BAPTIZED BEHOLDING: An Ascension Day Meditation

Glory E. Dharmaraj

BAPTIZED BEHOLDING

This is a story about the Ascension of Jesus to heaven. I would like to call this passage a story about and call to baptized beholding.

As a young pupil in India, I sang a favorite hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” The recurring cyclical image of “summer and winter and spring time and harvest, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above” spoke to me of the routine of God’s faithfulness and love. It still does…

When my brother and I were young children, whenever there were eclipses -- a special show of nature, especially during the night -- my mother would keep us awake so that she could explain these phenomena of nature to us. The "teacher" in her came up with ingenious ideas on such occasions. She would pull out my father's chest x-ray sheets that she had kept, even after his death, and let each of us select one.  As we held our x-rays close to our eyes to view the changes, she would explain the scientific details about how an eclipse occurred, just as it was taking place.

As a child, my mother's advice that we not view the eclipse with our naked eyes was a matter of fear.  Because I was the oldest, I could hold the rudimentary sheet across my eyes by myself – a time of great exhilaration.  My brother required my mother’s assistance. Just to be able to tell your classmates that you saw the entire phenomenon was worth a sleepless night.

Today’s scripture passage calls for something more than a flimsy film sheet to witness the event, for a greater phenomenon is taking place. To the naked eyes of the disciples, the Day of Ascension is a time of sorrow, since it is the day of the earthly departure of their beloved master, Jesus the Christ. Yet, the angels standing close by are urging the disciples not to look at this event with their naked eyes. On this day, their eyes need a special fitting. That is, their very act of beholding the Ascension requires baptism. A pair of baptized eyes is required for this kind of special beholding.

A TRI-FOCAL LENS

A routine of nature

As a faith community, often at times of transition, what gives us stability is nature’s cycle of summer and winter, spring time and harvest. It is the faithful course of the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets above, and even these can be marked with the furies of nature such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes. However, the ability to see “God in the midst of it all” sustains the survivors and the faith community. Such a seeing can be likened to what T.S. Eliot, a great 20th century-poet called “seeing things in a shaft of sunlight.”

A routine in church calendar

For us, the faith community, the church calendar offers the perspective for seeing things through a ray of sunlight. As with nature, the church goes through its times of seeding and harvesting -- through the enactment of the birth, life, death, and  resurrection of Jesus, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, through the Ascension of Jesus, and with the ongoing sustenance of the life of the church by the Spirit of Jesus. In this context, the faith community lives out its commitment of loving and living, and embodies the calendar events as a communal body witnessing to God’s faithfulness.

A routine in human life cycle

Sometimes the faith community breaks out into its witness in terms of its own life cycle: “Jesus in the morning, Jesus in the noon time, Jesus when the sun goes down.” Seeing nature’s prosody in one’s own life is sobering as well as exhilarating, especially when you are in the eve of your given life span.  Even then, Jesus is there with you, as the sun goes down.

To a great extent, routines of nature, church calendar, and human cycle offer a tri-focal vision of our human destiny.

BAPTIZED BEHOLDING AS A CALLING

Fitting God’s story into this story is the invitation of the scripture text. The angels standing close by to the disciples tell the disciples not to look up in an empty gaze. Such eyes are not meant to engage in a naked gaze. The disciples must be fitted with God’s promise. They are to see the event through the x-ray sheets of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and with his own promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, they ought to see this through the vision of the near and distant future. Jesus says to his disciples, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8a NRSV). For the on-looking disciples, it is a promise of a refreshing and near future. “And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8b NRSV). This is a promise of a spirit-endowed and enduring future.

For the faith community, as with the disciples, this promise of a power-filled incremental future forms the vision of Christian mission.

The on-looking disciples’ problem is not a “what” problem. It is not even a “who” problem. It is a “why” problem. The two men in white robes, angels on the ground, ask the disciples, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

When the moment of transition occurs, when what seems like an eclipse takes place, the angels on the ground closer to us remind us to catch eternity in time.

It is a call for a baptized vision for what is happening. Reading God’s story into our story, through the x-ray sheets of the Bible, is the need of the hour.
 
In the sacred chest of memories, God’s and human’s, as recorded in the Bible, time and eternity are captured in the narration of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The eternal message is to engage in mission at home, in our neighborhood, even in places of hostility and discrimination, and to the very ends of the world (Acts 1:8).

SIGHT VERSUS VISION

This vision sustains those of us organized for mission, even when our sight may seem to fail. An occasional sour spring, some intensely-dry summers and a few fruitless harvests are not the final vision of the mission story.

We are a resurrection people called upon to “hold infinity in the palm of our hand, and eternity in an hour,” in the light of the sacred story of God in Christ. Ascension is, after all, a miniaturized moment in the church calendar. Even so, the x-ray sheets of the lived life of the church continue to narrate the Great Story that the One who has baptized us and sent us out into mission is the Eternal God who holds us in the palm of God’s hands. It is the same one who fits us with this enduring vision, even Jesus the Christ.