cloud

 

While Luke records Jesus’ ascension — twice — for a primarily gentile audience whose reference point would be the cloud-enveloped Mount Olympus, home of the gods, the witnesses to the ascension and the first people they recounted this event to were Jews.

I don’t think that it would have been hard for the disciples to tell people about the ascension of Jesus into heaven — however that sounds to our ears — because it made sense within the Jewish mythos. Among other stories, it resonated with:

the ascent of Moses into the thick cloud enveloping Mount Sinai, to meet with the God who had just brought his people out of captivity in Egypt;

the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem built by king Solomon, the son of king David, when God descended on his earthly footstool, the temple being filled with the cloud of God’s glory;

the carrying of the prophet Elijah into the heavens, without having tasted death, in a fiery chariot pulled by fiery, flying, spirit horses;

the exilic prophet Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man, a vision symbolising the people of God being brought before the heavenly court by the prosecutor — the satan — but vindicated by God, the Judge.

So for Jews hearing testimony of Jesus’ ascension, they would hear a claim that Jesus is the new Moses, who leads God’s people out from captivity to sin and death, and establishes a new covenant; the new Solomon, a royal descendant of David who establishes a new temple; the new Elijah, greatest of prophets, through whom the community lives in fidelity to the covenant; the new Son of Man, or people of God, vindicated by God and released from their exile.

Whether they accepted or rejected the claim, they would recognise it as a claim to meet their most fundamental longings.

Jesus is all this and more, the fulfilment of the Jewish mythos, just as he is also — as Luke will set out — the fulfilment of the Gentile mythos. The one to whom every story points, and in whom every story comes home.

That we live in a culture that so easily dismisses mystery reveals the impoverishment of our imagination. But the human — heart and mind and soul and strength — is created for mystery, is refreshed and restored through encounters with mystery.

In the ascension of Jesus, our human nature is taken up into mystery, for our salvation, our being made whole.