Editor’s Note: This post is written in honor of today’s date on the Western Church calendar: the Feast of the Ascension
Every April, I teach students about taxes. The class isn’t Accounting, but Physical Chemistry. These aren’t monetary taxes mandated by written laws, but energetic taxes mandated by the physical laws of chemistry and thermodynamics. Every body — literally, every human body — pays these taxes to a world that constantly presses in.
I even have a reading from the gospels that goes with this, regarding the time Jesus was taxed. He was nickel-and-dimed by the Roman Empire, or really, drachma-and-statered. In Matthew 17:24, two tax collectors asked Peter if Jesus paid the two-drachma tax. Peter brought this tax bill to Jesus, but Jesus already knew. I sense a bit of irritation, or at least a sigh, in Jesus’s question to Peter about whether they are sons or strangers.
But the Son of God doesn’t insist on his rights. He tells Peter, “Go to the sea, cast a hook and take the first fish drawn up, and opening its mouth you will find a stater; take and give that to them for me and you.” (Matthew 17:25-27, D.B.Hart translation)
Jesus chose to be subject to the imperial laws and also to the laws of nature. This includes the chemical laws. When my students calculate the work their lungs must do, I tell them this applied to Jesus as well.
When Jesus’s lungs pulled in air, lung volume increased as gas pressure decreased according to a “gas law.” (This was the same law that his follower Robert Boyle would discover a millennium and a half later.)
When the oxygen from that air crossed into Jesus’s blood, the blood given for us, it stuck to hemoglobin molecules like ours, following the same chemical rules. His body obeyed the “law of mass action.”
When he breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), his body accomplished pressure-volume work against the atmosphere. I don’t know the atomic composition of Jesus’s resurrection body, or if atoms even are there in the same way, but I assume that he was able to push air around if he was able to eat fish and break bread. He has the power to work, in simple thermodynamic terms.
All of these atoms, his atoms, obeyed the iron-clad laws of thermodynamics, which is what I teach every April. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (which is so important it is capitalized) says the universe is constantly spreading out toward a bland uniformity. This law requires that if part of the universe gathers, another part must scatter. As Peter Atkins puts it, “Nature exerts a tax on the conversion of heat into work.”1 As less eloquent writers may put it, there is no free lunch.
More accurately, there is no completely free lunch. I teach my students a calculation for “free energy” applying thermodynamic laws to any well-defined system, either an engine or a human body. This equation adds everything up. Atkins calls it an “accounting tool”2 to incorporate the taxes exerted on matter when energy is extracted, controlled, and put to work. Thermodynamic calculations are as painstaking – and as important — as tax law. With these calculations in hand, the Industrial Revolution was conceived.
But the key insight of thermodynamics is that, when you add it all up, you run into a wall that makes some things impossible. When you put heat into an engine and extract work from it, no matter how carefully or efficiently, you will always lose something. You cannot corral every last vibrating atom and put it to work for you. Some will slip through your fingers. Some energy is stored in the system as disorder so deeply embedded that you can never turn it into order. As a result, a physical body like ours – like Jesus’s — must pay extra for any order it maintains. With every breath, we must pay a tax to Nature.
The two-drachma tax was enough trouble for that one day in Matthew 17, but more trouble was coming. Jesus had his face set toward Jerusalem and chose to obey our Father’s will to the end. He was a son, not a stranger. He didn’t have to submit to our strange laws. He could have called down twelve legions of angels from outside the universe, but he endured the violence from within this universe, the violence we inflicted, till his body gave in.
So Jesus paid more than a tax. He paid a ransom for the world: “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his soul as the price of liberation for many” (Matthew 20:28). Taxes are the price of “liberation” demanded by governors; ransoms by kidnappers. Jesus paid for both and bought our liberation in every respect.
On Easter morning, the laws for taxes and trials, big and small, were overruled. Peter, who had pulled the small coin from the fish, stood up on Pentecost and proclaimed the overthrow of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in more down-to-earth terms): “neither was [Jesus] abandoned to Hades nor did his flesh see decay.” (Acts 2:31) Decay is the domain of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Jesus’s body no longer was under that law.
This is good news! It’s told in different languages, like those spoken by the disciples during Pentecost. One of these languages is chemistry. The truth is, we are born under these chemical laws of energy and entropy, but the one who wrote those laws descended to show us the way out, and to become the way out. That way out goes through a world groaning with burdens and taxes, culminating in a cross. But the cross is not the end. It is part and parcel of the transformation of the old laws into new life.
Before Easter, Jesus was already talking about overthrowing the laws of thermodynamics, when he spoke of bringing fire and warmth from on high: “I came to fling fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.” (Luke 12:49) The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy cannot be brought in from outside the universe. You cannot create fire – but the Creator can.
After Easter, Jesus kindled fire and warmed hearts, as he met and restored Peter by a small charcoal fire (John 21:9). Then at Pentecost, the Spirit kindled “tongues as of fire” (Acts 2:3) above Peter and the others. It’s these fires that God ignites with his transcendent, unearthly power.
In overthrowing the laws of thermodynamics, Jesus shows himself to be Lord not only of space but of time. The Second Law, in particular, has a special relationship to time. Some say it sets an arrow for time, making things fall apart, making fires burn out, and making life decay into death. When Jesus defied the Second Law and flung fire, in that same moment, and in all moments, Jesus transcended time, becoming the way to life. He ascended and gives gifts from on high to a broken-down world (Ephesians 4:9-10).
Jesus seated in the eternal throne room is like an image from A Kingdom Far and Clear, a fairy tale trilogy by Mark Helprin. Helprin describes a room outside of time that quietly defies the laws of thermodynamics. It’s 30 stories tall and at the top of a clock tower, and inside it sits not a person, but a huge perpetual motion machine giving power to the kingdom.
Even in this fairy-tale universe, the laws of thermodynamics must be respected. Such a machine was not made by people but was given by God — because someone prayed for it. As a character explains, “He set up the universe, the sun, the galaxies, physical laws, and all that. Why not a clock?”3
The character that ascends to this room experiences eternity. She feels that she becomes all ages at once and is joined to the loved ones she had lost. The room somehow holds eternity and perfect justice: “In this room perfection drove the clockwork, and its spilling over, its wonderful excess, like water tumbling over a weir, like the blast of sunlight at dawn, made everything come right.”4
Helprin’s machine is just a made-up place in a made-up story, yet it resonates because it points to the capital-T Truth. We have not something, but someone, greater than a perpetual motion machine in a tower. We have a high priest who ascended into heaven, who has been tempted, tried, and even taxed in every way. The act of descending as he did, in service to students, colleagues, and even tax collectors, becomes the act of ascending to be with him.
