of blessing. The Ascension icon of the Christian East, which in its core reaches back to the earliest development of Christian art, has made this scene the actual center of the whole. Ascension is the gesture of blessing. The hands of Christ have become the ceiling that covers us and at the same time have become the effective power that opens the door of the world toward what is above. In blessing he goes, but also the opposite is true—in blessing he remains. That is henceforth the way he relates to the world and to us. He blesses; he has himself become blessing for us. So this word could perhaps best impart to us the center of the event and clarify the strange contradiction of a departure that is entirely joyful. The event that the disciples had experienced was blessing, and they leave as ones who have been blessed, not ones who have been abandoned. They knew that they were forever blessed and stood under blessing hands wherever they went.
Considered in this way, the note of Saint Luke is quite close to a few sentences in Jesus’ farewell discourse reported to us by John. First, it is striking what role the mention of joy plays there. To be sure, the disciples must first go through the experience of sadness. Indeed, the experience of deprivation, the loss of companionship, is necessary so they can come to joy. “I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you” (Jn 14:18), and with this coming is meant the new experience of closeness, which Luke describes with the word “blessing”. For this sentence of the farewell discourse corresponds to the other: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever” (Jn 14:16). The theology of the Eastern Church has identified the prayer of the Lord for the other Counselor with the blessing of Ascension day: the blessing hands are also suppliant hands, praying hands. They are henceforth lifted to the Father and ask him nevermore to leave his own, that the Consoler might ever be with them in their midst. When we read Luke and John together, we may say the disciples knew precisely in seeing Jesus blessing and praying that now it is true: “I will not leave you desolate.” They knew that now it is unquestionably the case: “I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). They knew that now Christ always comes as blessing, that he now, so to speak, eats salt with them, that they will be and will remain blessed in all trials.
The liturgical texts of the Eastern Church emphasize yet a further aspect of this occurrence. It says there: “The Lord is risen in order to lift up the fallen image of Adam and to send us the Spirit that he might sanctify our souls.” In the Ascension of Christ we are also dealing with the second part of ecce homo. Pilate showed the assembled mob the abused and mistreated Jesus, making reference thereby to the maltreated, trampled upon countenance of man per se. “Behold—the man”, he said. Film and theater of today present us again and again—sometimes compassionately, often cynically, and sometimes with masochistic pleasure at the self-mockery—debased man in all stages of horror. That is man, they tell us again and again. The theory of evolution draws the line in reverse, showing us their discovery, the clay from which man originated, hammering it into us: That is man. To be sure, the image of Adam is fallen; it lies in the mud and is muddied over and over again. But Christ’s Ascension says to the disciples, says to us: The gesture of Pilate is only half-true and something less than that. Christ is not only the bloodied and wounded head; he is the ruler of the entire world. His rule does not mean the trampling of the earth but that its brilliance has been restored, to speak of God’s beauty and power. Christ has raised the image of Adam: You are not only dirt; you extend over all cosmic dimensions up to the heart of God. Christ’s Ascension is the rehabilitation of man. It is not the one being beaten who is debased, but rather the one doing the beating. It is not the one being spit upon who is debased, but rather the one doing the spitting. The one scorned is not disgraced, but the one who scorns. It is not arrogance that enables man but rather humility. It is not self-importance that makes him great but rather the communion with God of which he is capable.
Christ’s Ascension is therefore not a spectacle for the disciples but an event in which they themselves are included. It is a sursum corda, a movement toward the above into which we are all called. It tells us that man can live toward the above, that he is capable of attaining heights. More: the altitude that alone is
suited to the dimensions of being human is the altitude of God himself. Man can live at this height, and only from this height do we properly understand him. The image of man has been raised up, but we have the freedom to tear it down or to let ourselves be raised. One does not understand man when one asks only where he comes from. One understands him only when one also asks where he can go. Only from his height is his essence really illuminated. And only when this height is perceived does there awaken an absolute reverence for man that considers him still holy even in his humiliation. Only from there can one really learn to love the human condition [Menschsein] in oneself and in the other. For this reason accusation should not become the most important word about man. To be sure accusation is necessary as well, so that guilt is recognized as guilt and becomes differentiated from the right being of man. But the accusation alone is insufficient: if one isolates it, it becomes negation and, thereby, itself a way of degrading man.
For this reason it is also not right, as we sometimes hear it said today, that faith must keep mankind’s subversive memory alive, which hinders us from resigning ourselves to the injustice of this world. Indeed, faith does teach us the memory of the Cross and of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But this memory is not subversive. It reminds us certainly that the image of Adam has fallen, but it reminds us above all that this image has been raised up again and that even as fallen ever remains the image of God’s beloved creature. Faith hinders our forgetfulness. Indeed, it awakens in us the actual buried memory of our origin: that we come from God; and it adds the new remembrance that is expressed in the feast of Christ’s Ascension: namely, that the actual true place of our existing is God himself and that we must ever view man from this vantage point. The memory of faith is in this sense a quite positive memory. It sets free again the positive basic measure of man. And recognizing this is a much more effective protection against the belittlement of man than the mere memory of negations that in the end can leave only contempt of man. The most effective counterforce to the corruption of man lies in the memory of his greatness, not in the memory of his defilement. Christ’s Ascension impresses on us the memory of greatness. It immunizes us against the false moralism of the disparagement of man. It teaches us respect and gives us back the joy of being human.
If all this is taken into consideration, the claim that Christ’s Ascension is the canonization of a superseded cosmology disposes of itself. The issue is what is the measure of being human, not how many floors the universe has. The issue is God and man, the true height of being human, not the position of the stars. This insight must not, however, mislead us to think of Christianity as completely unworldly and to make faith purely a question of mental attitude. There is also a correct, meaningful relationship between faith and the entirety of the created world, for which, by the way, the old world-view can provide a signpost. That is not entirely easy to explain, since our ability to imagine has been changed by the technical use of the world. Perhaps a point of departure can be offered when we remember once again the classical type of Byzantine icon of Christ’s Ascension. There, the fact that the Mount of Olives was the site of this event is suggested by a few olive branches that jut out of the silhouette dividing heaven and earth. In this way, first of all, the remembrance of the night of Gethsemane is touched upon: the place of fear becomes the place of confidence. Precisely there where the drama of death and its degradation were withstood from within, the renewal of man is accomplished. Indeed, there his true ascent begins. But the leaves of the olive tree speak also in and of themselves: they express the goodness of creation, the wealth of its gifts, the unity of creation and man, where they both are understood to be from the Creator. They are symbols of peace. Thus they are here symbols of a cosmic liturgy. The history of Jesus Christ is not only an occurrence between men on a dismal planet somewhere in the silence of the universe. This history comprises heaven and earth, the entire reality. When we celebrate the liturgy, it is not a kind of little family circle in which we draw on the mutual support of a visible community. The Christian liturgy has cosmic proportions: we join creation’s hymn of praise and at the same time lend creation a voice.
In conclusion, I would like to add yet a further thought, which this time results from the image tradition of the West. You are surely familiar with all those precious, naïve images in which only the feet of Jesus are visible, sticking out of the cloud, at the heads of the apostles. The cloud, for its part, is a dark circle on the perimeter; on the inside, however, blazing light. It occurs to me that precisely in the apparent naïveté of this representation something very deep comes into view. All we see of Christ in the time of history are his feet and the cloud. His feet—what are they? One is reminded, first of all, of a peculiar sentence from the Resurrection account in Matthew’s Gospel, where it is said that the women held onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worshipped him. As the Risen One, he towers over earthly proportions. We can still only touch his feet; and we touch them in adoration. Here we could reflect that we come as worshippers, following his trail, close to his footsteps. Praying, we go to him; praying, we touch him, even if in this world, so to speak, always only from below, only from afar, always only on the trail of his earthly steps. At the same time it becomes clear that we do not find the footprints of Christ when we look only below, when we measure only footprints and want to subsume faith in the obvious. The Lord is movement toward above, and only in moving ourselves, in looking up and ascending, do we recognize him. When we read the Church Fathers something important is added. The correct ascent of man occurs precisely where he learns, in humbly turning toward his neighbor, to bow very deeply, down to his feet, down to the gesture of the washing of feet. It is precisely humility, which can bow low, that carries man upward. This is the dynamic of ascent that the feast of the Ascension wants to teach us.
The image of the cloud points in the same direction. It is reminiscent of that cloud which preceded Israel in its trek through the desert. By day it was cloud; by night, pillar of fire. Even “cloud” is an expression for a movement, for a reality we cannot catch and secure, for a direction that avails only when we follow it—for the Lord, who always goes ahead of us. The cloud is concealment and presence at the same time. Thus it has become a symbol of the sacramental signs in which the Lord precedes us, in which he both hides himself and lets himself be touched.
Let us turn back once again to our point of departure. The Ascension allowed the disciples to become glad. They knew they would no longer be alone. They knew they were blessed ones. The Church would also like to instill this knowledge in us in the forty days after Easter. The Church would like it not to become for us only a knowing of the intellect but rather a knowing of the heart, in order that that great joy might also overtake us that could no longer be taken away from the disciples. In order for knowledge of the heart to develop, encounter is necessary—an inner listening to the words of the Lord, an inner familiarity with him, as Scripture conveys it with the mention of the common eating of salt. The feast of Christ’s Ascension invites us to this inner openness. The more we succeed, the more we understand the great joy that occurred on a day in which apparent departure was in truth the beginning of a new nearness.
HOLY TRINITY
Dome fresco in the portico to the trapezium in the Dochiariou Monastery,
Athos, sixteenth century.
Pentecost
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The Holy Spirit and the Church
One often hears the complaint that in the Church too little is spoken of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it goes so far as to say that there must be a certain symmetry between the speaking of Christ and speaking of the Holy Spirit. Everything said about Christ must correspond to what is said of the Holy Spirit. Whoever demands this forgets, however, that Christ and the Spirit belong to the triune God. He forgets that the Trinity is not to be understood as a symmetrical coexistence. If this were so, then we would simply be believing in three divinities, and we would thereby be fundamentally distorting what the
Christian confession of the one God in three Persons holds. Here, as so often is the case, the liturgy of the Eastern Church can point us in a useful direction. The Eastern Church on Pentecost Sunday celebrates the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, on Monday the outpouring of the Spirit, and on the following Sunday, the feast of All Saints. This liturgical arrangement belongs close together and shows us something of the inner logic of faith. The Holy Spirit is not an isolated value or a value that can be isolated. It is according to his essence to direct us into the unity of the triune God. When we pass through the history of salvation from Christmas to Easter, Father and Son appear to us in contrast, in mission and obedience. Now the Holy Spirit does not represent a third reality somewhere next to or between the other two. He leads us to the unity of God. Looking to him means overcoming distinction and recognizing the ring of eternal love that is the highest unity. He who wants to speak of the Spirit must speak of the Trinity of God. If the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is supposed to be in a certain respect a corrective to a one-sided Christocentrism, then this corrective consists in the Spirit teaching us to see Christ entirely in the mystery of the trinitarian God as our way to the Father in perpetual conversation of love with him.
The Holy Spirit points to the Trinity, and thereby he points to us. For the trinitarian God is the archetype of the new united humanity, the archetype of the Church, as the prayer of Jesus may be seen as its word of institution: “that they may be one, even as we are one” (Jn 17:11b, cf. 21f.). The Trinity is measure and foundation of the Church. The Trinity brings the word of creation day to its goal, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). In the Trinity, mankind, which in its disunity became a counter image of God, should become once again the one Adam, whose image, as the Fathers say, was defaced by sin and now lies about in pieces. The divine measure of man should again come to prominence, unity, in it, “as we are one”. So the Trinity, God himself, is the archetype of the Church. Church does not mean another idea in addition to man, but rather man on the way to himself. If the Holy Spirit expresses and is the unity of God, then he is the real vital element of the Church in which distinction is reconciled in togetherness and the dispersed pieces of Adam are fit together again.