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Up, Down or Sideways? Psalms 47 |
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Up, Down or Sideways? This past Thursday was the church’s traditional celebration of the Ascension of our Lord, 40 days after Easter. There’s a temptation in today’s churches to skip over that rather quickly because the Ascension is something of a puzzle, seen even as an embarrassment. To begin with, the story of Jesus rising up from earth to heaven seems to belong to an outdated picture of the universe. We might try to tell a space-age version of the story, but there’s a deeper question. At the end of the gospel of Matthew, the risen Christ tells his disciples, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” That is a profound promise and one that has always been a comfort and an encouragement to the church in its trials. But how do we put that promise together with the story of the Ascension, which pictures Jesus leaving the earth and going into heaven? The ancient view Before we rush to interpret the story of the Ascension in terms that make sense in our world, it would be wise to think about how it made sense in the ancient world. What were Jesus’ disciples thinking? The background for all their thinking was the Hebrew scriptures, and our psalm for today is a good place to start. “For the LORD, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth.” Notice those words that we might skip over or dismiss as “just poetry” — God is “the Most High.” It’s hard for us to understand or get into the state of mind of people of the first century, people like Jesus’ disciples. They saw the world very differently from the way we do. Two thousand years ago, they knew nothing of space shuttles or, for that matter, of our common experience of hopping on a jet and flying a few thousand miles in a day. The unknown, the borders of the comprehensible world, were much closer for them than they are for us. If that was true for all people back then, how much more so was it for Jesus’ disciples! Their understanding of the world had been overturned several times in recent months. They had been called from ordinary lives by Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom of God was near. Then the one who had proclaimed that message, their teacher and the one they hoped would be their king, had been suddenly and brutally killed and his message discredited. Their hopes were dead, just like Jesus. Then they were jerked back to life by appearances of Jesus alive, mysterious, the victor over death. He was indeed the expected messianic king! Maybe he was even more, the Son of God. And though the appearances of the risen Lord ceased, they felt empowered as never before. How could they make sense of all that? Jesus’ disciples, however, were not just people of a generic “ancient world” but were Jews, members of God’s people of Israel and inheritors of its traditions. If Jesus was the promised Messiah, if he was God’s anointed king to whom God said “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool,” then the way they thought about God’s rule would shape the way they thought about Jesus. The language of height Psalm 47, which has been chosen for this Sunday after Ascension Day, is a hymn that speaks about God’s rule as it celebrates the kingship of the God of Israel. It was part of a liturgy, perhaps for the New Year’s festival, in the temple in Jerusalem. Don’t think of it just as words on a page but as the description of a celebration. The opening verse commands, “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy.” The trumpets blare and cymbals clash, the priests proclaim “Yahweh reigns,” and the people acclaim the Lord as king. Of course God is in charge whether we acknowledge it or not, but it is important for us to confess that God is the one upon whom our lives and welfare depend. It was very natural for a nation in the ancient Near East to celebrate the rule of its particular tribal deity. Plenty of people from that time did so, and today we look at that as a very parochial attitude. The Israelites weren’t immune from such narrow ideas but there was also a call in the scriptures to have a broader view of God’s rule. So when the reign of the Lord was proclaimed it was said that “God is king over the nations.” In the psalm there is pervasive use of the language of height to speak of God’s rule. The Lord, “the Most High” is “a great king over all the earth,” the “king over the nations.” God is “highly exalted” — that is to say, “lifted up.” A verse in the middle of the psalm says “God has gone up with a shout.” That declaration may originally have referred to a ceremonial procession up to the temple in Jerusalem where Yahweh’s kingship was proclaimed, but the fact that you had to go up to the temple was itself significant. The elevation of the Temple Mount in feet isn’t really very great but it is a mount, and the prophet Isaiah pictured it in the future as really high: “In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.” When they thought of God as the ruler of the world, it seemed natural for the people of the Bible to look up. That doesn’t mean that they always thought of God as just being up in the sky. Another psalmist said to God “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol” — in the underworld — “you are there.” God is everywhere, but there is a special emphasis when the image of divine height is used. God is beyond the limits of our world and in control even of the scope and power of the heavens, scope and power that dwarf ours. Then we think of God as far beyond us and able to control our world. That can and even should make us aware of our smallness in God’s sight: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers ... what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” We have to recall then that God also says, “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit.” Jesus’ first disciples knew the psalms, and as they tried to make sense of his death and resurrection it would have been natural for them to think of the words of our text. Jesus is God’s anointed one, raised from the dead (note the word “raised”), and since God is “highly exalted,” Jesus is exalted. If Jesus exercises divine power, then in the imagery of an ancient royal court, he is “seated at the right hand of the Father,” enthroned in heaven. And if those disciples were to speak of where Jesus had gone when his appearances to them ceased — well, he had “ascended into heaven.” The Ascension Does that mean that the story of the Ascension is, as we too easily say, “just a symbol,” having nothing to do with what actually happened? No, it is only to say that our language — up, down or sideways — is unable to describe fully the risen Christ and his relationship with our world. We can’t really know, 2,000 years later, exactly what happened when Jesus appeared to his disciples for the last time and how that appearance ended, but it’s hardly surprising, with what they knew of biblical texts like Psalm 47 and what they believed about Jesus, that they perceived his departure as an upward motion. But it wasn’t simply a departure to a throne in the sky. If God fills heaven and earth, and if the risen and ascended Christ is at God’s right hand, then his promise to be with us “to the close of the age” begins to make sense. The letter to the Ephesians declares that Christ “ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.” Jesus is no absentee landlord but the Savior who is truly present, albeit in ways that transcend our understanding. He is present for us when the Gospel is proclaimed and when the Lord’s Supper is celebrated, but at the same time he is not limited to the confines of churches — and we shouldn’t be either. Our psalm proclaims that “God is the king of all the earth,” and before his Ascension Jesus told the disciples that they were to be his witnesses in the whole world. We are called to proclaim the gracious rule of Christ everywhere, confident that he goes before us and is before us. |
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