I’ve spent a fair amount of time this week looking at paintings of the Ascension. There are lots of them—by Renaissance masters like Giotto and Rembrandt and Titian—and also by early iconographers and manuscript illuminators. And then in the 20th century, there’s the evocative rendition by Salvador Dali. I hope you have seen it, or will at least go look it up online. It’s pretty shocking, as it was surely intended to be. The perspective is from below Jesus as he rises to heaven: a dove leads him upwards and a female figure—presumably the Virgin Mary—witnesses the event. The passage from earth to heaven is brilliantly surreal: most critics understand it as Dali’s representation of something like a nuclear explosion. He painted it in 1958, barely a decade after the Manhattan project, at the height of the cold war. But what’s really memorable about this painting are the hands and the feet of Jesus.
Basically, the feet occupy the center of the composition. They are huge, bare, and kinda dirty. Not in an off-putting way: they simply look like the oversized feet of someone who walks barefoot on dusty roads. So we’re meant to understand that what God called upwards to heaven was not just Jesus’ mortal body, but also the very dust of the middle eastern roads that he walked. It was all—all of it—drawn into God’s realm through Jesus. As the whole earth, and all of its inhabitants, will all be drawn into heaven in the fullness of time. That’s the good news that makes the Ascension a major feast in the life of the church. And also makes for a surreal—in Dali’s dreamy imagination—but nevertheless beautiful composition.
But just above the feet, I found myself drawn to the hands of our Lord. They are not at all what I expected. Small—maybe a quarter size of the feet due to the exaggerated upward perspective—and shaped in a distorted grasp that makes them look rather like claws. What is Jesus struggling to hold on to, or at least to let go of? Power? Earthy cares and loves? It’s not clear.
And I assume it’s not supposed to be clear. You can imagine for yourself what was for Jesus—and would be for you—hard to let go of. But this grasping gesture raises even another question for me. In the Gospel story we just heard, Jesus’ hands do get a mention. But they are blessing, not grasping. Remember the reading we just heard? “He led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” This is Luke’s version, which differs slightly from our first reading from Acts, even though both accounts have the same author. Maybe that’s why I’d never really noticed the blessing before. It’s not consistent in the stories of the Ascension, and—as I discovered in some study this week—it’s the only time that Jesus is recorded as having blessed his disciples.
Now it’s obviously not the only time Jesus mentions blessing. You remember the Beatitudes, of course: blessing upon blessing for those who do as Jesus did. You probably also remember how Jesus blessed the little children. And then there’s the blessing the of the bread. All of that bread! In this same 24th chapter of Luke—which we’ve been hearing from a lot lately because it contains so many post-resurrection accounts—you may recall Jesus breaking bread in the town of Emmaus, with the two disciples he had been walking with. He revealed himself in the blessing and breaking of the bread. Although… not necessarily in blessing the people. That came later in the chapter, at his Ascension.
Later in the chapter, but using the same Greek word. Eulogéō (euloGEO). A cognate and relative of our contemporary word eulogy, but in New Testament Greek it’s really not a speech at a funeral. Or not just that, anyway. Eulogéō is a naming the truth about the creativity of things that God loves. They are created, they are blessed, and they multiply. So in the Septuagint, for example—the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible—God blessed humanity. He made the male and female eulogéō, and told them to “Be fruitful and multiply.” The same Greek word for blessing is used when Jesus blesses the bread and fish to feed the multitude. Blessing is translated eulogéō whenever God is about to make an abundance of something good.
I rarely do Biblical word studies in the midst of a sermon, but bear with me. I intend for this sermon to bless you! And you know which Greek word I intend for that. My eulogéō for Trinity is that there be 5000 of you, plus women and children! But here’s where things can get confusing: there is actually another—much more common—New Testament word for blessing. It’s makarios, and since it’s most frequently used to describe blessed individuals, it’s contemporary use tends to be as a boy’s name. It means something like fortunate, or happy. Someone who is makarios enjoys God’s protection, and lives a good life.
Jesus, however, wasn’t talking about that. “He led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them.” Like the bread and fish he blessed on the shores of Galilee, like the bread he broke in Emmaus, he blessed them as eulogeo for the specific purposes of revealing the creative and multiplying intentions of God. If he’d wanted the disciples to have wealth and riches and safety, he could have blessed them as makarios. But he didn’t. He had something else in mind for them.
Back to the eulogéō hands of Jesus. Dali’s version, my version—because I have the privilege of blessing you—and your version. We are actiually all blessers all the time, even if we don’t all do it in church. By our very presence, we make each other’s lives fuller and richer, and we multiply the gifts of God in our community. Which doesn’t insure that we personally will be safer or richer, but it does mean that the world will be better. That the world will be truer to the blessed purposes of God, indicated by the first days of creation.
Canon Filemon and I—who have the privilege of blessing you in church—we have particular ways of using our hands. My own, I like to imagine them as opened towards you as something like mirrors, reflecting God’s blessing back at you. The classic form of priestly blessing—borrowed from the earliest iconography of Jesus—always has our hands palms open towards you. Like as if Jesus was giving a little push. Go! Go out and multiply blessing. Which is what God made you for, and commissioned you for. At the Ascension of Jesus: with him out to the picture, literally and metaphorically, it’s us who must do the work of blessing.
So what of Jesus’ oddly positioned hand in Dali’s painting? Salvador Dali was not above copying the masters: he did it a lot, most especially in his Ascension painting. And the masters all had Jesus’ hand in the traditional blessing gesture, which leads me to believe that Dali was deliberately saying something different. These are not the open hands of a blessing for giving and multiplying; these are the hands of someone grieving. Perhaps even someone in pain. Someone whose every word and gesture, teaching and healing and touch, had been multiplying all along, and would continue to multiply in his disciples. And now came out his moment to let go of all that.
I don’t know about you, but I am quite sure that whenever I am called to let go of the earthly privilege of blessing, I too will try to hang on. I’ll want to embrace each one of you and hold on to the good earth of God’s blessed creation, even though I am utterly convinced that every act of surrender, and ultimately death itself, returns us to the source of all blessing. So even though I may not understand the depiction of Jesus’ clawed hands intellectually or theologically, I do understand them as a fellow human being.
And this is our human journey, no? We are blessed to be a blessing, until we return to the source of all blessing. That’s what we are made for, and you have everything you need to bless other people with eulogéō, even if you don’t have as much makarios as you might want. Your very person is eulogéō; you are enough, and more than enough. This is God’s first word to humanity in creation, and Jesus’ last on earth. So hear it, with the ears of your heart, and go out and multiply it. Jesus has showed us the way to God with his eulogeo: blessed are you, blessed are we.
