Tramping by his side
ASCENSION
Peter Steel SJ

You may have seen paintings of the Lord’s Ascension into heaven. They come in all shapes and sizes; amongst which are some which show the apostles gazing upwards, while the feet of Jesus disappear into a cloud.

This, perhaps is quaint, an oddity. And yet it suggests something of critical importance about today’s feast. It is this: we celebrate today God’s blessing both upon what is most ‘earthy’ about us and upon what is most ‘spiritual’ about us.

By definition, our feet are our most down-to-earth feature. Our eyes can gaze at the wide blue yonder, our hands and arms point across the oceans, but our feet get right on with the dirt or the grass or the floor beneath them. We can’t bluff our feet—they know what’s what, within their own immediate realm. And when we are footsore, beyond a certain degree, or when our feet are injured, everything changes, and many things come to a halt.

There is another remarkable painting which shows the dead Christ, his feet towards the viewer. They are, as it were, switched off from their normal contact with the earth and purchase on it: and we know that, for him, everything is over.

To paint the feet of the raised and rising Christ is in effect to paint his whole worldly, earthy experience. With or without the nail-wounds through them, they still stand for a toddler’s reeling stride, a young man’s brisk trot, a traveller’s marching tramp, a concerned friend’s sprint in emergency. They declare the truth of the Church’s constant claim that, in Christ, God is made flesh and blood. They are a vivid factor in the code of divinity among us. Where the feet are, God is—God, a weatherer of time: God, made weary on the way: God, our refresher on our way.

In those paintings of the feet rising into clouds, we see all this implied. But we also see implied that they will soon be invisible.

St Mark says, in the gospel passage for the feast (Mark 16: 15–20), ‘the Lord Jesus was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right of God’. We may picture heaven to our hearts’ content, but none of us has been there, and none of us has seen it. Our seeing fades out at this point: but our hearing may, and should, become more alert, more acute.

For St Mark reports two other things: that the Lord, at his disappearing from earthly sight, turned his followers towards all the world, all of creation, and said that they were to make what he had told them their own and pass the word on to anyone who will listen; and that ‘the Lord continually worked with them’.

In other words, the last thing we have here is the vanishing of some enchanting, but unreal, dream. The Ascension carries both the treading feet and the trodden earth into the presence of that Father who created both, the Father who loves all that he has made, and who makes us his collaborators in helping the loved world to flourish.

We cannot walk away from the world, with all its ills and its poisonings, and claim to be walking God’s path. The Son of God was, for our sake, a tramp: a tramp over the hills of Galilee, and also a tramp through the often-bewildering maze of common life in a needy world.

Unless something very unusual happens, within the next twenty-four hours each of us, too, will be called to do some tramping, in body or in spirit, at his side. And his side will look to be just what it is: the side of our sisters and our brothers.