This is a post about serious weirdness, uncanniness, Unheimlichkeit, and oddity. The time between the Resurrection and the Ascension is deeply strange. Mary Magdalen sees Him and thinks he is the gardener. The gathered disciples see him suddenly among them. The fishermen see him eating grilled fish on the beach, and do not recognise him. Cleophas and his friend walk and talk with him for an entire long afternoon, and do not recognise him until he breaks the bread. He walks through walls and yet has scars that can be touched. And then, after giving them some final instructions, he is whooshed up into a cloud.
The period, unsurprisingly, is forty days long: like that which divided his baptism from the start of his ministry. So in fact his active human life as Meshiach is bordered by two liminal periods of “forty days”. The first is a period of preparation, in which he has to clear himself of the three temptations that (necessarily?) accompany the condition of being both human and divinely powerful: gratifying simple needs, performing miracles for no other reason than to show off, and bringing the Devil into one’s mission for the sake of completeness.
The second period has two meanings. In the first place it is a rounding-off of his earthly mission. He has now conquered the world, the flesh (death), and the Devil, and completes the job by making sure that at least the core group of his supporters has ocular and tangible proof that he has in fact risen from the dead. Secondly, like the desert, it is also a time of preparation: preparation for his definitive return to the Father, keeping his humanity but henceforth only as a theological principle and attribute, which allows him, while “in Heaven”, still to be available to earthly humans’ prayers and entreaties.
All this said, his appearances are still deeply strange. Only Rembrandt, among painters, tried to represent this, in his Munich canvas of the Resurrected Christ – who is not only uncanny but completely different from his representations of the living Yeshua (see above). The disciples must have been utterly disconcerted. But he took the kindest care to reassure them, inviting Thomas to touch his scars, asking them for something to eat, and later breakfasting with them on fish grilled over a small fire of thorn-branches. The point, of course, was not only to reassure them that he was really he and not a ghost, but also to offer proof of the Resurrection.
And what about that cloud? What about the whoosh? Either it did or it didn’t happen. If it did happen, does it tell us something (as the disciples probably thought) about the location of Heaven? Since to them the earth was probably flat, a Heaven “up there” was not unreasonable; but for us? Where is the Father, and where, seated at his right hand, is the Son? Where are all those angels? We now have increasingly good, if still very approximate, mappings of the Universe. So in all that, where is Heaven? My own dim sense is that is exists in another, parallel, dimension, invisible to our telescopes yet very occasionally glimpsed by mystics. This in no way denies the reality of its existence, or suggests that it exists only “in the mind”. If, as some scientists consider, we can realistically imagine a plurality of parallel universes, a multiverse, then a dimension where Heaven, Paradise, really exists is not remotely unlikely.
Images: 1) Rembrandt, "Christ Resurrected (Ecce Homo); 2) Rembrandt, "Jesus"; 3) Gustave Doré, "Paradiso: Canto 31 (Dante)"
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