“These things have I have told you, that, when the time shall come,
ye may remember that I told you of them”
“God has gone up with a merry noise, / the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” as the Psalmist wonderfully puts it in what is the gradual psalm for today, capturing in a strong image the joy and the meaning of The Sunday after Ascension Day. We celebrate the “going up” – the Ascension – of Christ to sit, as the Creed puts it, at “the right hand of God the Father Almighty”. What is this all about?
The Ascension marks the culmination, the fullness, we might say, of the Resurrection. If the Resurrection is about the fullest vindication of our individuality as persons comprised of soul and body, then, the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of the world in which we live.
In other words, there is an inescapably cosmic dimension to the doctrine of the Ascension. In the comings and goings of God with us and among us, signaled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, we are opened out to the understanding of the spiritual nature of our lives and our world. The whole world participates in Christ’s redemption of our humanity. Our liturgy, to use a phrase and idea of a remarkable seventh century theologian, Maximus the Confessor, is a cosmic liturgy. Or, to put in the words of a seventeenth century Anglican divine and poet, Thomas Traherne, “you never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension and the Session belong to this larger theological sensibility. We are not in flight from the world as if it were evil. By no means. The Ascension and the Session are entirely about the redemption of the world and as such they are doctrines which free us to the world in responsible thought and action.
To think the world in God counters the very real dangers of thinking God in the world which often runs the risk of collapsing God into the world. The paradox is that this makes the world less than what it is in God. We make the world into our little playbox or spielraum only to discover that we have made it into a wasteland and a mess. The teaching of the Ascension and the Session corrects our mistaken ways of thinking about God and the world and our relation to both.
Simply put, everything exists for the praise and glory of God. Everything is restored and lifted up to God in prayer and praise. Everything returns to God through the Ascension of Christ who sits, as it is so wonderfully said, “at the right hand of God”, the place, as it were, of privilege and power, the place, as it were, where the truth of Christ as God the Son is honoured and celebrated, the place, as it were, where the rule and reign of Christ is signified, all our sins and follies notwithstanding. He ascends in the very being of our humanity. In him our humanity is now “risen, ascended, and glorified”, the very wounds of the crucifixion transfigured into the signs of glory and love. A vision of glory and life is opened out to us in love, the divine love all loves excelling.
“God has gone up”. The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, “having accomplished the work which he was sent to do”. What is that work? It is the work of our redemption and salvation, the vindication of the spiritual truth of reality itself. “I came forth from the Father”, Jesus has told us, “and have come into the world, now I leave the world and return to the Father”. Such is the Ascension.
But there is something more which concerns all of us and our lives in Faith. For “thither, too, the tribes go up, / even the tribes of the Lord”, as the psalmist puts it, recalling the annual pilgrimage of prayer to Jerusalem by Israel celebrated in the psalms of ascension. So, too, I suppose, all the tribes of Hants County! Yet, Jerusalem is not simply the wounded and bloodied city of historical and contemporary conflict and dismay, but, more profoundly, the redeemed city, the city of God, the city in which we have our real citizenship even in the midst of the woes and sorrows of the city of man. That “Jerusalem which is above is free”, St. Paul notes, is also “the mother of us all”, our spiritual home and place. And all because of the Ascension of Christ.
As the ancient fathers of the Church put it, the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity”. It is not just the “going up” of God but our going up as well. It reminds us of our life together in the body of Christ, the Church, a life which places us where Christ is, namely, “at the right hand of the Father”. How? Through the prayers and praises of our liturgy that in turn shape and move our lives.
Christian life is about being with Christ: now in prayer and praise; then with him in the glory of his risen and ascended life. This is more than pious picture talk. It is the spiritual reality of our lives of faith and worship. It requires something from us, something which is signaled in the accounts of the Resurrection, namely, the change that happens in us when we let go of the grave-clothes of our preconceptions and preoccupations, even our hurts and hatreds, our sins and follies, to embrace the radical new life of Christ’s resurrection. It requires, in Isaiah’s lovely phrase, that we “shake [our] selves from the dust and arise” to enter into the understanding which God has opened out to us. This is what is set before us in the witness of the Scriptures and in the faithful witness of the Church to the essential doctrines of the Faith. “We ascend”, as Augustine so eloquently puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts”.
We go up, then, in faith, and in prayer and praise through our part in the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church. “Lift up your hearts”. We have an end with God which signifies our life with God, both now and forever more. This changes everything. It changes how we look on the sufferings and the sorrows of our world and day and on our own lives of hardship and stress, our lives of worries and anxieties, our lives of the fear of death and dark despair. Christ’s Ascension reminds us of our spiritual home and its meaning for us in the world of our pilgrimage.
We are inescapably part of a spiritual fellowship. The Church, as the catechism reminds us, is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (A Supplementary Instruction, BCP, p. 552) in which we are nourished and nurtured in the ways of life and light. In our secular culture, at least in North America, today is Mother’s Day when we remember and give thanks for our mothers. There is, after all, notwithstanding the gender confusions and uncertainties of our day, none who are not born of woman. But by extension, we remember and give thanks to the Church of Christ as the mother of our spiritual life and being, the place where we are nourished and nurtured in the life of the Trinity, the life which gives meaning to every other aspect of our lives as lives of service and sacrifice.
The strong message of this day is about our going up and our being with Christ in the truth of his spiritual relation to the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. This is the Trinitarian fellowship into which we are called. And all because of what Christ has told us “that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them”. The time is now, and always.
“These things have I have told you, that, when the time shall come,
ye may remember that I told you of them”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday after the Ascension, 2016