Ascension
Day — 25 May 2017
Trinity – 12:15 pm
Acts 1:1-11 |
Psalm 93 | Ephesians 1:15-23 | Luke
24:44-53
“And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the
age.” [Matthew
28:20b]
When we think of the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ –
(I don’t know how often you actually think about the Ascension of Christ, apart
from on Ascension Day, but, after all, we do refer to it every time we say the
Creed – “He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the
Father” – and so presumably you do
occasionally think about the Ascension of Christ, at least briefly!) – what
comes to our minds? Well, a lot of the
time, I suspect, maybe first of all, is this story that St. Luke tells us
today. In fact, Luke tells this story
twice. We hear his second telling in the
first reading today, from the first chapter of his second book, that we call
the Acts of the Apostles; and then we hear Luke’s first telling, from the 24th
chapter of his Gospel. They are mostly,
but not exactly, the same story.
The
major difference between them is that the first, Gospel, story, apparently
takes place at the end of Sunday, the Day of the Resurrection. (A very very long day, if you actually set a
clock running on the events in Chapter 24!)
The second story, at the beginning of Acts, takes place 40 days later. (“40 days” is always a symbolic number in the
Scriptures, whatever the chronological reality behind it may be.) I hope you are not distressed by this
discrepancy. You should not be. Unimaginative literalism is an illegitimate
child of the Enlightenment, not of the Christian tradition itself. St. Luke was, or at least was functioning as,
a Hellenistic historian, and in the Greco-Roman world historians understood
their task as to explicate the meaning
of events, at least their
understanding of the meaning of events, not to provide a CNN transcript. This is true of all of them – Herodotus,
Thucydides, Tacitus, Suetonius, all that crowd – including the first-century
Jewish historian Josephus. On a spectrum
of historical writers we would put them somewhere between Doris Kearns Goodwin
[Team of Rivals, a history of Abraham
Lincoln, presidency] and Hilary Mantel [Wolf
Hall, a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII]. Probably closer to Ms. Mantel. But I digress.
There are a number of references in the New Testament,
direct and indirect, to the ascension of the risen Christ into heaven, where he
reigns – as for instance in the Epistle from Ephesians today. But St. Luke is the only one who provides a narrative, a story. This suggests to me that the narrative is not
the essence of the reality of the Ascension, despite the fact that this
narrative so readily captures our imagination, which is probably why Luke uses
it. Luke likes to tell stories. (We get most of our favorite parables through
Luke.) And after all, this narrative
gives us “Toes.” (Ah, you don’t
remember. Just as well.)
The problem with the narrative is that it seems often to
imply, although I don’t think this is what St. Luke intends, that now Jesus is gone.
Yes, Jesus will come again, but as it turns out, his coming again is not
any time soon (at least not so far!), although some Christian sects have spent
a lot of time sitting around waiting for him, and other sects have wasted an
immense amount of energy trying to decipher from misinterpreted Scriptural
passages just when that coming is going to happen. But the bottom line of all this is that we
operate on the assumption that Jesus is not
here. And that is absolutely not what we celebrate on Ascension Day.
“But isn’t Jesus in heaven?” Yes!
“And so he’s not here.”
No!
That raises the question of the relationship of earth to
heaven, which is another homily, or another lecture series, or another book,
for another time. And still another
question for another time is what we mean when we profess our faith that Jesus
“will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
The important thing, I think, and the bottom line for
today, is that Jesus is not somewhere
else. And certainly not long ago and
far away, in first-century Judea or wherever.
Heaven is not somewhere
else. Heaven is here. Jesus is here.
St. Matthew concludes his Gospel by telling it right: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
