Recently, a senior C of E bishop was talking on the radio about a tragedy that had occurred in his diocese. Referring to his ministry among the bereaved, he maintained that they found great solace in the doctrine of Jesus’ Ascension. By his Ascension, the bishop asserted, Jesus had opened the way to life after death, so that those who had lost loved ones so suddenly and prematurely could feel that their lives were not at an end. Such an interpretation of the Ascension is surely untrue to the meaning that Luke was intending to convey in his story in Acts. Biblical scholars have pointed to the similarity of Luke’s story to the story of the ascension of Elijah recorded in II Kings 2, and have suggested that this appears to be the imaginative source, or reference, upon which Luke was drawing.
Of course it is right to ‘speak comfortably’ to the bereaved, but it must also be right, surely, to be honest. I can see no grounds in the gospels for a belief in life after death. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’ is sometimes quoted in this connection, but it is far more likely that this refers to the inclusion of Gentiles in the new order initiated by Christ, where there is to be, as Paul says, ‘neither Jew nor Gentile…’
Pity the clergy who have to preach on Ascension Day (pity them even more on Trinity Sunday!). What are we to make of it? To begin with, surely, we have to recognise that Luke is having recourse (as he does in his birth story) to the language of myth, sending his Jewish readers (hearers, more likely) back to the Hebrew Scriptures with which they had become so familiar. This (he is saying to them) is how we have come to understand the meaning of the death of Jesus. His story, like the story of Elijah, has not ended with his death. We have discovered ourselves to be the new Elishas, energised with his spirit.’
Successful psychoanalysis ends with the patient leaving their analyst, empowered to live a fuller life than they had lived before. ‘It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counsellor will not come to you.’ But what might the character of the Spirit-filled life be like? The Acts story, of course, tells of the different races present beginning to ‘speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance,’ and much has been written about the phenomenon of glossolalia.
Perhaps, however, another story of Luke’s permits a different interpretation. His account of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple has the aged Simeon praising God for allowing him to see the fulfilment of his people’s hopes and dreams; the salvation ‘which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples.’ He sees in Christ the new humanity, that for which both Jews and Gentiles had inarticulately longed, and which, in Paul’s words, had ‘broken down the dividing wall of hostility’ (Ephesians 2:14). The mark of the Spirit-filled life is not a matter of doctrine, nor of obedience to a law, but of awareness of being the beloved daughters and sons of God, sharing the new vision given to Christ at his Baptism, and acting upon it.
But what about the bereaved? Christians, I think, do not have more to offer than unbelievers, but insofar as their faith has enabled them to become more human, what they have to offer is warm human compassion; a gift we ourselves have probably received as often from unbelievers as from believers. So perhaps the clergy faced with the question ‘What do I say on Whitsunday?’ might have recourse to the account of Christ’s baptism, the enlightenment experience which left him ‘full of the Spirit’, and which led people to say that ‘he taught them with authority, and not as their scribes’ (Matthew 7:29). This was the authority that came to him from living out what it meant to be a beloved Son of God.
Edward Walker’s book Treasure Beneath the Hearth (Christian Alternative, Winchester 2015) was reviewed in Sofia 117, September 2015.