Day: May 12, 2024

“He sitteth on the right hand of the Father”

Not quite a scriptural text per se but a scriptural digest of many passages in their interrelation. In a way, it is all about understanding the interplay of images. The text is creedal – from the Nicene Creed. The Creeds are themselves a distillation of the images of scripture that provide a critical interpretive principle for thinking the scriptures. This is especially important in relation to the doctrine of the Ascension. It is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world; in short, finding the meaning and purpose of our lives in God and the world in God.

There is the religion of Jesus in the heart, the religion of sentiment and feeling which remains very much with us in a host of contradictory forms, largely in terms of the dominance of the therapeutic culture. There is, too, the religion of Jesus the moral policeman, the religion of outward conformity to the shifting demands of social and political correctness, also very much with us in terms of the ideologies and concerns about social justice and identitarian politics. While there is something true in each of these, neither of them is the religion of the risen and ascended Christ who “sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. But without the risen and ascended Christ, the religions of sentiment and moralism are altogether empty and destructive, the religions of empty hearts and whitened sepulchres. For that is really all about us and not about God and us with God.

This is what happens when we try to reduce God to where we are rather than to be lifted up to where he is, to speak in the language of the images of scripture. Our lives are to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these 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. These images about the comings and goings of God are the spiritual and eternal motions of God himself, on the one hand, and our circling around and into that mystery of eternal life, on the other hand. In other words, the metaphors point us to an understanding of God and to our relationship with God.

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