“The end of all things is at hand”

It seems so dark and threatening, a complement perhaps to our current world of very real uncertainties and anxieties. This is the fearfulness of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future yet all the while clinging to the assumptions of the ideology of endless material and technological progress that belong to that uncertainty. There is at once all of the uber-hype of the techno-utopianism of AI, and all of the sense of foreboding and the fear of things falling apart, at the same time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats famously put it. That was in 1919.

Isn’t this really about ourselves? We have forgotten the centre and have willed ourselves to an endless emptiness. We can’t say what the Good is. This is an ethical dilemma. It is not exactly new. Plato saw the necessity of turning to philosophy and ethical thinking in the face of the self-destruction of the Greek city-states; such is his ‘Republic’ that examines justice as an ethical principle that belongs to the knowledge of the Good.. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ and Boethius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ speak to the devastations of their world in the collapse of the Roman Empire, recalling us to the infinite goodness of God which alone transcends our divided loves and the divisions that result, culturally and individually. “Disdain to be discouraged” is Gregory the Great’s wonderful advice that, in some sense, derives from both. In short there is always the need to return to thought and prayer.

“Take with you words and return to the Lord,” Hosea the prophet tells us, pointing out the problem of putting our trust in the works of our own hands, the idols of our minds, and in defaulting to worldly matters of political expediency. Assyria, he tells us, will not save us. Nor is salvation to be found in the technologies of war in any given age. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.” At issue, is our lack of attention to the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape our understanding and guide our actions. Our idolatry of the practical and of the technocratic – the techno-utopianism that assumes that technology will save us – is really a kind of anti-intellectualism at once anti-life and ethically bankrupt. What is it that is right to do turns on the greater question of what is it that is good to be. “To be is to be understood,” Gadamer says about Heidegger, but that requires an understanding of ourselves in relation to God. We are known and loved in his knowing and loving of all things.

The Sunday After Ascension Day speaks to these necessities in the face of our uncertainties. It offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, about how we are understood by God. It recalls the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. The Ascension is the return of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts” is the lifting up of the world to God, and so connects with the credal doctrine of the Session of Christ, his “sitting at the right hand of the Father.” It speaks to us about the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by, later on, but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us, words that speak to the blessed conjunction of his divinity with our humanity. We are partakers of his divinity only through his partaking of our humanity.

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“I am ascending unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

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.”

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