May 30, Ascension (Luke 24:44-53)

I’m not surprised Jesus has to “open the minds” of the disciples before his ascension, because my mind needs to be opened, too. This text has always felt hokey to me. Artists portray Jesus soaring into heaven, Superman-style, his arms outstretched in blessing and his feet pointed like a dancer’s. Some just show his feet dangling from the heavens, the last of his flesh to grace this world, with the disciples left reaching for a big toe. I prefer the version Luke tells in Acts, where the disciples are caught staring after Jesus—long enough for it to get awkward—until two men in white robes tell them to stop. That’d be me, staring after Jesus, asking myself, OK, where’s the metaphor here?

It’s not that I am without faith, just that my educated, Pres­byterian brain quickly seeks to rationalize the text—a text clearly meant to lead us toward religious imagination and wonder. The future of Jesus’ mission and ministry depend on the disciples’ minds being opened. He can’t leave until their imagination is stoked and their minds opened to the impossible possibilities he represents—a world shaped by repentance, forgiveness, and love; an incarnational God who lives and breathes, dies and rises.

At a recent conference of college chaplains, a colleague coyly asked, “OK, who’s your spiritual boyfriend or girlfriend?” I confessed that mine is Christian Wiman. The poet, who describes himself as someone who is both “confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness,” has come to mean a great deal to me. In the preface to his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman writes that as he set out to answer the question of what he believes, he came to realize “that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life—and your death—to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?”