He ascended into heaven

 

Today is Ascension Day, the day the Church remembers that forty days after he was raised from the dead, Jesus returned — physically, bodily — to heaven, ascending into the clouds. From there, ten days later, he would send the Holy Spirit, made visible as fire that engulfed the disciples without burning them.

What do you make of this claim?

Luke, the author of the two-part work Luke-Acts, writing for a Gentile audience, records Jesus’ ascension into heaven twice: at the end of his first volume, and the start of his second volume. How would the audience he wrote for understand this event?

According to Greek mythology, the generation of gods before the Olympian gods were the Titans. The Titan Chronos (Time) castrated his own father, Uranus (the sky, heavens) (this is why the sky bleeds red each evening and morning) and swallowed five of his own children, at birth, to prevent them from usurping him. But he was tricked, by his wife Rhea, into swallowing a stone instead of their youngest child, Zeus.

When Zeus had grown, he worked with his grandmother (and great-grandmother) Gaia (Earth) to release his siblings from their father’s stomach, and together, with help, they fought the Titans over a ten-year war. Despite being one of the Titans, Prometheus — who had created humans from clay — chose to side with the children of Chronos.

After the Olympians won, and had thrown most of the Titans into Tartarus, they wanted to decide what sacrifices mortals should offer to them as gods. Prometheus, the great champion of his creation, tricked Zeus into choosing the fat-covered bones of an animal sacrifice, so the humans could enjoy the meat. Angry at having been tricked, Zeus revoked the gift of fire from mortals. But Prometheus stole fire from the gods and brought it back to his cherished creatures.

As punishment, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a mountain where an eagle — symbol of Zeus, and, later, symbol of the Roman empire — would eat his liver. Every night, the liver would regenerate, only to be eaten again the following day, in an eternal torment. However, later, Zeus’ son Heracles persuaded his father to allow him to set Prometheus free. But by then, Prometheus and the humans had been further punished by the creation of woman — Pandora — who succumbed to the temptation of opening a jar containing every evil known to humanity, releasing them into the world, leaving only hope in the bottom of the jar.

The parallels between Prometheus and Jesus include:

Chained to a mountain/hung from a tree;

Liver eaten by an eagle/side pierced by a Roman soldier;

(Sometimes) welcome on Mount Olympus, the cloud-shrouded home of the gods where mortals could not go/ascending into the clouds to the realm of God (and remaining there);

The one who returns fire to humans/the one who sends the Holy Spirit — known in the past by a limited few, but now given to all — made visible as fire.

These are clear parallels, but there are also transformative differences:

Jesus is not crucified because he has angered the sky god, but by mortals to whom he had been sent by the God of heaven and earth with a message of reconciliation;

This god is not persuaded by another actor to show mercy to Jesus, but raises him in accordance with his own will, in an act of vindication and of judgement on those who had put Jesus to death;

Jesus’ willingness even to die, and to freely forgive his executioners, is an acceptable sacrifice from humans to God;

Jesus takes every evil known to humanity into himself and contains and nullifies them there, and instead will pour out God’s permanent, affirming, presence with mortals.

In this way, Luke presents Jesus as the one who is victorious over the older Titans as well as the younger Olympian gods; as the one who fulfils Greek mythology — the hopes and fears of a culture — not through violence but through being humble enough to allow himself to be placed into the hands of humans, to love even his enemies, those who sought to erase him.

Of course, our cultural context is not the same as that of those for whom Luke wrote. But the myth — the true story that transcends its original telling, by which the world is ordered — remains.