Ascension 1998

Sing: Lord, enthroned...

 

The Epistle for Ascension Day: Read

 

I don’t know about you, but the ascension of our Lord does not always bulk very large in my thinking. I am not assisted by the fact that we commemorate it, if we do at all, always on a Thurs­day, and in Holy Trinity we have no tall tower to climb and sing carols on at dawn on that day. Perhaps we are a bit embarrassed by the three-decker universe symbolism of the body’s being dis­posed of in this way. Its awkwardness is surpassed only by that of having a resurrection body, however imperishable and invulnerable, hanging around all these centuries. Yet when we think about it, it is right up there with the other pivotal events listed in the creeds, as one of the saving events without which there would be no Christian faith. Of the incarnation in general the Athan­asian Creed says “One Christ; One however, not by conversion of Godhead into flesh, but by taking of Manhood into God.” That creed then goes on to give us the familiar list including “ascended into heaven”. Its significance is very much more than as a hint about what the Lord’s return will look like; that’s going to be much more spectacular. Some people believe that that will be located on the Mount of Olives; but obviously there will be major differences if it is as promis­ed to be visible simultaneously all over the earth. It is significant now as the proof of all that we believe about who Jesus was, and as the precondition of all that we enjoy in him.

            The ascension, the last resurrection appearance of our Lord in Luke’s Book I and the first episode in his Book II, is as funny a thing to find in an ancient book of sober history as in a mod­ern one. It is stranger than the transfiguration, for which Luke is our only source. What seemed perfectly straightforward when I was young I now find very mysterious. Yet it is related by Luke the Doctor as he related everything else in Luke-Acts, with details of time and place and touches of local colour. Efforts have been made to identify what really happened in the Lord’s resurrect­ion, and to restate it as in effect a psychological event. But the ascension simply refuses to be de­mythologised in that way: if all that really happened at what they called the resurrection was that the disciples got an assurance that the spirit of Jesus was alive, what was the symbolic point of the removal of his imagined body? Notice the amount of fact here, in the introduction and the actual account: “my former book”, “all that Jesus began to do and teach”, “the day”, “instruct­ions”, “apostles he had chosen”, “suffering”, “these men”, “forty days”, “eating”, “Jerusalem”, “the gift...which you have heard me speak about”, “John” who “baptised with water”, “when they met together they asked him”, “Israel”, “Judaea and Samaria and...the ends of the earth”, “said”, “eyes”, and “cloud”. In the ascension if one tries to disentangle myth from history one comes up against a blank wall. Everything about it, from the last conversation, which is about politics and Providence, through the body, which emits sound waves one moment and the next is gone, to the cloud, which is both material and miraculous, fuses together the factual and the spiritual. There are no two ways about it: God really seems to mean to say something completely shocking, that there is now a man in Heaven, a man with a name, a history and a recognisable male body. That a contingent being who lived as we do in time has been taken up into eternity. “Those dear tokens of his passion/Still his dazzling body bears/Source of endless exultation/To his ransomed wor­ship­pers/With what rapture/Gaze we on those glorious scars.” It’s really not surprising that the first witnesses, strict monotheists as they were, couldn’t think of anything to do but stand there gawp­ing up into the sky.

            It seems to me that there are two ways for us to be looking up into heaven. The first is fruitless, a looking which clings to the marvellous past, or which wonders and speculates about the future. One way of doing this is to become fixated on times and seasons, to join or create one of those sects whose raison-d’être is the dating of and waiting for the Lord’s return. Another, more personal and interior, is to spend our lives looking back, back to our spectacular conversion, and forward to glory, with basically not much hope for anything in between. I see now that until two years ago this was my mentality; I did hope, and sometimes saw, that God used me for what I would have called his kingdom, but quite honestly I did not think that he had much to say in this world about lost doctorates and broken careers, in other words not much this side heaven (and in heaven one would not be wanting them). My personal miracle has changed all that, made me much more believing than I had been for at least twenty years. This is the “If only” approach, and I know what it is to be stuck in it. “If only I had chosen this career rather than that; said, or hadn’t said, so-and-so; if only I were married, or hadn’t got married; if only I were a man, or a woman”. Long ago one of my tutors helpfully characterised this as “worrying backwards”, and my temper­ament is still very prone to this. One plods on but does it with a sore heart and wounded faith. The disciples are asked in our passage what is the point of this. “Why do you stand here?”. They are still obsessed, and will be till the Spirit comes (when they forget all about it) with the lost pol­itical kingdom and its restoration. It is very human what they do, for it is human to find the pre­sent an uncomfortable time to be living in. Like us, they hear without hearing, and it is still in their minds that the Lord will be their political Messiah, and roll on the day, say they. But nobody gets up and does anything who spends all his time in the past or the imagined future. If this is what we are doing, we have to stop it. We will not see Jesus that way. For us he will be gone.

            The second is a looking which the early church did all the time: this looking is the very basis of our lives as Christians. The man from heaven, who is now in heaven for us and will return from heaven, these are ideas without which one cannot understand the New Testament. “But we see Jesus”; “Whom having not seen we love”; we “love his appearing”. The words in Hebrews 12 about our life and witness being a race, which we are running, with the whole church triumphant rooting for us in the bleachers in a vast stadium, as we “fix our eyes on Jesus”, are just a vivid way of putting this central doctrine of our faith: We can trust in Jesus because he ascended, we understand even the resurrection because he ascended, he has all power in heaven and earth be­cause he ascended, he sends forth his Spirit because he ascended, he pleads his death for us with the Father because he ascended, he sustains each one of us because he ascended, he waits to wel­come us because he ascended, the whole world is shot through with the presence of God because he ascended.

            So the question to each one of us, today and all days, is: will we live in the light that streams from the Lord’s ascension? Will we live for him in the present because he ascended? Will we bring to the ascended one our guilt, our regrets, our broken hopes, our heartbreak, our rage with God who has disappointed us? Will we bring to the ascended one our imperfect looks, our lost loves, our regrettable children, our decaying bodies, our failing memories? Will we define our lives in terms of the ascension? Will we conduct our dying in the light of it? Will we believe in God?

 

Say: Collects for Ascension Day, Sunday after.

 

Sing: Soldiers, who are Christ’s below.