Christ Church

“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.

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He ascended into heaven

The Ascension signifies the homecoming of the Son having finished his course having accomplished the will of him who sent him and returning to the Father. The whole life of the incarnate Christ is his going forth and returning to the Father in the power of the Spirit. In his going forth and return to the Father he returns all things to their source and end, to the divine life which he is with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Why the Ascension? 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 realized in the celebration of the Ascension. Ultimately, it signifies the meaning of prayer as well as the cosmic dimension of our liturgy of prayer. Our liturgy is all ascension.

“Lift up your hearts.” Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “We ascend,” says Augustine, “in the ascension of our hearts.” We ascend in the lifting up of our hearts. We have someone and somewhere to lift them up to. The Ascension of Christ is directly related to Jesus Christ as the “High Priest” of our salvation whose perfect humanity is the vehicle for our redemption and whose perfect sacrifice is the forgiveness of sins. He, and he alone, is the mediator of the new and better covenant. “For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hand, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb.9.24).

Prayer enters into the presence of God because of the Ascension of Christ.

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“Lord, teach us to pray”

Rogation Monday is one of the formal days of prayer that bring us to the culmination of the Resurrection in Christ’s Ascension. In other words, these days of Rogation prepare us for the homecoming of the Son to the Father which is about our home with God, that “where I am there ye may be also”, as Jesus says. That homeland of the Spirit is the true meaning of our Christian fellowship. We participate in it now through prayer.

For prayer, too, is about our being with God without whom we cannot be with one another. The Gospel from Luke is about learning to pray; the prayer which shapes all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. It signals nothing less than the nature of our being with God and with one another. In that sense, it is quite radical in its scope and meaning.

In prayer we are constantly seeking God’s will. “Thy will be done,” we pray, a very different thing from simply asking and getting what we think we want as if God were some sort of grace-dispensing machine, a kind of candy-man giving whatever we demand and want. A good part of prayer is about learning what God’s will is for us and for our lives. It is not some sort of wish fulfillment, fantasy or dream. It is about reality, reality as defined by God, the source and principle of all reality. Part of that reality is about human sinfulness – our pride and folly which stand in the way of God’s will for us and in us.

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