In the valley where I live, mountains, hills and heavens rise upward in every direction. People who live here often wander up off the valley floor, sometimes hiking mountain trails, or driving the roads that loop and wind ribbon-like through deep-green forests, occasionally even climbing on foot towards one of the commanding summits above.
Most of the time though, we just live down in the valley. But even then, all the verticality that surrounds us constantly draws our eyes upwards, from the grassy slopes and hillsides that hem the valley floor, to ridges draped thickly in green, to bare peaks against blue sky, and to whatever lies beyond.
Haven’t people who live in the presence of mountains always done what we do? Haven’t they always gazed upward from the valley below?
In ancient Israel, before the people had only one God, and before the Temple in Jerusalem became the only legitimate site of worship, the people raised altars on mountain summits and on hilltops. Psalm 121 says “I lift up my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from?”
Hills, mountains, and heavens play a sacred role in the Christian story as well. The harsh and rugged Judean wilderness where Jesus was tempted by Satan, the hilltop from where He delivered his great Sermon on the Mount, the summit on which the miracle of the Transfiguration took place – all draw believers closer to the heights above.
But with the Ascension, the final event in Jesus’ time on earth, our minds are drawn even higher. Jesus has been crucified and resurrected, and after spending time with his disciples, he prepares to depart from them. At the end of the gospel of Luke, his disciples witness him rising upwards into the sky, to join his Father in heaven.
But a rather obvious question nags at any modern person who thinks seriously about this scene. Just where is Jesus going when he ascends? In other words, where exactly is up?
To the people living hundreds of years ago, say at the height of the Middle Ages, the very question would’ve seemed silly. They lived on an earth that was at the center of a cosmos – a richly ordered creation, in which the earth was surrounded by concentric spheres. The stars and planets were lights embedded in these spheres. And the higher you went, the better things got. So they knew exactly where up was, and it would be natural to imagine Jesus ascending to a higher and better place – upwards to heaven to sit at his Father’s right hand.
But today we live in a much different world. Medieval theology no longer governs our view of the cosmos. The earth has been driven from the center of all that exists and has become instead a tiny speck in a vast emptiness. Here there are no concentric spheres. The stars are pinpricks of fire in the vacuum of space. When the first astronauts returned to earth decades ago they told us, “in outer space, there is no up or down.”
So, for us there is no easy answer to the question “Where is up?”, or more to the point, “Where is heaven?”
Christians have been struggling with this question, in one form or another, since scientific materialism has come to dominate our culture over the last few centuries. The answers offered by theologians have ranged from a ringing affirmation of all the miraculous events in the Biblical narrative, including the Ascension, to efforts to forge a Christianity that is more compatible with the modern worldview.
The modern materialist will criticize all of these efforts for assuming that God and his unseen realm actually exist, even though they cannot be detected by any of the five senses. Where, they will demand, is the evidence for these supernatural happenings that Christians believe in? And of course, the materialist is right – there is and can be no such evidence, at least not physical evidence, the only kind the materialist will accept. Christians, they will say, assume the existence of things unseen.
But the materialist assumes as well. They assume that nothing exists unseen by our senses. In their world, there is no heaven, no source of the divine. This assumption cannot be proven with absolute certainty; our most fundamental assumptions never can be. But such an assumption can establish itself in the mind until it becomes a habit – a habit that is rarely if ever questioned.
For many people in the modern west, the materialist habit of mind has become the default. Traditional believers are often seen as out of touch with the real world, as people who lack the courage to accept what to the materialist is a fact – that looking upward to find the divine and transcendent is a meaningless and futile act.
Yet those of us who believe, who are open and receptive to things unseen and unmeasured, continue to look upward. We follow Paul in the book of Hebrews. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
As my pastor observed in his sermon on Easter Sunday, the day Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ, “Some things need to be believed, before you can see.”
