One of the great insights of the
early twentieth century was the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their
deep explorations into human personality and the world of what they named as
the ‘psyche’. Their voluminous work is not something many of us have waded
into, me least of all, so, like many people, I know their work in that sort of
‘pop psychology’ way.
One of the insights derived
particularly from Jung was about human personality and the different types of
person: this is used in the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator: so we may
tend to be either more introvert or extrovert, sensing or intuitive, thinking
or feeling, judging or perceiving. For some people this is a deeply helpful
tool of understanding for others, and for other people it is absolute rubbish!
Freud gives another polarity:
retentive or expulsive personalities. Being Freud it relates to nappies and
basic human actions, and there I will leave that aspect. Essentially a
retentive personality is someone who is insistent upon the smallest detail of
something, one who feels a need to be in control of all aspects of his or her
surroundings, controlling, ordered. So what sort of personality wrote this
phrase?
‘I decided after investigating
everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you…’
(Luke 1.1)
It sounds a rather ordered
personality, precise and careful. The author is, I’m sure you guessed, St Luke.
Luke gives us a most orderly account and plenty of detail. It is Luke who gives
us the celebration of the Ascension tonight, forty days after the Resurrection
of Jesus; he’s that precise and, just to keep it all tidy, the Day of Pentecost
falls a nice round fifty days after Easter. Luke inspires the putting of the
Annunciation a neat nine months before the birth of Jesus at Christmas.
Our liturgical practice mirrors
Luke’s neat and tidy scheme. Indeed priestly literature in the Bible
demonstrates this tendency: the orderly seven days of creation forming the
seven day week; the rubrics and liturgies of the Pentateuch. Priests, and Luke,
enjoy chronos the ordering of time, from which we take the word
chronological, measured time.
We have something of a contrast in
the Biblical tradition of the prophets: they
tend to let it all hang out, talking in big brush strokes, setting hares
running and not thinking through the consequences.
If we took the liturgical year from
John it would look all very different. We might call it expulsive, but a better
word would be kairos another Greek word that is about time, but more
about time as a fulfilled moment. Time, as we will all have experienced, is
something of quality of experience as much as measurement. How long has this
sermon gone on? Dangerous question! If it’s boring you silly you might say 20
minutes at least, but if you’re interested and engaged you might say 2 minutes.
Time flies by: well, chronos doesn’t; kairos does.
So what do all these threads say
about the Ascension of Jesus? It is a fundamental and often overlooked
festival, not just because it always falls on a Thursday, and not a Sunday, but
because it is a major collision point where the retentive and expulsive
tendencies of scripture and human preference run into one another, and where
time and space is unbounded, and a new cosmology is shaped. The Ascension and
its difficulties take us literally into places where our language and speaking
cannot go, caught between the poles of Him being here or not.
In Luke’s account of the Ascension
the disciples are busily asking Jesus the tidying up question, ‘’Lord, is this
the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel ?’ But that’s the last we
hear of them: Jesus’ answer, and what they see, renders them silent, gawping up
into the skies. From that moment Luke’s passion for things chronological fades
and whilst the Day of Pentecost falls on the fiftieth day what it unleashes is
a swirling maelstrom of confused language, visions, dreams and wonders, people
are taken to places, figuratively and literally, where they never expected to
go. The Risen and Ascended Jesus appears to Saul and dazzles him.
Jesus ascended into the heavens and
inaugurates the age in which his Body, the Church, becomes the vessel which, at
the very least, will bear his life and grace to the world, spilling out
expulsively from Judea to the ends of the
earth.
The Ascension of Jesus undoes our
efforts at retention and the compulsion to tidy up and hold onto God; it also
tells us that just as the climbing plant cannot climb without a trellis to
support it: the risen life is to be lived in the real and actual world and it
is not a pie in the sky. It is into the space that a new creative space is
created and engaged with in the Eucharist, where we meet the Christ who
commissions us. The Eucharist is the trellis that means earth meets heaven and
heaven touches earth.
In the psalms we read,
Mercy and truth are met together:
righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Truth shall flourish out of the
earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven. (Psalm 85: 10-11)
In the Ascension retention and
expulsion are met together: chronos and kairos have kissed each
other. And in the inadequate language given to us, God’s truth shall flourish
out of the earth, and righteousness hath looked down from heaven.
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