What do you see when you picture the ‘ascension’ of Jesus? Would you stand with the disciples gazing upward until a ‘cloud’ hid them from their sight (Acts 1:9), as once the divine cloud did that led the people of Israel to the promised land (Exodus 13:21)? Or would you take the perspective of Jesus? What did he see? Did he see God in heaven, or were his eyes on his friends, on earth?

What do you see?

The story about the ascension after forty days in the book of Acts is unique in the New Testament. As we read in 2 Corinthians 15:5-8, Paul does not make a distinction between the early resurrection experiences and his later vision of Jesus in heaven. The Gospels don’t describe the event and even the Gospel of Luke, the companion volume to Acts, simply ends the story of Easter Sunday with the following words (Luke 24:50-51):

When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And as he was blessing them, he parted from them and was lifted up into heaven.

No witnesses, no angels. ‘As he was blessing them, he was lifted up.’ Why was he taken up into heaven? Because that is how they experienced him: as the face and the voice of God. Because that is where God had taken his friend Enoch (Genesis 5:24), and his prophet Elijah (2 Kings 2:11). That is where Stephen saw Jesus when he was about to be lynched for his faith. That is where Paul saw Jesus when he broke down, hunting down followers of Jesus. Knowing this, it seems, the author of Acts wanted to provide the story of how it must have happened, given the ideas of his time about the sky and the stars as the heaven of God – not unlike the Greek philosophers and Roman emperors who saw eminent souls ascending upward to shine as stars among the gods.

What is the experience like?

Some people ascended to heaven during their lifetime on earth. These were real experiences but people like Paul did not always know whether it happened in a physical or a spiritual sense: “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know,” (II Corinthians 12:2).

"Lift up your heads!"

It is in this sense that the poet of Psalm 24 is looking for someone who may ascend to God’s holy place. Who will be blessed there? Who will receive justice from God? This is not just about ascending the temple mount in Jerusalem, but about ascending to heaven itself, the place from where God created and sustains the whole world. But who is pure enough, who is good enough?
And then something happens. Rather than waiting for the perfect human being to ascent, God himself comes down. The bows of the gates open up in the middle, as if their heads are lifted – no longer gazing downward, but upward from where the King of Glory is approaching. He comes through the eternal gates, separating our world from his realm. He enters our city. He is with his people where they are as they come. Good and bad, rich and poor, wise and dumb, - it does not matter. God is with all of them. He will fight their battles, he will give them justice and salvation.

The poet repeats his song. Again the gates have to lift their heads. Again the King of Glory, the Lord of Hosts wants to go through. But why twice? Will he enter the same place twice or will he enter yet another place? Or will return to where he came from? Are the hosts that accompany him people of angels? And who are the gates that they should do something to make this all possible? The psalm invites us to make all kinds of associations with the story of God’s people, of Jesus or of our own life.
We once used this song in our family celebration of Christmas, ‘dancing’ in a circle, to help us think about the story of Mary and Joseph, and their child Jesus. Together with your partner you make a gate with your arms to let the others go through, after which each pair of them make a gate for you to follow suit. We were all both gate and passers-through. We were both entered into and entering into.

You can recognize the same ‘dance’ in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, which reads like a poem or hymn: If we are united with Jesus, we humble ourselves to one another and are exalted by God. In our descending with him into the lowest regions of our existence, the places where we would feel vulnerable and shamed, we also rise up with him and ascend into God’s reality. If you understand or feel just a little bit of this, you can start practicing it. The key to that unity with Jesus lies in his ascension from below to above and from outside to within – into our hearts.

He came down to build us up

This double movement is the core of Christian theology. You can also see it in Ephesians 3:14-19:

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Quoting the Greek version of Psalm 68, the author then shows how Christ passed twice: on his descent and his ascent (Ephesians 4:8-13):

This is why it says: “When he ascended on high, he took [our] captivity captive, he gave gifts to his people.” What else does “he ascended” mean than that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.
So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

In psalm 68, the Lord is likened to a battle king, taking prisoners and dispensing gifts from the loot. For Paul, Jesus is the one who descended to battle the forces that keep us captive in our world. As he ascends victoriously, he gives us the gifts that enable us to grow and experience the fullness of God within the universe, within our community and within ourselves.

For Paul, the psalm allows him to see Jesus ascending to a ‘spiritual heaven’ so that in a spiritual sense he can dwell forever in our hearts. And he descends into our world, in order for us to ascend with him. Celebrating the ascension, is celebrating Jesus as the voice and face of God among us and within us, as the divine character in our humanity. His story and his spirit have endowed his followers to likewise represent God among each other: to go out, to share our stories and inspiration, to shepherd each other in all our needs, and to grow in knowledge and faith, each according to her and his God-given talents – until all have entered through the gates of God’s reality.

*      *

Then, in April 2006, Gagarin’s junior colleague Valentin Petrov shared with the world that Gagarin was not the atheist that the regime wanted him to be. After Gagarin asked Petrov what he thought of the prayer ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven,’ the two men developed an intimate friendship. Gagarin told him how shortly before his spaceflight, he had stood in a Russian Orthodox church with his baby daughter in his arms for her baptism. So when he circled the earth in his Vostok spacecraft, Gagarin did not ‘see God,’ but he did admire the work of his Creator, when he said: “The earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.”

Suggestions for dialogue

A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:

• Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness. 
• First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
• Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared. 
• Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
• Leave room for silence and contemplation. 
• Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.

These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com