the significance of ascension

Last Thursday I was invited to give the meditation at an Ascension Day service.

I chose to focus on the similarities and differences between the ascension of Jesus Christ (Acts 1:1-11) and an Old Testament ascension, the ascension of Elijah (2 Kings 2:1-18).

Both the ascension of Elijah and the ascension of Jesus take place in the company of others.  Jesus ascends from the presence of the eleven disciples on the Mount of Olives.  Elijah ascends from the presence of his disciple, Elisha, on the far side of the Jordan River.  In the Elijah narrative, however, it is not Elisha alone who is witness to the ascension of his master.  At each stage of the journey toward Elijah being taken up to heaven, a "company of prophets" meets Elisha and asks him, "Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?" (2 Kgs 2:3, 5)  From Jericho, the last point of departure before the Jordan, the company of prophets follows Elijah and Elisha at a distance, presumably to see what will happen (2 Kgs 2:7).  While the company of prophets waits on the Jericho side of the Jordan, Elijah and Elisha cross over to the place from which Elijah then ascends in wind and fire.  Though it was only Elisha who crossed over with his mentor, the company of prophets also seems to have known that Elijah ascended.  When Elisha returns from the other side of the Jordan, the company of prophets recognize not only that "the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha" but that "it may be that the Spirit of the Lord has caught [Elijah] up and thrown him down on some mountain or in some valley" (2:16).  Thus, even though the company of prophets recognize that spiritual authority has passed from Elijah to another, their proposal to Elisha is to search for Elijah, as though to restore Elijah to his prior role.  Elisha disapproves of their proposal, knowing that Elijah cannot return, yet under pressure permits the company to search.

The search of the company of prophets for the ascended prophet is mirrored in Acts 1 by the "looking up toward heaven" of the disciples after their ascended Lord.  And, just as Elisha warned the company of prophets not to search for Elijah, so "two men in white robes" admonish the disciples not "to stand looking up toward heaven?" (Acts 1:10-11).  Their message to the disciples left behind is a variation on Jesus' last words to them before he was taken up.  The two men assure the disciples that Jesus will come again "in the same way as you saw him go into heaven", which is to say that for the time being Jesus has really departed from them as a person of flesh and blood.  The disciples are not to look into heaven, for they cannot bring back the one whom God has taken away.  Jesus, similarly, had just previously told the disciples that "it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority" (1:7); just as the disciples' gazing toward heaven could not bring Jesus back, so the disciples' longing for Jesus to now "restore the kingdom to Israel" could not make it so (1:6).  In either case, the disciples are looking for their leader and prophet to assume his prior position in their lives.  Their desire with regard to Jesus is as the desire of the company of prophets with regard to Elijah; they wish to bring back to earth the ascended holy man.

Jesus' plan for his disciples' lives is entirely different from their own.  Rather than doing the work of the kingdom in their stead, Jesus will empower the disciples to do God's work in his stead.  "You", he says to the disciple band, the New Testament company of prophets, "will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (1:8).  The work is no less Jesus', but the power for kingdom work and witness has been transferred from the one prophet of God to the many; witness moves from the flesh and blood body of Christ to the spiritual body of his followers.  By the power of his Holy Spirit, the church will do the work of the kingdom of God until Jesus comes again.   

Thus it is that the disciples realized in their lives what the company of prophets could not realize in theirs.  Because they did not wish to see Elisha's master, their master, taken away, because they went looking for him rather than assume the responsibility of his mission, they did not receive, as Elisha did, the spirit that once rested on Elijah.  But for the mercy of God through his messengers, the disciples of Jesus would have gone the way of the company of prophets.  As it was, however, they remembered and heeded the words of Jesus "not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4).  Their commitment to follow Jesus was met with the power to follow Jesus from Jerusalem into the world at Pentecost.

In our own time, the church, like the company of prophets and the disciples gazing toward heaven, often rather cedes the work of God to holy individuals.  The church too would rather search for Elijah than take up his mantle (see 2 Kgs 2:13).  As a result, the spirit that might have passed to the whole company of God's people passes only to solitary Elishas.  The Protestant ideal of the priesthood of all believers goes unfulfilled.  In the words of John Howard Yoder, the church of "no one ungifted, no one not called, no one not empowered, and no one dominated" is "the reformation that has yet to happen."

One final word on the ascension of Jesus Christ: What is the significance of the ascension?  The ascension lies between resurrection and Pentecost.  The ascension makes possible the conferring of the power of the resurrection of Jesus to his followers at Pentecost.  If Jesus does not go away, he cannot come to us by his Spirit.  If he does not leave us empty through his ascension, he cannot fill us by his Spirit.  Perhaps then the ascension of Jesus is a call to the church for preparation and purification in anticipation of empowerment for service and mission in the world.

-Joe

The quote from John Howard Yoder comes from Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), pp. 59-60.

law in light of law

Earlier this month at Bethany Bible School I taught on the topic of Law, or the course in our curriculum on the Torah or Pentateuch. The eight-hour course (in one day) is designed 1) to give students a framework for making sense of the material in the five books; 2) to gain understanding of one particular Old Testament law; 3) to gain understanding of how Jesus interprets that OT law in a gospel text. For this year, I selected Deuteronomy 25:5-10 and Mark 12:18-27 to accomplish the goals of points 2 and 3.

Deuteronomy 25:5-10 spells out the procedure for what is known as levirate marriage, or the marrying of a deceased man's widow to his brother. The purpose of such marriage is defined in the law itself as “the perpetuation of the [dead] brother's name in Israel” (25:7). Indeed, the concern for the continuation of the deceased's name appears three times in the text: 1) in the introduction to the law, “so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (25:6); 2) in the conclusion, “This is what is done to a man who does not build his brother's house” (25:9); 3) centrally, in the words of the widow pleading her case before the elders at the gate, “My husband's brother refuses to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel” (25:7). Although elsewhere in the Old Testament the law of levirate marriage is portrayed as an initiative of the widow to gain security for herself through offspring (Gen 38:1-26; Ruth), the Deuteronomy text seems not to foreground the care of the widow but the perpetuation of the deceased man's name. Though it may not be insignificant to the cause of justice for the widow that by law the widow carries out the public shaming of the brother who refuses to take her in marriage (what if all men who did not fulfill their responsibilities toward women were similarly shamed, rather than the woman bearing the shame of society by herself?), nonetheless the primary offense of failure to marry a brother's widow is stated in the law by the widow herself—the failure of the brother “to perpetuate his brother's name in Israel” (25:7). The perpetuation of the name, I argue, is the central concern of this law.

Having established with the students that the perpetuation of the deceased brother's name does appear to be the text's central concern, one older woman offered her opinion of the text: “I so don't like this lesson.” It was perhaps not the practice of levirate marriage that offended her, which is even still not unknown to our students or resides in memory in the not-so-distant past; rather, the prescription of the widow “spitting in the face” (25:9) of the her husband's brother who refuses to take her in marriage struck the woman as not in accord with the broader concern of the Torah for “holiness” and “love”. The student's disdain for the text was encouraging to me, not because my goal is for them to disdain particular texts, but because she displayed the ability to read the text in the light of other texts, in canonical perspective. For many of our students, the Bible is an authority whose commandments are beyond interpretation (perhaps in North America we have a slightly different problem: the erosion of the notion of the Bible's authority). The woman's comment thus showed an ability to critique the text in light of the Text.

The woman made one other, highly imaginative comment. The brother who refused to marry the widow, the brother whom the widow by law may publicly disgrace, is, in the words of the woman, the righteous one who belonged to the age of the resurrection. Why did the woman make this comment, and upon what was her reference to the resurrection based?

In the gospel text that appropriates the levirate law, Mark 12:18-27, Jesus tells the Sadducees that “when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (12:25). The man who did not wish to marry his brother's widow, therefore, belonged before his time to the resurrection in which “they neither marry nor are given in marriage”. In our student's perspective, the disgraced brother was the righteous one; the one shamed according to the law was the one vindicated by the word of Jesus.

Whether or not one accepts the woman's midrash, it is certain that Jesus disagreed with the Sadducees' application of Deuteronomy 25:5-10 to the issue of resurrection if not the main concern of that particular law itself. The Sadducees, those “who say there is no resurrection,” applied the levirate law to a hypothetical and highly unlikely situation in order to deny the resurrection and to humiliate Jesus (Mark 12:18ff.). Their story, in which seven brothers, each in turn taking his brother's wife following his brother's death and failing to produce offspring for his brother, somehow, in the Sadducees' mind, proved the impossibility of resurrection. The proof for the Sadducees seemed to lie in the unassailability of life by “natural” means. In Sadduceean perspective, life continued or went forward into future generations through sons, those who would carry on or “remember” the name of their father in Israel. Without offspring, the continuation of life through the perpetuation of the name was an impossibility. For the Sadducees, fathers only lived on through their sons, ancestors through their descendants who remembered them. The only possibility for a kind of “everlasting life” was via reproduction. To the extent that Deuteronomy 25:5-10 also attaches ultimate concern to the perpetuation of the brother's name, the Sadducees not incorrectly understood it as the guardian of the one way of “eternal” life.

Jesus, of course, rejected the Sadducees' way of thinking and perhaps with it the central concern of Deuteronomy 25:5-10. For Jesus, eternal life was not secured by one's capacity for offspring but through the faithfulness of God. In Jesus' perspective, human beings do not cause their own names to be remembered in perpetuity; God, as he promised Abram on the heels of the disaster of those who tried to “make a name for [themselves]” at Babel (Gen 11:4), will “make your name great” (Gen 12:2). Abram, the one whom God called to obedience in the very years of his childlessness, is the same Abraham whose name God remembered when God appeared to Moses in “the story about the bush”--the very story from the Law (Exodus 3) that Jesus used to combat the Sadducees' account of eternal life through the law. If God remembers the righteous dead, those who “walked before [God]” that they might be “blameless” (Gen 17:1), then the righteous dead continue in God. Life is secured by the God who raises the dead—not by human beings who, through all manners of desperation, attempt to “raise up” offspring for the sake of a name (Mark 12:19).

One might see all kinds of applications of this textual debate to the realities of traditional and modern life in Africa, North America, or elsewhere. I leave that work to the reader. But in terms of an understanding of biblical law and its authority for our lives, Christians still have much to learn from Christ's way of reading law in the light of law through the knowledge of “the scriptures” and “the power of God” (Mark 12:24).

-Joe