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The Importance of Ascension Ascensiontide is a fairly brief period lasting only from Ascension Day until Pentecost Sunday. During those ten days the Church directs our attention to the departure of Jesus from the earth, in order to return to God the Father in Heaven--from whom he came to us at Bethlehem 32 years earlier. I go through all that as a kind of test--to see if the ideas and words of traditional Christian theology, seem to you as quaintly old-fashioned as they did to me when I first started thinking about this Sunday's sermon. You have, I'm sure, seen classical art works depicting the Ascension. Without being totally irreverent, let me just remind you of what I'm thinking about: We see Jesus dressed in gauzy, flowing robes and he appears to be floating weightlessly on a couple of insubstantial-looking white clouds. The clouds are being lifted up by some smiling, chubby cherubs. It seems like some kind of pre-technology elevator or a circus levitation act. Even though we understand that what we're seeing is artistic and poetic, we just have to smile at the apparent silliness of the whole thing. Jesus lifting off like a rocket? Peter Pan with pixie dust? Come on! Isn't this whole idea of Ascension dated and embarrassing--something we'd be better off simply leaving out of contemporary Christian theology? Let me say right at the top, that my first thought was to do exactly that--ignore Ascension altogether and move right on after the Easter season to Pentecost. But, as I considered some of the questions and issues involved, I changed my mind. This morning I want to talk with you very simply and directly (and I hope logically) about the Ascension of Jesus Christ. I will do that by asking three questions: What is Ascension? Why do we have so much trouble with it? And, what difference does it make anyway? First, What is the Ascension? It is the event that we describe every time we say the words of the Creed, "He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty." It is the event described in one sentence found in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles,
These are descriptions of what happened to mark the end of the visit of Jesus upon this earth. As Christians we believe that in the person Jesus, the creative and loving energy of God was somehow translated into the language of a human life in order to dwell for a time among us. At the Ascension that earthly visit is ended and returns to God. That, in the simplest terms possible is what Ascension is. That definition leads, of course, directly to the second question: Why do we find all that so difficult to understand and accept? Before getting into that question, I guess I ought to acknowledge that, for some of you, maybe there's no problem. Maybe you find the Ascension no less credible or problematic than many other aspects of religious belief. But I think I am safe in saying, that for most modern day Christians, the Ascension is a very tough concept to get our minds around. Certainly there's not time here today to examine and unravel all the questions and issues surrounding the Ascension, but at least I would like to identify a few of the reasons I believe that this one particular episode in the story of Jesus represents such a problem for us. One reason we have trouble with the Ascension is that we don't hear much about it. It gets lost in the church calendar in the rush between Easter and Pentecost. It's a very brief, ten-day-long liturgical season. Since it comes forty days after Easter it always falls on a Thursday, so it doesn't have a Sunday of its own in which the sermon might deal exclusively with the Ascension. That, in case you haven't already figured it out, is precisely why I'm using this Fifth Sunday in Easter as a kind of "heads up" for this year's Ascension Day. But, even if the Church paid more attention to this particular occasion, a far greater difficulty faces us. The Bible is written from the viewpoint of first century Hebrew people--people who thought the world was flat and that it had three stories stacked on top of one another. Human beings lived on the earth (the middle or second floor), Heaven was directly above (a third floor), and down below was Sheol (the first floor). The perspective was that these were fixed geographical places, and to move from one to another involved ascending and descending--a notion that certainly has to seem strange to us today. But we can, I think, suspend our scientific sensitivities enough to recognize that the Ascension comes to us couched in poetic imagery and language. To demand a literal interpretation is to be like the little girl in Sunday School who wanted to know how God could paint the rainbow since Jesus was sitting on His right hand. The description, I am admitting, is symbolic and poetic rather than literal. Our difficulty is that we allow ourselves to get put off by the language and so never get on to a consideration of the message. My suggestion is that we concern ourselves here less with the geography and more on the truth that Ascension is seeking to communicate to us. Another equally thorny difficulty raised by the Ascension for people of the twenty-first Century is the whole matter of the contradiction it seems to require of the laws of nature. Is it possible that the force of gravity was somehow "turned off" for a while so that the Ascension could take place? Do we know of a single instance in which something like this--before or since-- has ever occurred? That may seem to you a challenging question that totally refutes even the possibility of the Ascension or, conversely and ironically, it may suggest to you that this is precisely why the Ascension is such an important witness to the absolute uniqueness of Jesus. A unique event in human salvation may demand unique happenings. It may well be that it is exactly because Jesus was God incarnate that no such event has happened before or will ever happen again. Science has a very hard time with the word "unique." Christianity is firmly based on a conviction that Truth itself can only be discovered through the lens of one absolutely unique life, death and resurrection. But, let's move on to the 64-thousand-dollar question: So what? What difference does it make whether we understand or accept the Ascension as a reality? Well, there are several ways in which I think it makes a profound difference. The first is that Jesus told his disciples that in order for the Holy Spirit to come to them--bringing God's own gifts of knowledge, power and new life--he himself first had to return to the Father. The initiative we describe as the Incarnation, had to be complete before the next initiative of God could begin. The rather limited physical presence of Jesus (which could only be shared by a few disciples) had to be withdrawn so that the universal spiritual presence of Jesus might become available forever afterward to everyone…all over the world. Here's another reason why I think the Ascension makes a difference to us. Whatever we may think of the poetic imagery, the Ascension tells us finally and completely who Jesus really is. The picture of Jesus returning to God the Father enables us to let go of previous and incomplete pictures of Jesus. Certainly Jesus is the baby in the manger at Bethlehem, but that's not who he is now. Yes, he is the great teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, but we know much more than just a record of his words. We know that he hung and died on the cross, but that's not where he is today. We believe that he rose victorious from the empty tomb, but he's not just hanging around like some sort of wandering ghost. Ascension adds a final and critical photograph to the album of who Christ is and what he does. He is ascended--once more with the Father, enthroned forever as the ruler and judge of all human history. This is the final picture and a very important one indeed because it puts all the other pictures in perspective, making them in a curious sort of way, hopelessly out of date. This is why churches and popular writers who try to keep one of the earlier portraits of Jesus as a sort of first century Abraham Lincoln, are not up to date. This is why the Medieval church--with all the bleeding heart crucifixes that refuse to let Jesus come down from the Cross--needs to be updated. That's why trying to figure out "what Jesus would do" is out of date. Jesus is alive and well and is still doing lots of things everyday. It's a lot more important that we see what Jesus is doing, than worrying about what he "would" do. That's also why the modern theological trend to make Jesus simply a good man who "lived his life for others" just won't do. It's hopelessly out of date compared with where and who Jesus is--right now, today. To be fully up to date is to see the most recent picture of all--to see the picture of Jesus that is shown to us in the Ascension. The Jesus of Nazareth who was all these other previous things is now Christ the King--Lord of Heaven and Earth, Ruler of Life and Conqueror of Death--"who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead." This is the final and most recent picture, and I believe that this picture places the Ascension not as some sort of afterthought or theological embarrassment, but squarely in the company of "those mighty acts whereby (as the Prayerbook puts it) God has given unto us life and immortality." That's my brief for Ascension and why I commend its celebration as a high and holy day this year, and for all the years to come. Far from being a problem, I suggest that it just might be for you--as it is for me--the key that makes sense of the whole thing. Think about it. Copyright 2002 Calvary Episcopal Church
Acts 1:1-11 |
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