THE ASCENSION

Thursday, May 13, 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt, N.J.

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47 or 93

Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

Have you ever noticed that our secular culture has appropriated certain Christian festivals but not others? You don’t have to grow up in a church-going family to know when Christmas and Easter are coming. The wider society even pays a tribute of sorts to All Saints Day with Halloween costumes and trick or treating.

But just think: when was the last time anyone sent you an Ascension card? Or gave you a Pentecost present? Or hosted a Trinity Sunday holiday party? I suppose we ought to be grateful that at least some of the holy days in our calendar have remained free from commercial exploitation. But on that account, we may be apt to overlook these days’ pivotal significance in the Church calendar.

Today we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord. Both the Ascension and Pentecost, which we shall celebrate a week from Sunday, are principal feasts of the Church Year, of equal rank with Christmas, Easter, and All Saints Day. Yet while our attendance today is pretty good, it’s still far less than the throngs who turn out for Christmas and Easter.

I suspect that the reasons for this relative neglect of the Ascension are not only cultural but also theological. Not only does the wider culture fail to notice the Ascension, but many believing and practicing Christians don’t quite know what to make of it either.

Perhaps the imagery itself is a bit embarrassing. Unlike ancient people, we’re no longer accustomed to imagining a three-story universe, with heaven up there in the sky, hell down there under the earth, and us here on the ground floor in between. The birth of Jesus we can understand; it’s easy to imagine the manger, the barnyard animals, and the shepherds. The resurrection of Jesus we can understand; the empty tomb and the appearances of one previously dead but now alive speak to our deepest longings and hopes.

But the same risen Christ lifting off from the earth and rising up into the clouds? It’s difficult to make sense of this picture when we no longer think of heaven as a place located spatially up there, in the sky. A friend once told me of a sermon he’d heard in which the preacher described Jesus as the first astronaut: the first human being to leave the earth’s atmosphere and travel through outer space. That description just highlights the absurdity of too literal a reading of the Ascension story.

So, what really happened on Ascension Day? The short answer is that we don’t know. Perhaps the story is just a symbolic way of saying that Jesus has returned to his Father in heaven. Or perhaps Jesus really did lift off from the ground and rise into the clouds. The priest Robert Farrar Capon once wrote that Jesus only needed to get up as far as the first cloud to make his point – a visual point that his disciples would understand in terms of their own world view and cosmology. The underlying principle is that God always accommodates himself to our human limitations by speaking in a language, whether verbal or visual, that we can understand. And the Ascension may be a case in point.

Either way, the Ascension is absolutely crucial to our Christian faith because it answers the question: Where is Jesus now? He is at the right hand of his Father in heaven, whence he reigns as Lord over all creation. And that answer makes all the difference in the world as to how we relate to him here and now.

Some great teachers from ancient history are figures to whom we can relate only through their writings or through what others have written about them. Think, for example, of Socrates. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything, but his disciples Plato and Xenophon wrote down many of his teachings in minutely detailed transcripts of his dialogues in Fifth Century BC Athens. Reading these dialogues, we get a wonderful picture of Socrates’ personality, his relentless questioning, and his deeply held principles. It’s admittedly difficult to disentangle the historical sayings of Socrates from the words that Plato and others put in his mouth as they developed their own philosophies. Either way, however, when we close the book, Socrates remains nothing more than a figure from the ancient past, someone whom we can know only through the medium of what others wrote about him so many centuries ago. Even though he may seem to come alive in these writings, the indisputable fact is that Socrates was, is, and remains as dead as a doornail.

Precisely the opposite is true of Jesus. Sometimes scholars make a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith – the Jesus of history being the figure whom we encounter in the pages of the Gospels; and the Christ of faith being the figure worshiped by the Christian Church throughout the centuries since.

The doctrine of the Ascension teaches us, however, that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. The Jesus about whom we read in the Bible is not merely an historical figure who lived and then died in the ancient past, but rather one who is alive, even now, in the fullest possible sense of the word.

And so, to return to the question: Where is Jesus now? He’s at the right hand of his Father, reigning as Lord over all creation. Moreover, we can know him today not only as someone whose words and deeds we read in the Bible, but also as a living presence in our midst – and more specifically, as the one who still speaks to us in his Word, who still becomes one with us in his Sacraments, and who is still worthy of our deepest loyalty, allegiance, faith, and obedience.