Ups & Downs

“How are things?” we are asked. “Oh, you know,” we respond, “Life has its ups and downs.” I could give examples of the rises and dips of the roller coaster of life at times. This is one kind of analysis we use: comparing the ups and downs in dualistic terms. We draw distinctions and compare. In western culture especially, we see life in contrasting categories.

I am sure we also visualize distinctions about God’s presence in the world. Before the birth of Jesus as the Messiah, the world waited. Then he was in the world.  Our faith reveals that Jesus is Emmanuel—God with us. In his earthly life, God was incarnate, and so, physically present in the world. For the disciples, he was with them in his teaching and healing, then he was taken from them.  Crucified, dead, and buried: he was here and then gone. Soon, he was with them again, appearing to them after the resurrection. Then again, he was gone: taken up from them, ascended into heaven. In this way, we draw our dualistic sense about Jesus’ presence and absence.

In Luke’s gospel, the disciples are with him when Jesus commissions them to stay in the city and wait until God clothes them with power from on high, with the Holy Spirit.

While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. "This," he said, "is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." … You 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." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."  (Acts 1:4-6, 8-11)

Think about that for a moment. They are looking up toward heaven, and the two white-robed men seed their understanding, that Christ will be present in a new way as they move forward. They are feeling as though he has left them, but in time they will encounter what Jesus had promised them before, that he will be with them always even to the end of the ages. What is more, Christ will be in the world through them.

Bishop Michael Marshall writes of the Ascension, saying that when Christ ascends up, God is actually coming down to them in a new way. What looks like an end, is a beginning. He references T.S. Eliot’s concluding verse of the second section of the Four Quartets: East Coker, “In my end is my beginning.” Marshall mentions that the Ascension of Jesus marks the end of chapter one in Jesus’ earthly ministry and also the beginning of chapter two.

In chapter one that earthly ministry is through the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth…Necessarily, that ministry is limited in terms of time and space and is tied to the whereabouts of the physical person of Jesus at any one moment. In chapter two (Acts) that same earthly ministry of the heavenly Jesus Christ is through the sacramental body of Christ, anointed at baptism—the church, increasingly unlimited in terms of time and space. (From Great Expectations?  p. 111)

While I am sure the disciples experienced their years with Jesus, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension as ups and downs, we take it all as part of God’s wondrous gift of divine power in the world. All of it is about the work of God through the body of Christ. It is all tied to the consistent, yet the dynamic presence of God in the world. We often wearily encounter life as a ponderous series of changes and chances, ups and downs. Nevertheless, we are invited to move ever more deeply into God’s view, into the comfort of God’s eternal changelessness.