UP, UP, AND AWAY
On Sunday, 12 May, we observe the feast of the Ascension that celebrates the end of Jesus’ resurrection appearances and his ascending to heaven. Ascension itself is this Thursday and not on a Sunday. It always falls 40 days after Easter, which typically means Ascension Day itself is on a Thursday. Many congregations move their Ascension observance to the following Sunday out of convenience.
If you visit Jerusalem, you can make your way to the Chapel of the Ascension. It is a small, round, tower-like structure whose origins go back to the 4th century. It was later adapted into a mosque after Jerusalem fell into Muslim hand in the 7th-century. The chapel is a remarkable site because it is one of very few places that is venerated by both Christians and Muslims. This small, ancient building houses a stone with an indentation in it that looks like a footprint. Or, maybe once looked like a footprint. When I was there, I couldn’t see anything that really looked like a footprint. It just looked like a really old rock. Once there were actually two footprints in the stone – one for Jesus’ left foot and the other for his right foot. But during the Muslim era the left footprint was removed to the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. The chapel’s remaining imprint is supposedly the last spot on earth where Jesus’ right foot stood as he lifted off into the heavens. It requires some imagination to discern the footprint; but this image may help –
You can also visit several pilgrimage sites in Great Britain associated with the Ascension. The most important of these sites, Walsingham, does not have Jesus’ footprints embedded in stone, however. It instead has an image of Jesus’ feet and legs dangling from the ceiling. Walsingham was one of medieval England’s most sacred pilgrimage destinations. According to legend, in 1061 the widow of a local noble had a vision of the Virgin Mary who told her to build a chapel in honor of the Annunciation. Mary gave the widow precise instructions as to the chapel’s dimensions, which were to be identical to the size of Mary’s Holy House in Nazareth. Unfortunately, Mary neglected to tell the widow where to build this perfect replica of Nazareth’s Holy House. Then, one morning after a heavy dew had fallen during the night, the pious widow observed a spot near two wells where no dew had fallen. She decided this was the very spot that Mary was telling her to build. Unfortunately, she was wrong. The workmen found it impossible to dig into the soil at this spot. So she decided to spend the night praying for an answer. When she came out the next morning, she discovered that her chapel had been miraculously built overnight at a different, nearby site. The lesson of this legend is that if you want to encourage the pilgrim trade in your village, you need more than a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary. You need a miraculous construction project.
And pilgrims came. In droves. When still greater miracles attracted medieval pilgrims to Glastonbury and Canterbury the Holy House in Walsingham went into a slow decline. Finally during Henry VIII’s reformation of the English church, the shrine was completely destroyed in 1538. It was abandoned until the 19th century when it experienced a revival of interest due to the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England as well as a series of parliamentary actions that removed discriminatory restrictions on Roman Catholics. Today more than 250,000 pilgrims visit Walsingham’s rebuilt shrines and chapels each year.
One of Walsingham’s side chapels is dedicated to the Ascension. It illustrates the Ascension with a sculpture embedded into the chapel’s ceiling. When pilgrims look up at the ceiling, they see a sculpture of two feet dangling through a puffy ceramic silver cloud. If they look closely, they can see the hem of Jesus’ robe. And shooting out from his feet are golden rays of light. It looks like this.
In Jerusalem we have in imprint of Jesus feet pressed into a half- buried stone. At Walsingham we have Jesus’ ascending feet dangling from the ceiling. If on the first Easter Jesus walked through locked doors to comfort his frightened disciples, why should he not also simply float through an otherwise solid-looking ceiling on his way to heaven?
These two very different images pose an important question: Where do we look for Jesus? In the Ascension story itself, angels ask the disciples, who are standing there, open-mouthed, staring up into the heavens, “Why are you looking up to heaven for Jesus?” Where then do we look for Jesus? Do we look for Jesus “down-here” on earth? Or do we look for Jesus “up there” in some other world beyond our own?
Perhaps looking to earth is the better choice. There’s an old cliché about someone being so “heavenly minded that they are of no earthly use.” It’s easier to imagine a spiritual life that is perfect and joyous “up there” rather than live with grace and courage amid all the confusion and uncertainties of our lives “down here.” It’s so much easier to look “up there” to imagine the friendship of angels than to embrace the blemishes and bruises of all the people we brush up against in our daily lives: grumpy co-workers, difficult supervisors, the clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and perhaps even a few people in our extended families.
Likewise, perhaps we should not look for Jesus in the fixity of a stone like that in the Chapel of the Ascension but rather in the fluidity of our changing world and our protean, unpredictable personal lives. We look for Jesus not in a place “set in stone” but amid a dynamic world that is always changing as well as in our ever-evolving and changing lives. Jesus, after all, tells Nicodemus that the Spirit-filled life is not a life “set in stone,” absolute and unchangeable. Instead, everyone born of the Spirit is like the constantly changing wind that blows where it will. (John 3:8)
The angels remind both those first disciples and us that if we want to see Jesus, we need no more than to look at the people around us and the events that shake up our desire for a reality “set in stone.” We are called to find Jesus Christ in the midst of our lives “down here” – Lives that are always buffeted by the winds of changing experiences and emotions. As the communion hymn “In Remembrance” has us sing:
In remembrance of me don’t look above
But in your heart. Look in your heart for God.
Blessings, Pastor Thomas
Share