Ascension and postmodernity

Today was the Feast of the Ascension, which has always been interesting to me as a student of Biblical interpretation, because only the Lucan texts (Luke and Acts of the Apostles) recount the Ascension in their original forms (Mark’s gospel quickly mentions it, but only in the section that scholars generally agree was added later, and which was compiled from the post-resurrection accounts of the other gospels). Anyway, not only is it not mentioned by the other gospels, but within the Lucan tradition, the timeline given for how it operates differs: Luke’s gospel implicitly says that the Ascension happens on the evening of Easter Sunday (the road to Emmaus story happens on Sunday, they go from there right back to Jerusalem, Jesus shows up then and talks to them, takes them out to Emmaus and goes from there). Acts, on the other hand, explicitly says that Jesus taught them for forty days (symbolically significant as “a long time,” rather than a number to be taken at a literal level, but still more than one day). This is interesting to me not because the author of Luke-Acts can’t seem to keep his story straight, but because presumably he knows what he is doing. At the same time, other texts say exactly opposite stuff – for example, Acts has Jesus telling the disciples to stay in Jerusalem, but Matthew, Mark and John have them go to Galilee (that’s where they see Jesus, not in Jerusalem as in Luke-Acts). Again, the organizers of the canon presumably knew what they were doing; they were not stupid, in fact, they were extremely careful readers of Scripture. What we call postmodernity, which is in part about the end of overarching metanarratives that silence counter-testimonies, is in fact not simply a nineteenth- and twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon, but is woven into the very canon of Scripture – those who organized the canon of Scripture deliberately included in the canon texts that made differing claims, without having to take out or edit those problematic discrepancies. They were allowed to sit side by side in tension, without one final answer running roughshod over any of those multiple voices. That is maddening, of course, for people who want to be given one final claim about what “actually happened,” (as if the Bible is simply “camcorder theology”) but I would argue that the Bible reflects well that our lives are all lived in the context of multiple testimonies, none of which ever earns finality in the common discourse. We all know that political liberals and conservatives, for example, have different story lines about what our nation’s identity is about (and of course it isn't simply as clean as "liberal vs. conservative") – witness last week’s competing speeches by Barack Obama and Dick Cheney regarding “enhanced interrogation techniques” – and most of us choose one side in that issue and call that the genuine script of our nation, to the exclusion of the other, but there is no higher authority that finally settles the dispute for everyone. The Constitution theoretically serves that very purpose, people might say, but witness the degree to which it, or any other text or story that could serve as an adjudicating testimony, gets used as a political football by all parties in the debate. Similarly, the Bible gets used as a theological football by those who would see it making monolithic claims: “the Bible says” is a most unhelpful referent for lots of issues that people want to say the Bible is crystal clear about, insofar as there is a multiplicity of perspectives represented therein. Again, maddening for us who so often just want someone to deliver a final answer – I use the image of a person wearing a wristwatch: someone who is wearing one watch likely feels pretty confident about what time it is, but someone wearing multiple watches not only has no idea what time it is without some higher adjudication (looking out a window, for example), but is likely to lose faith in the very possibility of knowing what time it is. The claim that one might “boil down” from all the perspectives of the different gospels and Acts regarding the post-Easter Jesus is that Jesus really is alive with God, or that the totality of Jesus’ being has been taken up into the reality of God’s life, or that Luke-Acts is trying to explain for a Gentile audience what the other texts are trying to communicate for Jewish-Christian audiences, or something like that, but that runs the risk of too easily smoothing them all out into one claim, losing their very narrative quality in favor of seeing them simply as resources out of which Christians can mine doctrines. Were that to be the way we ought to see Scripture, there would be no point in having multiple gospels included in the canon – we would just choose one, or squeeze them all together into one common storyline (as has been attempted repeatedly throughout Christian history, presumably by people who are as uncomfortable with ambiguity as we are). However, life is endlessly (and inherently?) contestational, so that all we can do is keep going back to the various scripts that are there for our perusal and contesting the implications of the choices we make as individuals and as a society for the scripting of our lives...