The Ascension of Christ
1992 (Year C) 31 May / Easter 7
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
It seems to me that every time Mae West opened her mouth something tremendous popped out. ‘It’s not the men in my life that count – it’s the life in my men,’ she said in one film. And in another she delivered the line, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!’ I guess the disciples felt a bit like that by the time the Ascension is reported to have happened. They’d been desolate at the crucifixion, fearful yet finally amazed at the resurrection, so much so it had changed their lives. Now comes the Ascension, yet another climax, and according to the writer of Luke’s gospel ‘as he blessed them, he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven.’
Now it seems pointless to me to even begin to guess exactly what happened as the disciples gathered together on the outskirts of Bethany. The Gospel said Jesus was ‘carried up into heaven’, but the biblical writers expressed the truths they knew about God very differently from the way we would today. The way we think, the things we expect all condition the way we experience things and those are very are different from the thoughts and expectations of the disciples. Maybe one of the few things we can say is about the Ascension is, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.’
Yet the story of the Ascension echoes others, other moments in the Old Testament, even from Jesus’ life. They are moments when the characters involved receive profound insight, where they become aware of heavenly truths. It’s crucial that we recognise and understand them and the truths are these:
The disciples know now that Jesus is finally and eternally with God. They know that everything is complete. Jesus is king. He is to be worshipped by the whole of creation. They know that no night is so dark that it cannot be illuminated by the light of Jesus. They know, that no suffering – neither the suffering we impose on ourselves nor the suffering inflicted by other people – is so unendurable, nor any guilt so unacceptable, that it cannot be transformed by the suffering and ascension of Christ.
And they know something more. And it’s something vital that we must learn for without it our faith is nothing more than froth and bubbles. They know that these moments of profound insight can’t last. Even though they would stay with Jesus forever with their eyes, their imaginations, fixed on him and the vision they have of heaven. This state of grace and blessedness cannot last, they must return, come back down the mountain. Changed certainly by what they experienced, but they must return. They had to return from the outskirts of Bethany to Jerusalem. ‘They worshipped him and then went back to Jerusalem full of joy.’ Transfixed, returned, changed.
And that truth that the disciples discovered remain constant for us. The temptation is to stay with the vision of the glory of God. It feels only natural to want to be with the risen and ascended Christ. The temptation is to see these times of insight as the great moments in our lives, after all they are the times when we feel at one with the whole of creation. Yet these insights are not the points which will provide ultimate meaning for us. The points which we will know to be good and full of satisfaction are not at those times where we escape from the pressures of life, avoid decisions, flee into oblivion, and dream away our lives – apart on a mountain, or the outskirts of Bethany.
The great moments are the ones when, with Jesus, when we take up our cross, when we descend with him and enter into the world’s suffering, into temptation and into bodily obedience. For then we shall be brought into harmony with the will of God and be filled with the Spirit who waits to breath the life of God into us.
To express this more clearly. We are a called to be a pilgrim church. A church which has on the one hand tasted the victory, even been part of it, yet still walking on the road. A community which is still having to look forward journeying towards God. We like the disciples haven’t arrived yet. Teilhard de Chardin expressed it much more eloquently, ‘We must to a certain extent, look for a stable port; but if life keeps tearing us away, not letting us settle anywhere, this in itself may be a call and a benediction. The world is understood and will be saved, as I have already written to you, only by those who have no place to lay their heads.’ Personally, I ask God to let me die (metaphorically, at least) by the side of the road.
The disciples, at the Ascension, so we are told, saw no one but Jesus. No one but Jesus as he was carried up to heaven. And he told them that he would send down to them what the father has always promised. So they went down with him. We too must go down, into the failings of our lives, into the poverty of our world and we too will find the Spirit of God. The Spirit is waiting there for us. AMEN