Ephesians 1:15-23
Psalm 47
Luke 24:44-53
There is a powerful monument in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, a window into a below ground chamber of empty bookshelves, for this was the site of the most infamous Nazi book-burning. In the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, one can find a plaque commemorating the site where the vicious Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola met his fiery end in 1498, the same site where he had earlier burned books, paintings, including work by Sandro Botticelli, in the Bonfire of the Vanities.
There is no memorial, however, to the destruction of works of art, specifically religious images, during the 8th and 9th centuries in the iconoclast controversy, though the physical evidence is everywhere in what is present and what is absent in the eastern Mediterranean region. Cultural evidence of iconoclasm exists in the final split between the Western form of the church, which would come to call itself Catholic, or universal, and Eastern forms of the church, who would take for themselves the title Orthodox, for “right belief,†both evidence of chauvinism and hubris.
Today, an iconoclast is anyone who attacks a cherished belief or institution, though it originally meant specifically someone who destroyed images, eikon in the Greek, for that was the spiritual spasm that erupted in the Byzantine empire. In fact, modern iconoclasts might paradoxically become an icon themselves, someone like Albert Einstein, who challenged basic understandings of the universe in his day and age. Think, for a moment, how weird it is that we instantly recognize the image of a man who worked in the field of theoretical physics and died more than a half century ago. Not only do we recognize his image, but we can readily repeat his most famous equation, E=MC2, and name his most famous theory, relativity, though I suspect that I am not alone in knowing these things without really understanding them, for we often know what we don’t really understand.
While the last half of the 20th century would see tremendous leaps in technology, much like the last half of the 19th, the first half of the 20th would see massive shifts in human knowledge, in human thinking, not experienced since the Enlightenment. You don’t have to be a scientist or a geek to know some of the names and theories of scientists and thinkers from that age, Gödel’s Incompleteness, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty, Einstein’s Relativity, and Schrödinger’s cat, which has taken on cultural icon status all of its own.
Quantum physics is science voodoo, a source of wonderment and consternation. As some of the core ideas of quantum mechanics were taking shape, especially the idea of superposition, which I totally cannot explain, some theorists took exception to the absurdity. Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian who would do foundational work in quantum theory, was one of them. In response to an article by Einstein and two lesser known colleagues introducing what is now known as the EPR paradox, Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a sealed box, along with a mechanism that would activate and release a poison gas if an atom decayed during the fixed period of time, one hour. Since, at the quantum level, the atom could theoretically be decayed and not decayed until measured, Schrödinger suggested that the box would contain both the living cat and the dead cat until the moment it was opened.
While I cannot explain the first thing about the quantum, I can assure you of two things. The first is that no actual cat was harmed in this thought experiment, so all you cat lovers can put away the pitchforks. The second is that this is not a question of not knowing. It is not that the cat is either alive or dead inside of the box and we simply don’t know. In the world of the quantum, the cat IS alive and IS dead inside of the box. Both things are absolutely true at the exact same time.
And here is Jesus, forty days after the resurrection, up, up in the air like Superman. If we refuse the leap of faith, strip the story of the transcendent, we have the tidy solution to a thorny problem. If he is physically alive again, he has to die again, landing us either in an eternal circle of undying that feels a bit too “Walking Dead,†or leaving us with a tomb, which makes Jesus finite. Get rid of the body in the same way as Enoch and Elijah, and that loose end is all tied up. Of course, we as Christians are not willing to completely strip the story of the transcendent and miraculous, not even those of us at the progressive end of our tradition, so while what happened may remain as mysterious as that cat in the box, our faith does leap over the edge into the X, the more, the mystery that we claim, that they saw him die and saw him alive again, saw the triumph of love over the forces of empire and death.
Christians have always synthesized the four gospels, smoothing over differences to create the story we want, one with no contradictions that reinforces what we already want to believe, but it is worth noting that this ascension narrative is unique to the Luke-Acts tradition. The authentic ending of Mark gives us nothing after the women run from the tomb in fear. Matthew implies the departure of Jesus but does not describe it, while John seems to conflate the lifting of crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension as a single trope, but does not spell it out. There are differences in the details in Luke and in Acts, most notably the forty days, which comes in Acts but not in the gospel, where Jesus ascends soon after resurrection. The other notable difference is minor, for Luke reports the ascension as taking place at Bethany, while Acts describes the disciples afterwards as returning from the Mount of Olives. In fact, Bethany is on the south-eastern slope of the Mount, so essentially the same place, which is pretty good considering how often the gospel authors get the geography wrong.
We do not know why the two versions by the same author are slightly different, whether it is intentional or a corruption that took place as the texts became separated and were copied by hand again and again. But the difference is one of timing, not of the nature of the event, that Jesus physically ascends. This story follows close on the heels of one in which his physicality is emphasized, for he eats a piece of broiled fish.
Which brings us to the odd nature of Christian claims, to a theological Schrödinger’s Jesus. We describe Jesus as ascended, as “seated at the right hand of the father,†to use traditional language, yet we describe him as being real and present right now. We describe him an ascending and promising to send the Holy Spirit to be with us until he comes again, the Second Coming of traditional language and theology, yet we then sideline the Holy Spirit as too amorphous and refer to the relatable Jesus who “walks with me†and “talks with me†and sometimes carries me in the saccharine imagery of footsteps in the sand.
The confusion is justified, but only if you read literally things that Jesus may well have meant figuratively. Take, for example, the “least of these†teachings, one of my favorites. Though we often use a scriptural shortcut to put these words in the mouth of Jesus, they are part of a third-person teaching in Matthew where Jesus describes the Son of Man, more properly the Human One, coming into his glory. And yes, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, though in characteristically oblique ways, for Jesus speaks far less about himself and his role than you might think based on our centuries of interpretation. Jesus is about God, we are about Jesus.
There, in that sheep and goats “least of these†teaching, the king, the Son of Man, says that the righteous served him anytime they served the “least of these†in his family or gathered community, the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned. In another teaching in Matthew, he promises to be present with them, even when “two or more are gathered in my name†to chastise and correct a sister or brother who has strayed, that last part that we always leave off.
I’m not talking about the magical actual presence of flesh and blood in the sacrament, long abandoned by our Reform tradition, but the presence of Jesus in people. How is he with us and yet we are waiting for him? How is he with us and also seated at the right hand of the Father? If we think about it, if we open the box, does Schrödinger’s Jesus resolve to a binary, here or not?
The culture of the Ancient Near East was not Jungian, and Jesus would have never used any version of the word “archetype,†yet, as we have seen again and again, religion almost always operates on the level of the deep and the universal. The late Methodist scholar Walter Wink did powerful work on the concept of the Son of Man, language that existed before Jesus and that Jesus used frequently. Wink and others, recognizing that we are sometimes trapped in the gendered language of that age, prefer terms like The Human Being or the Human One, for the Son of Man is not so much an individual gendered person as it is a representative of humanity, and not specifically Jewish humanity, for a term like Son of Jacob, aka Israel, would provide that boundary. The Human One is an embodiment of all of humanity, of the human condition, an archetype of what we are and what we might be.
Wink, in his 2002 masterpiece “The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man,†describes the way his followers experienced God in the person of Jesus, then the way they experienced the presence of God in themselves after they had seen him executed. The author suggests this experience of God-head in themselves and in one another is the source of the post-crucifixion encounters with Jesus, though I don’t feel the need to go there. But I think all of this ties into the question of how Jesus is with us and yet ascended, seated at the right hand of the Father, waiting to come again in the fullness of time, but present in our communities.
It seems pretty clear, in both the teaching of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels, and in the belief of the early church as recorded in the authentic and pseudonymous letters of Paul, that the presence of Jesus, the “least of these†that is visited in prison, is Jesus as universal human, and in the church specifically as the collective body becoming Christ-like, becoming a location of the encounter with the divine, becoming the body of Christ. The maudlin present Jesus is not needed and may well be an obstacle to the ways in which Jesus intends us to see the divine in other humans, even other humans who seem the least Christ-like in our eyes, the broken and deserted, to see how the divine works as Spirit in us, a topic for next week’s Pentecost.
Jesus in all of his particularity, a charismatic and unauthorized rabbi calling for religious reform, a community activist who provided direct support to the oppressed and vulnerable while also confronting the systemic evil that was breaking people, this Jesus is objectively not here, having been executed long ago thanks to the collusion of Rome and the elite of his own people, whether or not you believe that they experienced him as alive after that execution, saw him raise his hands up, up, and away.
Jesus in his universality, the presence of the goodness of God with us and in us and in our world, is very much a reality for those who choose to see it. Let those who have eyes to see see, let those who have ears to hear hear, for the kingdom of God is here for those who seek it, for those who knock. This is what he told us.
When we insist on making Jesus think like us, use words like we do in our Enlightenment and Post-Modern context instead of using words in the way of the ancients, when we insist on asking if he literally rose up into the air and floated off into space, past the as-yet-undiscovered and as-yet-un-demoted Pluto, we are opening the box and forcing an alive or dead decision, but quantum superposition turned out to be true, despite Erwin Schrödinger’s objection that it did not make sense, that it left us with a cat that was both alive and dead.
And Jesus is gone and is still here, not disappearing footprints in the sand, but there when we carry one another.
He is not here. He is risen. And he will be with us until the end of the age. May we have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts and minds that are open.
Amen.