by CCW | 29 May 2025 21:00
Christ’s Resurrection words to Mary Magdalene reveal the necessary connection between Resurrection and Ascension. No Resurrection without the Ascension, paradoxically! Christ’s homecoming is ours too. We have a place or end with God.
The Ascension of Christ marks the culmination of the Resurrection; its fullness and completion, we might say. In the Ascension we see the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, all “because I go to the Father,” as he has said. That is the meaning of his Ascension as marking the end of his going forth and return that signals the gathering of all things to God. As Aquinas says, “God is the beginning and end of all created beings, but especially rational beings.” Thus Christ’s Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity” to its end or place with God in the dynamic of the spiritual life of the Trinity. His homecoming is equally ours.
We catch something of the drama and the intensity of the Ascension in the readings from Acts and Mark. “He was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. The cloud refers to the symbolic form of the divine presence or glory of God, the shekinah of the Exodus and elsewhere that serves as prologue to Christ’s Incarnation. “He was received up into heaven,” Mark tells us in what belongs to the so-called longer ending of his Gospel.
The doctrinal significance of the Ascension is that Christ returns to the Father in the flesh of our humanity, that “where he is there we may be also”; in short, it signals the idea of our abiding with God. Yet at the same time, the Ascension signals the meaning of prayer. Prayer is the ascension of our hearts and minds to God, and thus to our abiding in his will and purpose. Prayer is sursum corda, the lifting up of our hearts, as we say in the liturgy. Prayer is ascension.
In that sense, the Ascension is both direction and action. Yet it is also cosmic in scope, since the return of the Son to the Father is the gathering of all creation to God. Our prayers participate in that sensibility and activity; the lifting up of all things to God. As Christ has “ascended into the heavens,” as the Collect puts it, “so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.”
The architecture of Christ Church, like so many carpenter Gothic churches in the Maritimes, reflects that same upward motion. We ascend not only in the ascension of our hearts but in our bodies, coming forward through the nave and upward and under the Rood (Cross) to the altar where we receive him sacramentally who was received up into heaven. The Ascension super-emphasizes the spiritual nature of our lives.
“We should understand the sacrament not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues, “Like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father which taketh away the sins of the world … by whose passion we are filled at His table … being made the guests of Christ, having Him dwell in us through the grace of his true nature … assured and certified that we are fed spiritually unto eternal life by Christ’s flesh crucified and by his blood shed.” There is something quite wonderful and rich and meaningful in these images through which we are gathered into understanding, not in flight from the images of Scripture but rather into their spiritual truth and meaning.
Prayer itself participates in the lifting up of all things to God in the Ascension of Christ. We ascend with him in the lifting up of our hearts and minds so that “we may dwell in him and he in us.” We are lifted up and into what eternally abides, “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God;” the love of the Trinity into which divine life we are gathered by Christ.
“His Father” is now “our Father” by means of Christ’s divinity; “Our God” is “His God” by means of our humanity in Christ. As Andrewes suggests, the true theological order of Christ’s words to Mary would be to make what belongs properly to Christ ours and what belongs to us to be made His. Thus “our God to become his God first,” emphasizing the humanity of Christ which alone makes possible the idea of his saying, “My God.” “For how can God have a God?” as Andrewes rightly notes. Yet “that His Father may become our Father after,” emphasizes the divine relation of Son and Father, so that “Him that was our God, we to make His God, that Him That was His Father, He may make to be our Father.” This is the interplay of the two natures of Christ in relation to the Trinity and opens out to us the radical wonder of the Resurrection as completed in the Ascension already pointed out to us by Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene.
Fr. David Curry
Ascension Day
May 29th, 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/05/29/sermon-for-ascension-day-6/
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