"A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me" (John 16:16). So says Jesus to the baffled disciples gathered around him at the Last Supper. This game of holy peek-a-boo caught my attention recently as I reflected on the event we call “the Ascension,” celebrated in our archdiocese last Sunday. What was Jesus talking about? What is Jesus talking about?
Obviously, Jesus was warning his disciples about his impending death. In the most literal sense possible, he would disappear into the hidden realm of death on the cross and then disappear bodily into a sealed tomb. Then, after his resurrection from the dead, he would reappear to them. Seems simple enough.
But you never play peek-a-boo just once. You hide your face behind your laced fingers the first time to whet the child’s interest; then you pop out to one side, saying “peek-a-boo!” The child starts laughing. So you do it again. And again. And again. (This is how we stupid adults learn that once is not enough for a child, so don’t start something you don’t want to do over and over and over again.)
Jesus in fact did something similar with the disciples. Over a period of forty days, according to the chronology of Luke’s gospel, he would appear to them and then disappear again. Sometimes he appeared to an individual, as to Mary Magdalene in the garden (John 20:11-18) or to Simon Peter, an event of which we are told after the fact but do not witness (Luke 24:34). Sometimes he appeared to small groups, as to the women on the road from the tomb (Matthew 28:9-10) or the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Sometimes he appeared to the whole gathering, as in the upper room (John 20:19-23). They didn’t laugh. They had never played this game before. They greeted Jesus’ appearances with a mixture of surprise, fear, awe, and, as they began to realize he was really there in their midst, their beloved Teacher, with joy. They grappled with confusion: he was the same Jesus whom they had followed around Palestine for three years—he bore the wounds of the nails—but he was different. He wasn’t a ghost. What was he? How did he get into a locked room? Where did he come from? Where did he go? And just as they got used to the idea that he was genuinely around somewhere and might appear at any moment, he took off in a cloud and was seen no more (Acts 1:6-11). That is what we call “the Ascension.” But even then, messengers from heaven told the gaping disciples to shut their mouths and go on home. They would see him again, coming as he had left them, on a cloud. (The cloud is God’s favorite disguise in the scriptures.) The game was not over. It would pick up later. Children are always disappointed but consoled by that promise.
However, Jesus was not really playing a game, except insofar as we play games with children to teach them skills they will need to live in our rough old world. Through his various appearances, Jesus was teaching the disciples how to see him differently. They had been used to looking at him sleeping by the campfire like anyone else, or teaching on the hillside, or walking the dusty roads of their homeland. When they got up every morning, they had only to look over, and there he was (unless he was off on the mountain alone praying, but they usually seem to have known where to find him when they needed him even then.) Now, he began to instruct them on how to see him anew, not with their bodily eyes but with what St. Benedict might have called the “eyes of the heart,” had he thought of it. (Benedict speaks of opening the “ears of your heart.”) Jesus would, he said, be with them always (Matthew 28:20). If they looked and listened, they would find him in the familiar scriptures of their childhood, hidden but revealed in texts they had heard a million times but understood too literally to recognize him there (Luke 24:25-27). They would find him in the practical, familiar act of breaking bread with them at table (Luke 24:30-31), but the act would become the heart of a sacramental ritual through which he would always make himself present to them. They would even find him in the work they had always done, work that now took on a new meaning and a new shape, as John suggests in the highly symbolic episode of night fishing on the Sea of Galilee (John 21:7-14).
One reason biblical stories have held their power over the human heart for centuries is that they always look like they are “then”—a long ago, far away, alien “then,” with its own customs, its own geography, its own vocabulary—but they are really “now.” They pretend to be the story of the ancient people of God and the first disciples, but they are our story also. The game of peek-a-boo goes on. The annual retelling of Jesus’ stories spread out over the course of the Church’s year is in part an act of memory, but it is also the script for a rehearsal. As we commemorate the unfolding events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension to glory at the Father’s right hand, we are learning how to read the true story of our own lives.
The period of time between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension is part of this narrative lens through which we can read something about the rhythms of our own experience. It is a time between seeing and seeing, between one kind of seeing and another. All of us reach a moment—usually more than once—when the old ways of “seeing” or imagining Jesus or God fail us. Familiar religious language, visual and verbal, sounds artificial, unrelated to our own very real struggles:
—The pictures that moved us dissatisfy. I remember when I became disenchanted with what I came to call “the Breck Shampoo Jesus” (no insult intended to a fine shampoo) who decorated the pictures in my Sunday school classroom or the holy cards the Sisters gave us to put in our prayer books. He was too perfect, too neat and clean and well coifed, too remote from my world, to get me through hard days and bitter lessons in other people’s frailties and my own.
—The biblical stories sound too much like “then,” too little like “now.” Jesuit Father Thomas H. King notes the comic effect of Don Quixote’s insistence on using (and living) the language of the golden age of chivalry from times long ago and far away. The language of the golden age may be beautiful, and often is, but, says King, we long sometimes for more of the language of our own iron age. It means something to us because it is born of our own world’s experiences. One of the demands of the prayer form known as lectio divina (prayerful reading of scripture) is that we work at bridging the gap between the world of the Bible and our own, with the ever-read help of the Holy Spirit. “Listening” as a way of prayer requires a willingness to work to hear.
—The rituals of worship seem archaic, removed, inaccessible. We have taken part in them so often that we know their surface well but have lost the key to the inner world they make present. Especially in a culture that prizes passive entertainment over the labor of active participation, we surrender to the role of spectator at a spectacle that no longer touches us.
What do we do in this “dark night” between seeing and seeing? My suggestion is that we look to the disciples and their experience between resurrection and ascension, ascension and Pentecost. After the resurrection, they were often as much at a loss as we are; they took off for elsewhere (Emmaus) or a past that comforts by its familiarity (the fishing expedition in John 21); but it seems that they never quite turned their back on the possibility of Jesus. When he appeared, they were glad, even when they remained frightened and confused. After the ascension, they put all their hope in the promise that the Spirit would come. They gathered and prayed—though for what, they likely did not know, because they had not yet experienced Pentecost. They trusted, they hoped, they prayed—and they waited. Above all, they waited.
And sometimes, so must we. The key to the waiting is the genuine expectation that we are waiting for someone who is really coming, no matter how unlikely it seems to our impatience, our desire for comfort, our temptations to look elsewhere for any easier way to fill our longing. Expectation is a vigorous hope that refuses the possibility of disappointment. Memory helps: we have seen Christ before, however imperfect we now find the modes of our seeing, so we know we could see him again. Trust, blinded but not suffocated by the cloud, matters. He did say, "I am with you always"--even in the dark. Expectation, memory and trust keep us looking in the places he showed his first disciples: scriptures, worship, and the ordinary activities of our daily lives. And we have been told that he will reappear out of the cloud that hides him. Then, once again, perhaps he will take our silly hands away from our eyes — his own were never covered— and say, “Peek-a-boo.”
Of course I find this much easier to write than to live, but the promise haunts me: “Again a little while, and you will see me….your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:16, 22).
Note: See Thomas M. King, Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (Sheed & Ward, 1989).
©2009, Abbey of St. Walburga
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