As Christians we testify that Jesus’ story doesn’t end with his death. But it also doesn’t culminate with his resurrection. If it did, Jesus might be walking among us today in his risen state, paying each of us random visitations as he did the disciples: suddenly coming through the walls to join us at dinner or popping up alongside us when we’re out for a walk. No, the risen Jesus disappeared. His glorified body is something we are no longer able to behold, at least here and now.

So what’s the point of his rising at all—besides to show that death is not the last word? Wouldn’t Christian testimonies be more persuasive if the resurrected body of Jesus had continued to journey among humankind these past two thousand years? Wouldn’t Jesus have changed the world far more if he’d remained among us as a walking living breathing deathless wonder? Maybe. But the existence of the church depends on Jesus’ having lived, died, risen from the dead—and then disappeared into the sky, sending us gifts of strange power that come from God’s Spirit: power to forgive sins, to heal one another, to speak as if we’re drunk (Acts 1:9, 2)—as if we can actually be understood by people across every barrier of language and place.

To ponder the significance of this strange story as it unfolded during and after the life of Jesus, I want to invite us into his story from an angle of vision we don’t always consider—or at least, from an angle I’d not really considered before. The sociologists among us have probably thought about the world a great deal looking through the lens I have in mind.
Many years ago I was having dinner with some friends of a companion during a visit to Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of those friends, John Plotz, was in a doctoral program in literature, and I asked him what his dissertation was about.

“Crowds,” he replied. “The function of crowds in Victorian literature.”

That surprised me at the time. Crowds seem anonymous, so far removed from the intimacy of face-to-face conversation, individual persons whose lives stand out with texture and weight and depth. How can we care about crowds? How can we explore questions of meaning and purpose, in literature or in life, looking at crowds?

Lately, though, I’ve found myself thinking about crowds. At least three reasons come to mind. Two I’ll describe straightaway, the third a little later.

First, this past winter there’s been a television with cable in my house for the first time in my adult life. And just about the only thing I’ve been watching is Blackhawks hockey. So I’ve been literally seeing crowds on a regular basis. I’ve also been paying more attention to the way sports writers sometimes utter nasty intimidating threats: despite being at or near the top of the NHL standings, if you keep up this losing streak, beware beware, your fan base will shrink, your crowd of followers will disappear. The assumption seems to be that crowds require a constant diet of victories to survive. As if crowds will die of starvation if they don’t glut on glory. (But how can any sports writer based in the city of the Chicago Cubs make such a claim?)

The second reason I’ve been noticing crowds is because of the attention garnered by the Tea Party movement, with its outraged public gatherings and the delight in the voltage of raw power experienced by women and men who suddenly find themselves important as the head of a movement. I’ve wondered if for some middle-aged persons, with no history of political activism, there’s a draw to leadership in the Tea Party and other political movements that’s similar to the draw of younger generation to be seen on reality TV—to feel real by feeling themselves visible in the public eye. There’s a high in feeling our own power of speaking before loud cheers, a rush in pushing back with our voice against an amorphous giant (whether or not that giant really exists). There are surely many motivating factors behind the Tea Party movement, including a sense of crisis about job loss and perhaps a fear of changing demographics (if critics are right that many whites are losing the sense that they represent the true identity of the U.S.). One motivation may be instinctively to imitate Sarah Palin, with or without her wit—to be the homegrown underdog who can speak for those who feel overlooked and disenfranchised. But whatever feelings we may have about the Tea Party movement, its ability to coalesce crowds is undeniable.

Whether or not crowds do in fact need a sense of success to survive, crowds certainly do need something interesting and even dangerous going on if they’re going to appear in the first place. Crowds gather for contests, for ceremonies marking graduations and inaugurations. They gather to watch a fire burn down a house, to watch a public execution. Crowds that form for political purposes need leaders who want to be seen and heard, who know how to name the feelings of their followers, how to galvanize them to change the social order, to get what they want. A crowd is raw communal energy that is formless and forming at the same time, the energy of transformation there on foot, ready to make something happen—to destroy in rioting, or pressure for the creation of something new, something not yet here.

A crowd like this stood waving palm branches when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem the week before his death, riding into town on a donkey, echoing a prophecy from Zechariah 9:9, a prophecy directed at a crowd: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey.” It is precisely the power of a crowd to acclaim Jesus as king that would lead the Roman Empire to execute Jesus, with the complicity of the leaders of his own people.

Many Christians insist that the crowds which gathered around Jesus, and even Jesus’ own disciples, didn’t get what Jesus’ public teachings were all about: he wasn’t calling them to form a political kingdom on earth but a very different sort of kingdom, one with God at its heart. He was subverting the very meaning of “kingdom.” Some say Jesus subverted the meaning of “kingdom” by locating it in heaven or (more accurately) in a new earth that comes after the end of time. Other Christians stress that for Jesus the kingdom of God isn’t a place but a new way of life on earth, one not based on status or rank, a way of life that involves eating meals with your enemies and with society’s outcasts.

All this may be true, but sometimes we can protest the political nature of Jesus’ leadership so much that we miss seeing just how odd Jesus’ relationship to politics could be—odd in a way that demands a lot of our imagination, stretching our ability to sort out the relationship between politics and the ultimate concerns of religion. Like Jews and Muslims, Christians debate among ourselves what exactly it means to order the whole of our lives—including our political lives—in deep awareness of God.

For Christians, the peculiar thing to note is that our central figure was a public leader who kept showing up in front of crowds, and then vanishing before the hopes of the crowd could be met. He kept doing this even after he rose from the dead. And it’s in this dance between Jesus’ physical presence and his absence, the shifting nature of his comings and goings before crowds of onlookers, that we can get a sense of some of the larger significance of Jesus’ reappearance from the dead. So let’s briefly trace the life of Jesus by looking at his interactions with those hungry, clueless crowds during and just after his time on earth.

We can see almost every kind of crowd appear at one time or another around the person of Jesus.

Certainly a crowd would gather when Jesus performed an amazing feat: making a lame man walk, a blind man see, healing lepers and a bleeding woman.

Crowds would form to listen to Jesus’ teachings—the parables or stories he told, many of them about how the grace of God comes to the poor and not the rich, to those who are freed enough from the search for material security and other “things of this world” to be able to sit down and listen deeply to what matters most in life.

Crowds would gather to watch Jesus engage in intellectual contests with other Jewish teachers, most notably the Pharisees. Like Tibetan Buddhist monks debating the fine points of Buddhist doctrine, Jewish teachers would engage in public disputes about the right interpretation of Jewish law.

How did this teacher and miracle worker come to be acclaimed by crowds as a political leader, too—the “King of Israel,” as the sign on his cross mockingly stated? For Jews of the first century, in the area that the Roman Empire called “Palestine,” there was no such thing as a separation of politics and religion. Many Palestinian Jews longed to have a Jewish state restored to them, to overthrow Roman rule over their territories. Many Jews hoped for a Messiah, a leader anointed by God to be their new king, unifying Israel as King David had done. So when people wondered if Jesus were the Messiah, they weren’t asking: are you God in the flesh? That was a later Christian development. No, they were asking if Jesus was going to be their warrior king. Even Jesus’ disciples held this expectation of Jesus. Look at Acts 1:6. The only specific question the disciples ask the resurrected Jesus is: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” It’s all well and good that Jesus ate with sinners, prostitutes, and the outcast; that he talked with impure foreign women at wells; but surely these are all signs that the kingdom of God is about the restoration of the nation of Israel?

Jesus raised a lot of expectations among the crowds. And there’s no denying that those expectations were not only for personal healing, not only for belonging to a community in which everyone loved and served one another, but also for Jesus to be inaugurated as the new king of Israel.

This expectation helps explain something that happened between the story of Jesus’ ascension into heaven and the story of the descent of the Holy Spirit forty days later: Peter leads the disciples in figuring out who will replace Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. The disciples decide to throw dice to see which of two men will get Judas’ spot, believing the Holy Spirit would guide the dice. Why do they need to replace Judas? Because Judas was part of the twelve disciples of Jesus who represented the twelve tribes of Israel—a new Israel, united by Jesus as their messianic leader.

So Jesus gathered just about every type of crowd—including a crowd that is said to have clamored for his execution as a traitor to Rome and as a challenge to the priests who ran the Temple with Rome’s consent.

And how did Jesus himself respond to the crowds?

Although Jesus spoke to crowds and often welcomed their acclaim, over and over again he eluded their expectations of him. He took off in another direction.

Jesus performed at least three kinds of disappearing acts.

First, after healing or teaching all day, he’d often take off to the hills to pray. John 6 describes Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee to avoid the crowds, only to find them waiting for him on the other side. Jesus had fed the whole crowd with just a few loaves of bread and fish, and this miracle roused the crowd to declare, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world” (6:14). Jesus doesn’t rise to the occasion, however. Instead, he runs from whatever expectations of him were beginning to take shape in people’s minds: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (6:15). All the gospels describe Jesus zigzagging between encountering the crowds and retreating to solitary prayer in the wilderness—moving back and forth between being with masses of people and being alone with God.

This isn’t a very surprising sort of disappearing act. We expect our spiritual leaders to have energy to feed us only if they keep recharging their batteries in solitude with the Source of Existence. But Jesus’ second disappearing act is more dismaying.

This is the disappearing act that Christians remember every Holy Week, every Good Friday: the death of Jesus on the cross. At one level, this disappearance was hardly a surprise: not only do we each expect our own death to come at some point, but Jesus knew he was courting a likely execution by the state. Still, a Messiah wasn’t expected to die before he’d accomplished his mission of restoring Israel.

So when Jesus returned in a glorified body, first to individual disciples and later to crowds of hundreds, his followers felt vindicated. Their expectations soared once more: the whole world was about to change! Roman oppression would be no more! And suffering and death didn’t seem to have the last word, either!

Then Jesus pulled his third disappearing act. Forty days after he first reappeared from the dead, in front of a crowd of his followers, Jesus commissioned them to wait for the Holy Spirit, then sojourn to the ends of the earth as his “witnesses.” Then Jesus rose up into the clouds, his resurrected body no longer present in time and space, at least as we know them.

Christians debate where the body of Jesus is now located. A few centuries ago, many Christians doubted the new announcement that the earth was round and circled the sun, for if earth wasn’t the center of the universe, where did Jesus’ body go when he rose to the heavens? Isn’t his body up there somewhere, on a throne seated next to his Father? Sixteenth century Protestants divided in part over the nature of Jesus’ glorified human body. Ulrich Zwingli argued that, because Jesus’ body could only be in one place at a time—up in the heavens—then when Christians ate bread and wine during communion Jesus could only be spiritually present. Martin Luther, on the other hand, argued that because Jesus was the Word of God made flesh, the Word that structures the universe so that “all things hold together in Christ” (Colossians 1:17), we can’t really go anywhere without bumping into Christ. Christ is in our cabbage soup, Luther said; Christ is in a cockroach’s ass. So, Luther insisted, we certainly ought to take Jesus’ words at face value when he said to his disciples, “This bread is my body, this wine is my blood.” Jesus meant that Christians somehow physically consume the body and blood of Christ when they take bread and wine during communion, in faith.

This debate about where Jesus’ physical body is located after his ascension ties into larger debates about how Jesus’ humanity and divinity relate. But for our purposes, the key thing to notice is that Jesus reappeared from the dead, only to disappear again. Why?

By disappearing a third time, Jesus fully eludes the expectation that he’d be a political leader right then and there. To be sure, his early followers thought he was just delaying his earthly rule, and still today Christians share with Jews the expectation of a returning Messiah who will establish peace and justice upon the earth.

But Jesus did return again, after a fashion—sending his Spirit down upon his followers on the day of Pentecost, empowering them to continue his mission. Pentecost is first of all a Jewish celebration of God’s giving the Torah to Moses on Mt. Sinai. As Jews, Jesus’ followers were gathered in Jerusalem for this celebration. Because the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’ followers on the day of Pentecost, Christians give the holiday a different meaning: it marks the birth of the church, of God’s sending down the Spirit in Christ, dispersing it over many followers, both male and female.

The physical ascension of Jesus and the spiritual descent of his Spirit: both events throw a wrench in the expectations of a Messiah who would establish a political Kingdom of God on earth. Christians have been sorting out the consequences ever since.

As one Lutheran in my congregation put it: “So, people were expecting the Messiah, and what they got instead was the Holy Spirit.” According to the early Christian apostle Paul, that Spirit is a pledge of our inheritance in Christ—a pledge that’s to be fulfilled somewhere down the road (Ephesians 1:11-14), even as it shines in us now.

But where does it shine—this whole story of resurrection and ascension and the descent of the Spirit?

Christians give many different testimonies on this matter. What we tend to agree about is the fundamental importance of forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing—sharing in the power of Christ’s teaching, the way his resurrection stamps every failure and betrayal and wrongdoing with the message, “That’s not the last word.” We may not agree about the role of government in promoting a vision of justice, liberation, and well-being. But amid all the polarization and abuse of power that can be carried out by we who call ourselves Christians, there’s a core vision that can call us back to repentance, a vision of the healing and reconciling Spirit of Christ that can convert us from prejudice and blindness—especially the kind of prejudice and blindness that’s sustained by the energy of crowds.

When the crowds that followed Jesus were hungry or hurting, he fed and healed them. But when they sought to solidify his power among them by crowning him their ruler, he escaped to the hills. When he rose from the dead and his disciples asked if he would now take the throne and rule Israel, he vanished into the sky. The power that drew crowds then became dispersed on the crowds in the form of the wily, elusive Holy Spirit. Jesus physically disappeared, only to reappear in the power of the Holy Spirit in communities that seek to practice justice and mutual forgiveness. The Spirit of Christ ultimately seeks not to shun crowds, but to transform them.

There’s a third reason why I’ve been noticing crowds. Facebook has enabled a kind of reappearing act before a crowd that I’d never expected. For me, at least, it’s a little like experiencing the descent of the Holy Spirit in many tongues of flames, in a gathering place of people from all over the world. I’d not want to push too far an analogy between Facebook and the birth of the church in Acts 2. But I’d like to close by giving testimony to where I’ve sensed the Spirit of Christ at work in the crowd-space of Facebook.

Like many of us here, I suspect, I made a disappearing act at the age of eighteen. I left my hometown, a town of about 2,500 people in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I kept in touch only with the close friends I had there. But ever since a persistent fellow Lutheran theologian persuaded me to join Facebook last summer, I’ve slowly found my Facebook friend list filling with my childhood classmates. Not just those I’d known well but the people who formed part of the texture of my childhood. We were the assumed background to each other’s lives for so many years that it’s meaningful to find our ties to one another renewed, our differences not as important as the fact of our shared history. So now I know that the other Amy in our class—the one we called “Moose”—is teaching physical education classes in a school in our county and driving the zamboni at the ice rink, that Tim is making artsy Western-style furniture in Wyoming. I know that the L’Anse Pee Wees won the UP Hockey championship this year. I see photos of everyone’s new all-terrain vehicles, their deer-hunting and fishing exploits, their children and a few grandchildren. I know that over half of our graduating class of eighty-eight people (along with a good number who didn’t finish high school) still lives in our county.

Before this crowd of classmates, I find I can still be as socially dense as I was when young. I’ve been slow to notice that when it comes to political postings, most of those I grew up with only respond if they agree with what someone wrote on their “wall.” But I’ve found myself responding to postings by classmates with whom I’ve never had an adult conversation—but now, suddenly, we’re talking about health care reform. Most of the postings are exclamations by classmates who are healthcare workers, who fear that the healthcare system is being overrun to exhaustion and that the national debt is exploding. Some of our classmates do support the healthcare initiatives, but they’ve not replied to the outraged postings of our dissenting classmates. And those who might have Democratic leanings are silent on the walls of those who post capitalized declarations warning about the imminent demise of the United States.

Recently someone posted Psalm 109:8 on her wall about President Obama: “Let his days be few, and let someone else take his office.” All sorts of people I didn’t know echoed their approval. I commented that I hoped those who disagreed with Obama’s policies were praying that he not be re-elected, not praying for his death. Within two hours there were a flurry of comments, many by those who’d liked the original posting, all expressing concern about extremists. The author of the posting also clarified that no, she would never wish for anyone’s death—she just hoped that Obama’s days in office be few.

I was not only relieved to find out I was wrong—about her and everyone else who’d liked her posting. I also had a sudden desire suddenly to worship with the woman who’d made the posting, to pray in her company as we had in our days in the AWANA Baptist youth group, where we both won trophies for memorizing the most Bible verses. I felt convicted of having made assumptions that misread the nature of our political differences and drawn to being able to name what holds us together in common across those differences.

I sense that hunger for humane conversation across our sharpest divisions is one way the Spirit of Christ is speaking most strongly among us today. I’m aware of the Spirit’s nudging in the way Facebook has called me to reappear before a crowd of people I thought I’d left behind, a crowd half anonymous and half known, including many human beings I’d be unlikely to form ties with if we didn’t have a shared history in a small place. Similarly, I’ve also strongly sensed the Spirit’s presence in a forum I attended at an ELCA congregation (not my own) that was really wrestling with the decision to make space in our church for both those approving and disapproving of same-sex relationships. I watched with amazement as three pastors—at least two of them publicly opposing the ELCA’s decision—skillfully portrayed the arguments and perspectives of those with whom they disagreed.

The Spirit of Christ has an elusive relationship to every human crowd that gathers around him. Jesus repeatedly disappeared from the crowds in order to escape being defined by their expectations. But he kept reappearing, each time in a way that radically rearranged what seemed possible—first by rising from the dead, then by disappearing in physical form and returning in a dispersal of spiritual power upon many who sounded at first like babbling fools, drunk on the Spirit. Certainly some of our conversations on Facebook, in the church, and in the public square sound drunken and reckless, and not always in a way that’s animated by the Spirit of Christ. But maybe, like the disciples of Jesus at the birth of the church, we’ll only find out how the Spirit of Christ dances us into the kingdom of God if we go out to where the crowd seems most strange and noisy, and learn how to listen and how to speak with one another without mutual caricaturing. This was what Jesus’ Jewish followers struggled to learn how to do as they confronted their prejudices about the Gentiles pouring into the new movement called the church. Jesus had left them in a room together, in a single church, bestowing on them the Spirit who would grace them with the ability to communicate and dwell together in ways they could never have fathomed ahead of time.

In this way, Jesus’ ascension to the Father in heaven opened a path for the reign of God to appear and grow in the midst of each new generation, led by the Spirit, not on any timelines we can measure, but in moments and movements of graced communication that interrupt our many kinds of alienation from one another and from God. The Spirit invites—even drives—us to participate in and bear witness to this reconciling work of God, so forming our eyes, ears, and hands as Christ’s body in the world.

Amy Carr teaches in the Philosophy and Religious Studies department at Western Illinois University.