Christ Church

“How can these things be?”

The mystery of God reveals the mystery of our humanity; the one envelopes the other. Trinity and Incarnation are intimately connected and inseparable. They go together. “Thou hast but two rare cabinets, full of treasure,” as the poet George Herbert puts it, “The Trinitie, and Incarnation”. He highlights what is emphasized in the Athanasian Creed, namely the connection and interplay between these two essential doctrines revealed to us. He goes on to say, “Thou hast unlockt them both,/ And made them jewels to betroth/ the work of thy creation,/ Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.” This is a commentary on the Lesson from Revelation indicating how the fullness of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation embrace, contain, and restore the whole of creation and especially our humanity. Our task is to make the effort to enter into  what is revealed and made known to us; the mysteries of grace perfecting nature not destroying our nature. Nowhere is that more concentrated than in the Athanasian Creed, itself a creedal reflection on God and our humanity born out of the witness of the Scriptures.

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven,” John tells us in his Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Scriptures. Earlier this week on Tuesday after Pentecost, in the Gospel from John 10, Jesus identifies himself as “the door of the sheep,” one of the so-called ‘I am’ sayings about the essential divinity of Christ revealed through his humanity. The lesson from Revelation is a lovely summary of the whole pageant of revelation, with the books of the Old Testament symbolized in “the four and twenty elders” referring to the writers, and the New Testament, especially the four Gospels, symbolized by “the four living creatures.” The whole vision is not just about what is seen, but rather, through the telling image of the door, it is what we enter into and in which we participate. And what is that? The life of prayer and praise as the signalling the whole purpose of creation and our humanity.

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“He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him,
and will manifest myself to him.”

Pentecost offers a glittering array of contrasting images that gather us into unity with God and with the whole of our humanity. There is wind and fire, and the many and different tongues where one thing proclaimed and understood, namely “the wonderful works of God.” There are the red hangings and vestments of Pentecost in the tradition of the Church on a day commonly called Whitsunday, ‘white Sunday’, symbolic of Baptism and new life. And what is that new life? It is the coming down or descent of the Holy Spirit to give birth to the Apostolic Church and Faith in which we have our  beginning and end; in short, our life in the abiding love of God.

One of the classical Anglican divines, Lancelot Andrewes, identifies the theological meaning and significance of Pentecost. He astutely observes that “the Holy Ghost is the Alpha and Omega of all our solemnities. In His coming down all the feasts begin; at His annunciation, when He descended on the Blessed Virgin, whereby the Son of God did take our nature, the nature of man. And in the Holy Ghost’s coming they end, even in His descending this day upon the sons of men, whereby they actually become “partakers,” θειας ψυσεως, “of His nature, the nature of God” (Andrewes, Whitsunday, 1610).

Pentecost is festum charitatis, the feast of love. “And He Whose feast [this] is, the Holy Ghost, is love itself, the essential love and love-knot of the two Persons of the Godhead, Father and Son. The same, the love-knot between God and man, yet more specially between Christ and His Church.” Word and Spirit. Faith properly refers to Christ the Word, whereas love is properly associated with the Spirit, who is also named the Comforter who brings faith to birth and strengthens and increases that faith in us. Comfort belongs to love. “If you love me, keep my commandments,” Jesus tells us in the Gospel, that in the giving of the Comforter “he may abide in you forever.” A beginning and an ending.

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“God has gone up with a merry noise,/The Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

The creedal mysteries of the Ascension and the Session of Christ are clearly and unambiguously set before us today, the Sunday after the Ascension. We celebrate the Ascension and the Session of Jesus Christ to “[sit] on the right hand of the Father”. Often overlooked and passed over, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.

“The end of all things is at hand,” says Peter. That “ending of all things” is celebrated in the Ascension and the Sessionof Christ. It is an ending in the sense of mission accomplished, an ending that recalls Christ’s last word from John’s Passion: “It is finished”. Human redemption accomplished or ended is achieved through the sacrifice of Christ and in the gathering of all things into unity in God through that sacrifice.  From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been done by Christ Jesus for us and which ever and always remains to be more fully realised in us. The Son goes to the Father having accomplished “the will of him who sent him.” He returns to glory and enters into glory. What does it signify for us? Simply the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise; our lives in faith, hope, and charity.

If the Resurrection is the fullest possible vindication of the true nature of our human individuality, soul and body, as it were, then the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of all reality. This has enormous consequences for how we look upon every aspect of our lives. The Session of Christ signifies that all things – all forms of natural and human endeavour, all forms of social and political life, whether it be the family, the state, our schools, or our churches – ultimately have their ground in God and participate in one way or another in the work of redemption. In other words, they find their correction and their perfection, their fulfillment and meaning, in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. All authority and order belongs to God; all is gathered back to God.

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