Ascension Sunday A

Stephanie Flanders was explaining on Newsnight the parlous state of the economy, and its possible recovery, with a series of letter-shaped graphs. A sharp recovery would look like a “V” and something smoother would look like a “U”, while a “W” would represent a second collapse and a second recovery.

At the ascension we get the second half of the “V”. The incarnation is the first half. For some reason people find the ascension part of the story harder to swallow today, but the truth is both members of the biblical “V” are myths, both telling us something significant about the Jesus event, and both difficult for the honest 21^st century Christian to swallow.

There are certain things you just aren’t allowed to say in the church, and this is one of them. John Hick and some of his friends at the University of Birmingham wrote a book called The Myth of God Incarnate, and then took up a position teaching at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. The pin heads in the local Presbytery gave him immense flack—I can’t remember the whole story, except for how sad I felt for my home denomination. Hick’s opponents were no doubt the same reactionaries who became so heated over the Angela Davies affair and Presbyterian participation in the Sophia conference and continue to raise a storm over homosexuality issues. Hick later wrote a stronger challenge to the small-mindedness of the church, The Metaphor of God Incarnate, in which he outlines the grief the know-nothing had given him.

In order to speak about the ascension we need to look at the nature of myth. What we might call Primary Myth is a creation of the community involving deep-seated archetypes and traditions. Stories accumulate and re-iterate themes that seem to spring out nowhere, or everywhere.

Thomas Thompson, for instance, in The Messiah Myth: The Near Easter Roots of Jesus and David, writes,

Before asking whether episodes and scenes that structure the story of Jesus’ life are based on events, we need to look at the function of stories in antiquity. The story of Jesus’ birth and baptism, of his teaching and miracle working, of his suffering and crucifixion—as well as his resurrection—fulfill a clearly defined, coherent function. Together, they embody a well defined tradition of discussion that formed the Judaism to which the gospels belonged.

A second level of myth-making we could call Creative Myth, authored myth, in which a specific and identifiable writer is responsible for the story—Isaiah, Malachi, Mark, Luke, D. H. Lawrence or John Updike. Here we might have, for instance, prophecies of cosmic judgement and the final inauguration of God’s kingdom in self-consciously mythic language, extravagant hyperbole, vivid imagery. The function of the rhetoric is to project intentionality and hope. Rarely were the visions “successful” in terms of historical validation, but this does not imply they were failed prophecies. The way the story is told creates motivation and vision. The relevance of historical truth is beside the point.

A third level of myth is secondary to both of these levels of myth-making, and I would therefore cal it Secondary Myth, and that is the point of reception when the story ceases to be supple and alive and becomes institutionalised and literal. Primary, naive myth, of course, also has this of belief about it, but emains supple and inventive. On this level myth is no longer generative or supple, but rigid. It becomes literalised, set and dogmatic. This is what happens when myth becomes theology and the property of groups like The Presbyterian Lay Committee in my home country or, here in the UK, the Reform movement among the Anglicans that thrives on bating Rowan Williams.

A fourth level of myth is what scholars call Broken Myth, myth that can no longer be believed because the frame in which we see the world has moved on from, say, a Ptolemaic understanding to an Einsteinian understanding. You can still cross the Atlantic guided by Ptolemaic stars, but you can’t get to the moon that way. This is the level at which we throw out the ascension story as no longer workable. We no longer live in a world where verticality has value or hierarchy or absolute truth retain any hold on us. We live in the Richard Dawkin’s world where myths are no longer “true”.

But of course asking a myth to have historical or scientific validity is to miss the point. It’s not that ealier cultures once considered the myths that animated them to be “true” in the sense that we hold things to be true, since truth as we understand it simply didn’t exist in those days, any more than it has any determinant function in the work of poets and novelists and screenwriters today. So there needs to be a fifth level of myth, what Paul Ricoeur calls “the second naïveté”. And that is the capacity to pass through the work of historical-critical understanding to re-appropriate the original energy with which Isaiah wrote, or a contemporary poet writes today.

It is curious that Luke is the only gospel to give us an ascension story, and it is unfortunate that “Ascension day” in the church calendar, more beloved in high church circles than my own tradition, takes the story so mechanically from there. Surely in Luke/Acts the narrative of the ascension is a conscious midrash on what is more nuanced in the other gospels, as when in John we read of Jesus being “lifted up”, or in his story of the call of Peter. We also get the story in that hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2, evidence, I think, that an earlier strata of Christian tradition was thinking more poetically than later generations. It proved too easy for orthodoxy to fall in with the Lukan story, and lose this subtlety of thought in the interest of a dogmatic conformity that could be more easily managed by the increasingly rigid institutional structures of the church.