Sunday: Sunday after Ascension
Gospel Reading: John 14.15-21
Theme: Being Adult in the faith
Let us pray:
Come, Holy Spirit. Come as mighty wind or gentle breath. Blow on the embers of our faith. Empower us to speak and to act so that there might come a day when there is not a needy person among us. Amen.. Amen!
Last year I had the great privilege to spend a month in the Holy Land and one of the places our group visited was the Dome of the Ascension, on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the shrine marking the place where Jesus is believed to have ascended to heaven. An unusual feature of the tiny building is that it contains what has been traditionally regarded as the last impression of Jesus’ right foot on earth before he ascended into heaven. It has been carved into the rock and dates from the Middle Ages. The first church was built in the area in 380. In the centre of the stone floor of that church was a rock on which it was believed Jesus’ final footprints could be seen in the dust. By 670 the original structure had been destroyed and rebuilt but the English pilgrim Arculf reported to his countrymen that the footprints were still to be seen in the dust of its floor. In the 12th century the Crusaders rebuilt an octagonal chapel, set within a fortified monastery. From this strategic position on the crest of the Mount of Olives, the Crusaders controlled the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. The footprints were still venerated, but now they were reported to be carved into the face of the rock. Part of this rock remains today in the Dome of the Ascension, although the Muslims have moved it adjacent to a mihrab, or niche, they inserted in the building, to indicate the direction of Mecca. They took the section bearing the left footprint to the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, where it was placed behind the pulpit there. One could have serious difficulties believing 2000 years later that this is the actual place of Jesus departure or that one could see his footprint!
But in the ascension of Jesus, which was celebrated on Thursday last is not without it spiritual difficulties as well, for modern ears and sensibilities.
For you see when we ponder the Ascension of Jesus and let’s hear again the way the writer of Luke’s Gospel puts it, “Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven,” is there not an obvious question that even a young child will ask when hearing this, “Where did Jesus go?” And more questions follow, “How high is up? Is that where heaven is? Why did Jesus have to go? When is he coming back? These are also the type of questions many adults might have when we start pondering the feast of the Ascension. I put it to you today that we need to have an adult faith to start to address these types of questions. I would also add that these types of questions revolve around two main themes: that of absence and presence.
It seems to me that some of our basic human longings are summed up in the Acts reading picture of those men and women gazing bewildered and wistful into the empty sky: the longing for a happy ending, for an end to perplexity and pain; for the reassurance that we are not alone. These hungers we all carry deep within us, perhaps never more than when we have glimpsed, as the disciples had, some meaning, some purpose in life, only for it to be snuffed out as if it had all been a mirage. We go back to the great questions that will not go away, that we hurl at the universe when life is hard: why injustice and pain; why disasters and accidents; why war and sadness and loss? We look up to heaven for some answer. But there is none. The shuttered sky is silent. No power comes to save us. Our child-like faith is sorely tried. If we think about it, much of our Christian faith is constructed around experiences of absence. There is the cry from the cross, as Jesus dies with a question on his lips: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’
At the empty tomb, Easter faith is born with a message of absence in the face of loss and searching: ‘He is not here’. And in the Ascension story, once more it is where Jesus is not: ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’ Each time, it seems, absence, not presence, is the midwife of faith, gives birth to a new awareness of God, awakens a deeper longing. The medieval theologians called this the via negativa, a way of believing that recognises that God is in the gaps of our knowledge, not so much in the words we use to talk about him, or the images with which we picture him, in fact not so much in our knowing at all as in our unknowing, where words and images run out before the profoundest mystery of God. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe.’ The alternative Collect prayer for this Sunday is a beautiful expression of the via negativa:
O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love: help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden, and to surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ. Amen
This approach to religious faith is strikingly at home in the experience of the contemporary world. To many people, God is more absence than presence, and the world a place where, in Bonhoeffer’s words, we all have to get on with life ‘etsi Deus non daretur’, as if God were not part of life’s equation, and all we have to rely on are our own human resources. That is a key insight of the Ascension story into the nature of adult believing in a world that has ‘come of age’. As the great 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, Christ has no hands but ours, no feet but ours. We bear him to humanity; we bring him forth to his world like Mary his mother. Without us he can do nothing: that is how he chooses it shall be.
Yet absence is not absence – that is the paradox of this story and the opposites it contains within it. Its symbol is the cloud that, as Acts puts it, received Jesus, and took him out of sight. In the pew bulletin today there is a medieval picture depicting the cloud as gentle with two feet sticking out under-neath.
Yet I prefer to think of it as a mighty storm cloud, with the Ascension like Elijah going in a whirlwind up to heaven. I am word-painting, of course, like the writer of Acts. The Ascension is a story. Its symbols and metaphors belong to the imagination. It is not a literal story where we ask literal questions about where and why and how Jesus disappeared. But the cloud is the vital theological key to the whole picture.
For in the imagery of the Scriptures, the cloud stands, not for the absence of God but for the awesome covering presence of Yahweh in the pillar of cloud and fire, recalled in Isaiah’s temple vision, and on the mountain of transfiguration, and in the apocalyptic clouds of heaven ridden by the Ancient of Days. So, it is not that Christ has gone away from us, but rather that he is ascended in order to be more fully present, ‘that he might fill all things’ as the New Testament puts it. The cloud is the sign that Christ the head of all things is forever the active, life-giving presence in all of life. ‘Lo, I am with you always to the end of the age’.
This Sunday after Ascension, as we look forward to Pentecost, focuses on presence and glory. The imagery of the Scriptures is that Christ has gone from one place to be available in all places. A presence we with adult eyes and adult faith can see all around. The imagery of the Scriptures is that the Ascension is all about Christ’s glory. Presence and glory inseparably together. Today’s gospel from the 17th chapter of St John speaks of both in a few short lines. ‘I in them and you in me’ – this is the presence of the ascended Jesus in and among those who believe in him. ‘The glory that you have given me I have given them’ – this is the glory of his being among us as self-giving love, the glory of the only begotten Son full of grace and truth. This high priestly prayer of Jesus before his passion is given as our reading in Ascension week because it is a universal image of Jesus bearing humanity before God. It belongs to his being exalted ‘at the right hand of the Father where he lives to make intercession for us’, as the New Testament puts it elsewhere. So, to go back to the disciples gazing into the sky, it is not that the world or our hearts are empty of him. On the contrary.
The sky speaks of presence and glory. We look up at it and are sent back into the world where our hands and feet have work to do in the name of Christ. It takes us to places where we become life-changing bearers of presence and glory. It tells us that all is well.
The Lord be with you.