May 20, 2012

Clare Barrie

Sunday after the Ascension
     Acts 1:1-11     Luke 24:44-53

Video available on YouTube

My favourite images of the Ascension are those medieval ones which depict only Jesus’ feet disappearing into a stylised cloud, while the disciples and May stand about below, gazing upwards at the soon-to-vanish toes of Christ. There’s a very comical ascension statue set into the ceiling of the Chapel of the Ascension at Walsingham, England... there is a rather baroque-looking plaster cloud with a pair of plaster feet hanging down out of a golden robe...and shooting out from behind the toes are golden lightening bolts, creating the unfortunate effect of alarmingly elongated toes. Or equally unfortunate, the bolts are like the golden streaks that super heroes leave behind in cartoons and movies, when they zip up up and away.

The toes of Christ rocketing into the clouds of heaven. The very comicality of Ascension imagery should alert us to the strangeness of this story - and we should also be alert to the fact that this morning we have heard two versions of this event that somehow concluded Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Two quite different versions of the story, from Acts and Luke, but written by the same author. We do well to remember that the biblical authors used narrative to write about theology; ‘history’ is a modern genre - there are plenty of historical elements in the scriptures, but they were not written as history as such: they were written to convey theology.

Ascension used to be thought of as one of the great feasts of the Church - in fact, Augustine considered it to be the crown of all Christian festivals. It is far from that now. We tick it off on the way through from Easter to Pentecost, wishing perhaps to dodge the strange story with its special effects and its taint of ‘the miraculous.’

But if we read this story with the eyes of theology rather than being trapped by history, what do we begin to see? Instead of asking whether or not something happened as described, I think asking what a story means to us as Christians is often much more challenging - and it becomes much harder to dismiss.

So - ...The toes of Christ rocketing into the clouds of heaven... The story as Luke tells it is rich with echoes of the Hebrew Bible… as he is taken upwards into heaven, Jesus raises his hands in blessing and promise over the disciples, just as Moses and Aaron once did over the Israelites… there is a sense of Jesus passing on his mantle, his tasks and the power to do those tasks, just as – again the echoes – Moses did to Joshua and Elijah did to Elisha. There is a cloud and Jesus passes from their sight. Then two men in white robes appear, and almost incongruously ask the disciples why they are standing about gazing up toward heaven.

As we unpack the elements of this story, it starts to become clear why some commentators say the Ascension is the most political feast of the church, and others say it is the most mystical.

The Ascension story places the risen Christ at ‘the right hand of God,’ which is is a metaphor that ascribes immense power to Christ - in fact, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion.’ So Christ has to do with all spheres of life - Christ is not at all limited to the private and the personal. [1]

Notions of power immediately make us uncomfortable as contemporary Christians. But who is this Christ, ascended to this place of power over all things? This Christ preached that he came to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free; this Christ knew hunger and thirst and betrayal and injustice; this Christ was crucified. And those experiences are not erased by the Ascension - they are taken into the heart of God - the ‘burning heart of all reality.’ [2]

And ultimately, this is a political claim - because in taking these experiences of humanity into the heart of God, Christ utterly transforms how we understand the nature of power. The Ascension calls into question all human allegiances and all human uses of power, in the light of Christ. And as the Church, Christ’s own ‘body politic,’ we are tasked with continuing that questioning.

Sadly, as the Church, we can all too easily spend our time and energy turning in on ourselves, withholding the good news, holding people captive to our judgment, being blind to the needs around us, and oppressing those who need grace and love. Instead of challenging them, we fall into the patterns of this world’s powers and politics: division, competition, scarcity, fear. As if there isn’t enough of God’s grace to go around. When this happens we are failing Christ’s mandate. We have a responsibility to look outwards, to be concerned with all of our world, because Christ is.

Back to the story - the toes of Christ disappearing into a cloud. Contemporary Christians can be a bit mocking about biblical figures and clouds - but bear with me. In the Hebrew Bible stories, the image of a cloud often signifies the presence of God, something mysterious and wild and holy - and in English we often find such words in these stories as ‘thick cloud’ or ‘darkness’ or ‘glory.’ So it was when Moses went up the mountain.

These stories are not talking about white puffy clouds in the distant sky; they are talking about the mystery of God, what an anonymous medieval writer called ‘the cloud of unknowing,’ - the deep unknowability of God. This is what lies at the heart of the rich contemplative tradition in Christian spirituality, and the apophatic tradition in theology, the via negativa. Knowing God only through what God is not. The cloud is a metaphor for mystery, for our inability to see or understand or speak of God clearly. It teaches us to be profoundly cautious of certainties - especially of any triumphant or exclusionary theology.

And so we start to see why the Ascension is both the most political and mystical of celebrations, and why it is so disturbing. The image of Jesus’ feet disappearing into the holy mystery of God holds together the political and the mystical, when many Christians would - I think - rather keep these part of our lives separate.

There is nothing quite so prosaically human as feet, especially feet that walked in the dust of busy streets, cool gardens, hot dry deserts; feet that were washed with the tears of a woman and dried with her hair. Feet that stumbled, bleeding, on the path up to Golgotha and a state execution.

Luke’s story tells us that those very feet, with all that they signify, are now a part of God – part of God’s experience of our humanity and part of God’s trinitarian being. [3] As Rowan Williams puts it, Jesus has gone before us into the darkest places of human reality - he hears the human beings that no one else hears - the abused, the despairing, the destitute - and he carries all of that into the burning heart of God.

And he calls to us to say, ‘You listen too.’

....‘You listen too.’ [4]

At the end of Luke’s story, when Jesus is carried into the mystery of God, for the very first time in Luke’s gospel, the disciples worship Jesus and they feel ‘great joy.’ The scene is almost comical; the disciples are lost in wonder and worship, gazing up to heaven; but their holy reverie is disrupted by impatient figures in white robes; "People of Galilee!” they say, “why are you standing around gazing up towards heaven!?” You can almost hear them saying, ‘You’ve got things to do, places to be! Get it together!’ So they return to Jerusalem to gather and wait as Jesus asked them: Stay in the city and wait for what God has promised.

‘Stay in the city...’ this is where the church is meant to be - with its politics and media and demands and people who are lost and forgotten. ‘The city’ can be read as a metaphor for this world, with all its beauty and brokenness. And here in the midst of the city, we wait for God’s promise - we wait for the fullness of time, we wait for God’s kingdom to come, God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Though in the mystery of God, we cannot know and should not claim with any certainty what that vision will look like or who should be included or excluded, our active waiting for it irrevocably shapes who we are now and what we stand for in this world.

The Ascension story promises that all of our humanity is encompassed - welcomed - into the heart of the living, loving, mysterious God of all things, while our feet walk firmly in this city with Christ, loving it, questioning it, challenging it. And it is a story that proclaims not Christ’s absence from all things but his centrality to all things. And we are Christ’s body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

We are, to paraphrase Gerard Manly Hopkins,

all at once what Christ is, since he was what we are -

and ‘This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.’ [5]

Amen.

[1] For further reading: Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith - How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good, Brazos Press 2011 offers a good place to start.

[2] Rowan Williams, Sermon for Ascension Day, Thurs 21st May 2009.

[3] Ross Thompson, Spirituality in Season, Canterbury Press, 2008 (p. 143).

[4] Rowan Williams, Sermon for Ascension Day, Thurs 21st May 2009.

[5] from ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.’ (Gerard Manly Hopkins SJ)