by CCW | 1 June 2014 14:10
These are words from The Epistle to the Hebrews which might be called the Epistle of the Ascension so conversant is it with the idea of the Ascension. Why the Ascension? Why the Session? Because the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, the fullness of its meaning. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not to the world; it is to the world in God. Everything is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, the Ascension signifies the fuller meaning of prayer and paradise. Ultimately, the Session – Christ’s sitting at the right hand of the Father – signifies the Providential rule of God over the world. In some sense, these creedal doctrines remind us of the fundamental orientation, understanding, and perspective of the Christian faith.
They speak to the ethical dilemmas of our day. Mark Carney, now the Governor of the Bank of England warns that “capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish,” noting the breakdown of the social contract (Guardian, May 27th, 2014). Archbishop Desmond Tutu has condemned the Alberta Tar Sands project claiming that the connection between carbon emissions and climate change is obvious and catastrophic. Environmental assertions trump economic claims, it seems, yet this suggests, perhaps, a false dichotomy between the environment and the economic. There are the questions about science and technology and about the ethical and the spiritual that turn on how we understand our humanity and our world.
“The world is too much with late and soon,” the romantic poet Wordsworth notes, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers,/ nothing in nature is ours.” The consequence of knowledge as power which results in seeing the universe as a machine has become the even greater disease of technocratic culture which in turn affects our hearts. “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon;” the domination of nature through thoughtless knowledge leaves us dead and empty. And it affects our visions of paradise. Camille Paglia, commenting on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, the anthem of the hippie counter-culture, points out the contradictions on display at Woodstock festival, “where the music was pitifully dependent on capitalist technology, and where the noble experiment in pure democracy was sometimes indistinguishable from squalid regression to the primal horde.” We have a way of turning paradise into far worse than a parking lot.
The business of this day offers an alternative outlook. For the ancient fathers of the Church, the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity”. We have an end with God and that must govern our thoughts and actions “at all times and in all places.”
“Lift up your hearts.” Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “We ascend in the ascension, [the lifting up], of our hearts,” Augustine says. We have someone and somewhere to lift them up. Prayer places us in the Son’s intercession to the Father which has its fullness of meaning in the Ascension.
Prayer enters into the Paradise of God because of the Ascension of Christ. In a way, it is all about our looking, our looking unto the one who is the end and purpose of our being. But how is it paradise? Because the fullness of joy signifies the perfection of every beginning of joy. The paradise of The Book of Genesis was the place of the beginning of every joy, but not its perfection and completion. It was not our home; at best, it was but a starting-point. Now, in the Ascension, paradise has been transformed to become our home and end. And all because of the homecoming of the Son.
“Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise,” Jesus says on the cross. He does not mean a return to the paradise of the garden of creation in The Book of Genesis, any more than his Resurrection is a return to any sort of garden of earthly delights. No. The Ascension and the Session of Christ signify the redemption of paradise bringing out the true joy of which the biblical paradise was but the beginning. This true joy is about our being in the presence of God in the fullness of his truth and life. And the joy is made all the greater because of redemption and because of repentance. Christ’s word is to the penitent thief, to the one who confesses his sin, to the one who repents and accepts his punishment, to the one who looks precisely to the Crucified Christ and humbly seeks his mercy. “Jesus, remember me,” he says.
The Ascension signals the perfection of the purpose of Christ’s mission. The Son has run his course having accomplished the will of him who sent him. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” And his Ascension is the occasion of great joy for the disciples. “They returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God,” their feelings following perfectly their understanding. It is the occasion of great joy because the disciples have got the point of his Eastertide lessons. Have we? Christ will “not leave us comfortless” because his going from them and us is not into the barrenness of death but into the fullness of life. “Because I go to the Father… today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.” Such is the hope of heaven.
That paradise is our entry into “the rest of God” through the perfect humanity of Christ. The Ascension of Christ signals “the promise of entering into his rest,” “the sabbath rest of God” which we can only access through Christ, “the high priest of good things to come,” as The Epistle to the Hebrews puts it.
“Ye have been with me from the beginning,” Jesus says, in preparing them for the ultimate meaning of his going from them. “But these things have I told you, that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.” The Ascension is the fulfillment of his mission. For us, as St. Peter puts it, “the end is at hand … therefore … watch unto prayer. And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves”; in effect, “looking unto Jesus” in his remembering of us in his love for the Father. Prayer and charity place us in the paradise of the Blessed Trinity. As the former Pope, Benedict XVI, puts it, “Jesus lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father.” The Ascension shows us that intimacy as the true homeland of the spirit to which we have access through prayer, itself the grace of Christ at work in us.
Against our willful disobedience, there must be our penitential prayer. Like the prayer of the penitential thief, it means our “looking unto Jesus, the Author and the Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God.” The moral order of our lives depends not upon our self-righteous posturings but upon our penitential prayer to the Father in the name of the Son and by the power of the Spirit.
It challenges us with respect to the ethical dilemmas of our world and day environmentally and ethically, about how we act with what we have been given or acquired. We are reminded of another perspective signaled in our text. It means “looking unto Jesus” to remember us in his love for the Father. It means looking unto Jesus as the measure of our thoughts and actions “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Where are our hearts?
Fr. David Curry,
Christ Church
Sunday after Ascension Day 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/06/01/sermon-for-the-sunday-after-ascension-day-3/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.