The Golden Ass

I used to think I had to entertain reconciliation to our popular imagination for how “everyone will see” the Second Coming. In recently previous generations, the popular belief was that “everyone will see” (Rev. 1: 7, Isaiah 40: 1-11) on television in some grand event displayed on the News, or something, when Jesus returns. “Ha we told you!” Christians everywhere will shout while a confused news caster tries to narrate what they can’t understand and what challenges their heathen atheism. I was recently asked how I think God will make it so everyone on the globe sees Him returning all at once together.

In the last few years, I have been touched by desire for intimacy and care. I was previously less aware of these desires. It’s not that I was previously blissfully unaware, and nor that I “suppressed” them. In fact, if anything, my habit was more frequently to futilely indulge them without naming or owning them for what they were. And, at times, that indulgence, or any number of other pursuits or ways of interpreting the world, actually served as a distraction from or covering over of despair in alienation and death.

Besides an ongoing process of healing from what I semi-recently (in the last year and a half) learned was trauma, part of what awoke me to the embrace and touch of these true desires was the desire and touch of, for, and from a beautiful woman (don’t let your imagination go wild here, because that’s not even how it was, lol). As David Bentley Hart has said: "Beauty evokes desire. It precedes and elicits desire, it supplicates and commands it, and it gives shape to the soul that receives it."

As I got honest with myself and faced, named, and owned these desires, I also found myself in a place of uncertainty of whether or not I would ever enter the territory with this beautiful woman where such intimacy and care reign. In the midst of that uncertainty, I entertained what I only later learned was the lie that obtaining intimacy, care, and faithfulness, that entering that territory depends on my doing, saying, and being everything perfectly. The lie also included the sub-lie that the threat of the harsh desert territory of alienation and death hangs over me always as the harsh, punishing judgment for not doing everything right to obtain wholeness and belonging.

My entertainment of this set of lies naturally, at times, looked like extreme anxiety and fear, and like my WAY over-extending myself to do everything in my power I knew to do in order to close the gap of possibility and uncertainty around to actuality and knowing. This is an over-simplification, as there was a lot of other stuff going on, too, but it's also not an untruth.

My being given to see that I had been, unbeknownst to me, functioning on a lie was, at one and the same time, also the gift of seeing that entering a territory where intimacy, care, and faithfulness reign means and requires entrusting myself to the reign of just such a territory, rather than and as opposed to finding my way there by my own exhausting power. I died and found my life outside myself.

This means opening and entrusting myself into the reign of that territory as I take each small step in front of me of my actually being, my own enacting and embodying the faithfulness, intimacy, and care I now see I want - in relation to others. This means and implies that I can’t possibly see the far-reaching extent of the reign of the territory of my desire. I do not and cannot grasp them and wield them with my own power in a territory whose boundaries I set and therefore grasp. They do not belong to me. Rather, I come under them as I entrust myself to them, one step at a time along a journey whose end is always unknown.

It was just this week when the potency of the lie of my own power was opened to me, along with the greater power of the truth into which we entrust ourselves. That Truth is a person. Saturday, I “led” a discipleship cohort in training to enter this reign of the territory of faithfulness, care, and intimacy that we are tasked by the Truth to walk in and witness to. At least three people shed tears in our gathering, and that’s not the first time something like that has happened. Just afterwards, I got this email, which has an unstated message: “I was part of a group in NC back in the 90s with some really great people. I thought I wouldn’t find that again. This group is clearly that and this group is being one of the best examples of the church. I’m thankful for all of you.” That email brought tears of joy.

This was a parable, as much for myself as for anyone else, to say that the kingdom of God isn’t “seen” in the ease and power of grand spectacles. Let the reader understand. See Matt. 24: 23-28. The point of the Parable of the Mustard Seed, btw, is that a mustard tree, relatively speaking, isn’t a big, tall, tree with a predominant central trunk standing over everything in the middle of a field. It instead stays closer to the ground with many branches and crawls across a large territory.

Jesus isn’t seen in the power of a grand spectacle any more than is the intimacy and desire in a relationship between a man and a woman. And, spectacles of worship don’t replace discipleship any more than our predominant concentration of all intimacy into the idol of the nuclear family replaces worship of Yahweh.

“Witness…is already in conflict with nationalist desire, and against the fantasy of any people for global influence of world domination. The disciples will be formed by the Spirit as witnesses. They will be turned out to the world not as representatives of empires but those who will announce a revolution, the revolution of the intimate, God calling to the world. They will enter new places to become new people by joining themselves to those in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. As Jesus announces this divine desire, he ascends. The ascension of Jesus continues to play so small a role in ecclesial imagination precisely because we struggle to think spatially…

We more easily imagine the time of Jesus Christ, the time in which he wishes to announce his reign…than we do the space of Jesus Christ, the space he wishes to inhabit and to enter in. If the ascended Lord embraces our time as his time to be made known, then he also seeks to walk in the places of this world to announce his life as the life given for the world. It is true that the ascension of Jesus certainly marks the new time of his reign and the time of the Spirit. In this time what will be constituted is the moment of gathering that will become the church. Yes, as Jan Milic Lochman noted, Jesus' ‘journey to heaven’ becomes the disciples’ ‘journey to the ends of the earth.’ Jesus ascends not only to establish presence through absence, but he also draws his body into the real journeys of his disciples into the world. He goes to heaven for us, ahead of us. He goes with and ahead of his disciples into the real places of this world…

His ascension marks less his power and more his scope. He will reign over the whole cosmos and yet he rises to raise us into heaven [i.e. – into a territory of glory or authority in the Spirit], as John Calvin said, and to overcome the distance between us and God and between one another. Jesus’ ascension is in fact God claiming our space as the sites for visitation, announcing God’s desire to come to us. God’s desire will be seen in the pouring out of the Spirit in a specific place [Jerusalem] in order to enter specific places and specific lives. He ascends for our sake, not to turn away from us but to more intensely focus on us.

As he ascends, the disciples watch, and here the danger of watching becomes clear. Jesus is no action figure, no superhero to be consumed in spectacle. Watching Jesus and watching for Jesus was and is a significant temptation for his disciples. Such watching can easily undermine movement and easily undermine the priority of the journey. Luke presents to us two men in white robes standing by the disciples, just as they did at the tomb of Jesus (Luke 24: 4-5). These men echo a similar question to the one asked in the Luke passage, a question that basically means, Why are you performing actions that contradict the actions of Jesus? The women (in Luke) sought the living among the dead; these other disciples at this moment look into the heavens concerned with absence rather than looking forward to presence…This is a moment of loss, even as they know that they must go forward in faith. We must never discount that the next step must be taken at the sight of Jesus’ leaving. Such a step is understandably a labored step, unsure and unclear. Nevertheless it must be taken because faith always leans forward to Jerusalem, toward that place where God waits to meet us. We are always drawn by God to our future.”

- Willie Jennings, Commentary on Acts, pp. 18-21