Month: May 2013

“Christ sits on the right hand of the Father”

The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two scriptural and creedal teachings. They are at once forgotten and assumed, I think, with respect to Christian thinking and faith. And yet, they speak profoundly to the confusions and complexities of contemporary culture. They point us to an understanding of the objective reality of God and to a larger view of our humanity. They recall us to who we are in the sight of God.

As such these doctrines or teachings provide a strong counter to our fatalisms, ancient and modern and to our existential despair. Either the world is too much with us or we are too much with ourselves.

The great religions of the world offer the profound insight, in one way or another, that our humanity is radically incomplete without God. For Christians that insight is captured in what we might call the comings and goings of God signaled in the story of Christ. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are important moments in that story; the story of God, we might say, in which we find our story.

The image is strong and wonderful. Christ ascends and sits on the right hand of the Father. What does it mean? It speaks at once of the transcendence of God – God as utterly beyond, as almighty and all knowing – and of the immanence of God, God as having engaged our humanity in the intimacy of Christ, God as being with us. Both these theological concepts – transcendence and immanence – are comprehended in the Christian idea of God as Trinity signaled in the revealed names of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, names which are largely made known to us by Jesus. It is especially in the story and in the season of Christ’s Death and Resurrection that Jesus teaches us about the Father, about himself as the Son and certainly about the Holy Ghost or Spirit. It is in this understanding that God is God and that God is also with us.

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“I have overcome the world”

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.

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