I sometimes like to imagine the following word problem taught in a Christian-school physics class:

Jesus ascends into heaven 40 days after Easter, traveling at a velocity of 0.99999999999c (i.e., 99.999999999% the speed of light). Please answer the following, showing your work:
a) What % of the Milky Way Galaxy has he traversed to date?
b) What day of the week does he think it is?”

Answers:
a) Roughly 1-2%.
b) Sunday.

The universe is very, very big. (And special relativity is very cool.)

I offer you this word problem because today is, of course, “Ascension Day.” In his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells the story: after his resurrection, Jesus spends forty days with the disciples, before ascending again into heaven.

In a three-tiered ancient cosmology, this makes perfect sense. The world as we know it, the place where we spend our whole lives, was in the center. The underworld was a shadowy realm of spirits beneath the ground, where we buried the dead and where they remained. The heavens were the whole celestial sphere above us, a luminous place of divine beings we could not reach, although some mortals like Orion could be brought there by the gods. So when Jesus rises up into the sky, he is returning from earth to heaven.

But anyone with a basic grasp of modern physics or astronomy will have some questions about this story. We know now that the Earth is not, in fact, at the center of the universe, nor is it qualitatively distinct from “the heavens.” It is but one planet in but one solar system in but one galaxy in a truly massive universe.

Luckily for Jesus, “heaven” is not a place located within beyond the bounds of the known universe, or even just our galaxy. It is a separate and overlapping realm, one that is hidden within and behind and beneath and inside all of creation as we know it. Jesus is born, “descending” from heaven to earth. He dies, “descending” from the world to the underworld. He “rises,” ascending from death into life, and breaking the chains that keep the souls of the dead trapped there. And he “rises” again, bringing the souls of our ancestors with him to heaven, bearing human nature itself back into the dwelling place of God.

As physics, it makes no sense. As theology, it does. Jesus descends into the depths. He is with us in the hardest, and the scariest, and the most painful parts of life. He doesn’t always fix them. You can’t always sense him there. But he is in them, bearing witness to and redeeming them, and bringing them with him back to heaven.

And in the ordinary, holy parts of life, he’s inviting us to come and meet him. We can’t travel the trillions of light-years it would take to escape our universe to somehow get to heaven; it simply can’t be done, and in fact that’s not where heaven is found. But by the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit, we can sometimes catch a glimpse of the heavenly reality that is hidden everywhere.

Since I began with a joke about special relativity, I guess I’ll close with a poem. This one’s a sonnet for Ascension Day, by the British poet Malcolm Guite:

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heavencentred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.