ABSTRACT
Karl Barth announced that theology is always a post-resurrection phenomenon working within an eschatological horizon. Theology reads Scripture, the traditions of the Church and the world in the light of the glory of the Risen Christ in the space opened between that resurrection and our own. While not wishing to contradict that, I want to argue for the place of the ascension in Christianity, its practices, its Scriptures and its theological task. This nascent theology of the ascension is inseparable from a Christology which emphasises both the gendered body of that Jewish man, Jesus the Christ, and the way that body is represented in the Scriptures, and the tradition’s reflections upon the Scriptures, as continually being displaced. It will begin, therefore, not with the concepts philosophically and theologically honed by the ante-and post-Nicene fathers. It will attempt to demonstrate, through this approach, how questions such as ‘Can a male saviour save women?1 and modern investigations into the sexuality of Jesus,2 which simply continue the nineteenth-century rational search for the historical Jesus, fail to discern the nature of transcorporeality in Christ. For these approaches take the human to be a measure of the Christic. What happens at the ascension, theologically, constitutes a critical moment in a series of displacements or assumptions3 of the male body of Jesus Christ such that the body of Christ, and the salvation it both seeks and works out (Paul’s katergomai) becomes multi-gendered. I wish to argue that, since none of us has access to bodies as such, only bodies that are mediated through the giving and receiving of signs, the series of displacements or assumptions of Jesus’ body continually
refigures a masculine symbolics until the particularities of one sex gives way to the particularities of sexual differences. To that end, this chapter examines the presentation of the male Jesus in the Gospels and its representation in the life of the Church. It examines both the performance of Jesus the gendered Jew and the way that performance has been scripted, reperformed and ventriloquised by the community he brought to birth. It traces the economy of the deferred identity of the body of the Messiah;4 an economy which becomes visible in a series of displacements. The ascension marks a final stage in the destabilised identity of the body of the Messiah.
