by CCW | 9 May 2013 21:59
It is, it seems to me, the forgotten or at least an overlooked doctrine, the doctrine of the Ascension. Christ’s words from the Gospel of Rogation Sunday point us to the radical teaching of the Ascension. We have a home with God because Jesus has overcome the world.
The world no longer defines us. The Ascension of Christ frees us from our pragmatic frenzies and follies and from our fearful fatalisms. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection. Something of the fuller meaning and teaching of the Resurrection is presented to us in the Ascension of Christ. It bears eloquent testimony to the meaning of human and cosmic redemption. The world is God’s world; it exists for his will and purpose, not ours. We have an end, a home with God in Christ. “I go,” Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.” That sense of an end or purpose, especially for rational creatures, is really quite strong.
But what are we to make of the language of overcoming? It seems, dangerously, to be the language of technocratic exuberance whereby we think the world is simply there for us, a resource to be mined, fished, farmed, logged and generally exploited for the advantage and purposes of our devisings, the sad consequences of which are only too depressingly before us. But it is also the language of existentialism, (at least in its Nietzschean form) the language of the will to power which trumps the possibilities of a world of truth and meaning. Yet, Jesus means, I think, something quite different. His overcoming of the world has to do with God’s radical and wonderful redemption of the world without which the joy and delight of the Ascension make little sense.
He has overcome the world by reconciling the world with its origin and principle. We are allowed to think of knowing the world through our knowledge of Christ; in short, to know the world in God. Powerful stuff, really, because it speaks to the cosmic dimension of redemption, the redemption of all creation, and because, even more, it speaks to human freedom and dignity. The Ascension, as the Fathers repeatedly insist, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” That is not hubris but the honest realization of the meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. We are freed to God. God is our end and home and not the world. God is our end and home and the world, too, is part of that homeland of the spirit.
“We ascend,” Augustine says in one of the most powerful sentences about the Ascension, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Such is prayer. All prayer participates in the Ascension of Christ. All prayer and, especially, our liturgy is about the lifting up of our hearts to God, a lifting up which is at once our doing and desiring and the doings of the divine will moving and shaping our wills to his glory and to the good of his Church and people. It is the profound insight of most if not all of the great religions of the world to recognize that our humanity is radically incomplete without God.
In the Christian understanding, we are granted a vision of our end with God in Christ Jesus, that as he is so we shall be. We are granted on this feast day a glimpse of the heaven of God to which we belong and in which we share now through prayer and praise and through Word and Sacrament. We participate in the divine will for our good and redemption. He has made us for himself. We are his people and the sheep of his hand. He cares for us and has recalled us from the land of sin and destruction to the holy land of his love for the Father in the bond of the Spirit.
The world is overcome, not destroyed. The world is reconciled with God and we have an end with God. And all because of the Ascension of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Ascension
May 9th, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/05/09/sermon-for-ascension-day/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.