Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   Ezekiel 1:3-5a, 15-22, 26-28; Psalm 47; Acts 1:1-11; Mark 16:9-15, 19-20

In last week’s gospel reading, Jesus called us friends, not servants.  Instead of looking down on us, instead of judging us, He placed Himself on our level.  He seemed approachable, familiar, and above all, human.

But today’s readings are the exact opposite – Jesus ascends directly to heaven, and sits on the right hand of God. He’s ethereal, other-worldly, just like the startling vision of Ezekiel, full of strange creatures and wheels and domes and thrones.  These are images of a divine being, who came to earth for a little while to walk among us, but always remained very different from us.

These two faces of God have been debated since the time of Christ. On the one hand there’s the human Jesus, who was tempted in every way we are.  A Jesus who’s our friend; who’s accessible and easy to talk to.  This approach to theology goes by many names: bottom-up theology, starting with Christ’s humanity and working your way up to the divine; if taken to extremes it’s called Arianism, after the 4^th century heretic who argued that Jesus was an ordinary person until God “adopted” Him as His son.

And on the other hand there’s the divine Jesus, who ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father, and “will come again in glory to the judge the living and the dead, and [whose] kingdom will have no end.” This Jesus is our judge as well as our redeemer, and He’s powerful, and intimidating, and decidedly different than we are. This approach goes by many names, as well: top-down theology, for obvious reasons; and ultimately Docetism, the 2^nd century heretical belief that Jesus wasn’t really human – He just appeared that way. He didn’t really suffer – it just seemed like He did.  And maybe Jesus didn’t even die on the Cross, because the early Docetists entertained conspiracy theories that at the last minute, someone changed places with Jesus, dying on the Cross in His place.  Some thought Simon of Cyrene had taken His place; others even thought it was Judas Iscariot.

Of course, orthodox Christian theology teaches that Jesus was both human and divine. Where we get into trouble is when we focus on one to the exclusion of the other. That’s where we verge on heresy – when Jesus is only our friend and not our judge, or when we are only God’s slaves, and not His beloved children.

Now all this talk of ancient heresy may seem rather dry, and more suitable for history books than personal reflection.  But people back then had what seemed like good reasons to go astray.  It’s not like their goal was to distort the gospel.  They were trying to understand God, but their own needs and biases got in the way. And so instead of finding God, they created a god to fit their expectations, and ultimately would up far removed from the truth.

For example, the lure of bottom-up theology – where Jesus is our buddy, and not all that different from us – is pretty obvious. Last week’s gospel was revolutionary: “You are no longer servants, for I have called you friends.” The God of all creation; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob calling us friends! All of a sudden all our assumptions are turned on their ear, and perhaps we don’t know how to respond to God. If we don’t have to cower before Him, how are we supposed to act?  If our relationship isn’t the hierarchical one that we’d always thought it was, what kind of relationship is it? And so we allow ourselves to rest a while – to rest in the knowledge that, in the words of the famous hymn, “a friend we have in Jesus.”  And we take comfort in that remarkable promise of divine companionship.

So far, so good, but, as is usually the case with things that are “so far, so good,” when you take them further, they’re not good anymore. We might tend to lose sight of the fact that God is divine as well as human; judge as well as friend. We might get so caught up in the idea of divine companionship that we end up thinking that God is just like us. Eventually, we might even get to the point of defining God in relation to ourselves, rather than the other way around.  We become the center of our universe, and in some perverse way, God becomes our servant, and we end up heretics. 

The reason we might tend to take things that far is not just because we think being God’s friend is so wonderful.  More than that, we’re seduced by the idea that God is the same as we are. And when we get to that point, we no longer have to deal with the otherness of God.  It’s natural to be uncomfortable around people who are profoundly “other” – people from different cultures; people with strange ideas about what’s right and wrong; people who love differently than we do – and by focusing exclusively on the humanity of Jesus, we don’t have to be uncomfortable anymore.

The great Jewish scholar Martin Buber wrote about exactly this in his book I and Thou. In that book he talked of the two basic human responses to the otherness of God: we either reduce God to some thing that we can control, or else we deny God’s otherness and delude ourselves into thinking that He’s the same as we are.  The other becomes either “It” – a thing – or “Me.” But Buber stresses that God is “Thou” – an independent person that we cannot control, and who’s inherently distinct from us.  And that’s not a bad thing – indeed, it’s a wonderful thing – because you can only love a person who’s different than yourself.  To love a thing is idolatry. To love yourself is narcissism.  Only in loving the other – the “Thou” – can love be true.

And today’s readings are all about otherness.  Ezekiel writes of an other-worldly vision of storms, clouds, and fire.  “In the middle of it was something like four living creatures” he writes. He can’t really make sense of them – all he can say is that they’re like living creatures. So also at the end of that reading, Ezekiel uses the word “like” ten times in just three verses, as he fights to describe something so foreign in understandable terms. “Like gleaming amber.” “Like fire.” “Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day.”

Ezekiel resists the temptation to translate God into human terms that so many other people in the Bible fall into. Aaron built the golden calf, and called it God.  Peter at the moment of the Transfiguration wanted to build dwellings for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, in order to keep them from leaving.  In order to put them in a structure built of human hands, so that he would know where to find them.  So that he could, on some level, understand them, and on another level, control them.

And that’s what this kind of heresy – where we focus entirely on the humanity of Jesus – is all about: control.  We want to put God in a box, not only so that we’ll know what to expect of God, but so that He’ll do what we want Him to do.  Viewed in that way, it’s not as hard to recognize that way of thinking as way off the mark.

The Ascension is a response to this heresy, because it prevents us from thinking that we’re in control. Granted, there are lots of other good reasons for the Ascension – like the coming of the Holy Spirit, which can only happen after Jesus has left the earth. That’s the positive spin on the Ascension. 

The negative spin, though, doesn’t deal so much with what good the Ascension brings, but with the bad that it prevents.  And the bad that it prevents is our attempt to keep Jesus with us forever, as a human being, a brother, a friend.  Our attempt to make God so familiar as to be no different than any of us. If Jesus had stayed, not only would the Holy Spirit never have come, we would have reduced Jesus to some thing we could control.  Or perhaps we would have seen ourselves in Jesus, and come to view ourselves as gods.  In any case, we would have been devoid of love, because there would no other, no “Thou.” There would only have been the world we’d created for ourselves, and sought to rule.

During His earthly ministry Jesus was often confronted with this human tendency to try to make God do what we want Him to do. Jesus often withdrew by Himself to the mountains or the desert, because the crowds wanted to make Him their king.  But a king in an earthly sense. A king who fit their conception of what a king should be, and should say, and should do. But Jesus was different – as divine as He was human – and that’s not the kind of king He’d have been.

His Ascension served the same purpose as his earthly retreats, only on a grander scale.  He left this world so that we’d understand that our ways aren’t necessarily His ways.  So that we wouldn’t make an idol out of Him, after He’d spent all his years on earth preaching against idolatry.

But most of all, I think, He left his world because it made it possible for us to keep on loving Him. Because if He’d stayed, we’d probably have gone off the deep end, thought He was just the same as us, and fallen into heresy.  But by leaving – by being taken up to heaven and sitting at the right hand of God – He left no doubt in our minds that He was other; that He was not “it”, or “us,” but “thou.” And that if we were to love Him, we were going to have to step outside ourselves, and deal with someone totally different, someone who challenged us and stretched us and made us better than we were.  Someone, in short, who loved us, and gave us the chance to love Him right back.

And lest we ever go off the other deep end, and think of Jesus as being all God and no human, He left us with memories.  Memories of His time among us – the words He spoke, the wounds He healed, the lives He touched. And He left us with one memory in particular – that last night before everything changed, and the meal He shared with those who love Him, that we share with each other – and with God – every week.

At this Eucharist on Ascension Day – of all Eucharists, of all days – we’re confronted with Jesus in all His glory – both human and divine.  We cannot fall into believing Him to be only one and not the other, as we hear of His ascent to heaven, even as we share the Communion, in remembrance of His days on earth with us.

So let us, in classic Anglican fashion, walk the middle way between Jesus’s humanity and His divinity, always seeing both.  Realizing that we are both His servants and His friends.  That He is both our companion and our judge. And as we see Him rising to the heavens, in an otherworldly vision much like the one Ezekiel struggled to describe, let us balance our sorrow for His departure with our joy for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  And let us be grateful that Jesus didn’t give us what we wanted; that He had the courage to leave us to our own devices, come what may; so that in the end we could see him as wholly Other, and thereby have the chance to love Him, as He first loved us, which is the greatest gift of all.

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