" Ascended into Heaven 9,
By the REV. J. STAFFORD WRIGHT
UNLIKE the other great Christian festivals, Ascension Day does not force itself upon popular attention, for it has no Bank Holiday attached to it. Moreover, since it always falls on a Thursday, it tends to escape the notice of the less faithful of the Faithful; and the clergyman who is anxious not to strain the credulity of his flock need not even preach on it directly, since the Collect, Epistle and Gospel of the Sunday after the Ascension direct our thoughts towards the Pentecostal coming of the Spirit.
The difficulty that the modern mind feels about the Ascension is that a literal acceptance of it involves not only a scientific anomaly but an out-moded view of a two-storied earth and heaven. It would seem that there are two points involved here. The first concerns the historicity of the record of the Ascension; the second concerns the idea of heaven as a place above our heads.
Scientific presuppositions against the miraculous may make it difficult for us to approach the records as simply as we should approach the records of any normal event of the past. But it is worth while investigating what the record says, and also the reliability of our informants. Two of the Gospels speak of the Ascension in general terms. The closing section of St. Mark (which is a summary of the post-Resurrection events, and which is unlikely to be the original ending of the Gospel) states that, after Jesus had spoken to his disciples, " He was received up into Heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God." St. Luke's Gospel is fuller : " He led them out until they were over against Bethany : and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while He blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into Heaven." The closing phrase is, however, omitted by certain important manuscripts.. The Ascension is implied by the number of references in the Epistles to the position of Christ in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and to His coming again from heaven.. No other way of terminating His resurrection appearances is anywhere suggested.
But it is the introduction to the Acts of the Apostles that gives the fullest historical account. Here we have Luke again, and all evidence goes to show that Luke was a careful and accurate historian. At the beginning of his Gospel he claims to have written after painstaking investigation, and in ordinary points of detail he has been vindicated many times. Now he relates that over a period of forty days the Risen Christ appeared to His disciples and taught them many things. His final appearance was on Mount Olivet, to the east of Jerusalem. After instructing the disciples to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came upon them, " as they were looking, He was taken up; and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they were looking steadfastly into heaven as He went, two men stood by them in white apparel; who also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven ? this Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall come in like manner as ye beheld him going into heaven."
That is the record as it came to Luke, and it must have been the story that the first disciples related. Otherwise he would not have included it in a carefully constructed history. Some at least of those whom Luke had met on his travels were convinced that they had seen their Master ascending into the clouds from the Mount of Olives.
On scientific grounds there needs be no difficulty in this story. It would perhaps be irrelevant to refer to the phenome- non of levitation, for which the evidence is strong enough to command serious respect. The Ascension is the levitation. not of an ordinary human body, but, if it is true, of a body that had been not only restored to life after it had died, but also strangely transformed, so that it had new qualities and capacities. Scientific objections must be directed to the Resurrection in the first place, and, without going into it. we must remember that the evidence for the historicity of the Resurrection is extremely strong. Those who can accept the Resurrection of Jesus Christ have no scientific reason for rejecting the account of His Ascension.
But this does not rid us of the difficulty of the idea of heaven as a place above our heads. If we prefer to speak, as some theologians do, of the mythological character of the Biblical idea of heaven, the Ascension appears to be a meeting- point of myth and pure fact. The " aboveness " of heaven is a myth; and yet Christ, as a fact of history, ascended up. To reject the use of the words " up " and " above " in speaking of heaven is to accept the onus of saying what other terms we intend to use in relating heaven to earth. Would " down- wards" or " sideways " be a better word to use of heaven ? The attitude of prayer to the High God has always been to look up to heaven, as we are told Jesus did, and to lift up the hands, as Paul instructed the Christians of his day to do. Does this correspond to an essential reality ?
The problem concerns the translation of the facts of one order of existence into the language of a completely different order. The spiritual must be translated by the material. It is the same sort of problem as confronts the musician who tries to express colour and pageantry in his music. Thomas Hood tells the story of a blind man to whom someone tried to explain the colour of scarlet. At the end of the description the blind man understood; scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet. This appears to be an extremely apt and true trans- lation of a colour into terms of sound.
We use spatial adjectives of other things to which they do not strictly apply. Thus we speak of counting up to one hundred, and of high and low numbers. We sing up and down the scale. There is no logical reason why we should not reverse this terminology, but most of us would find it a great effort to do so. And it is interesting to see that the two examples quoted can be connected, in the sense that high notes have a higher number of vibrations than low notes.
It would seem therefore that, in translating heavenly things into comprehensible language, and in directing our thoughts to God, the spatial term of up may be the only one that is adequate. We may hold various theories of the precise nature of heaven, and speak of it in terms of vibrations, wave-lengths or multiple dimensions. But if any of these theories is true, we are still in much the same position as the physicist who can describe his chair in terms of atoms and electrons in violent action, or in terms of algebraic formulae, but who is still bound to sit on his chair as a solid mass, as ordinary men do. In other words, we still find that we can express heaven in terms of aboveness, and the Christian believes that when Jesus Christ with His risen body moved from the realm of earth into the realm of heaven He was seen by His disciples to ascend into the air until a cloud hid Him. This may have been no more than an acted parable; or it may have been that, if there was to be a partially visible transition from the one realm to the. other, it could only have been upward.
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