Ascension 2012

Over the years, many Christians have been embarrassed by the Ascension
The reason is that we have thought of heaven and earth in the wrong way.
We have supposed that the first-century Christians thought of 'heaven' as a place up in the sky, within our space-time universe, and that they imagined Jesus as a kind of primitive space-traveler heading upwards to sit beside God somewhere a few miles up in the sky.
God and the world are somehow a long way away from each another, so that if Jesus has gone to be with God - whatever that means - we think that he has left us behind, that he is now far away in another dimension altogether.
We have then come to believe that we, too, will one day go off to this same place called 'heaven', leaving earth behind for good.
But this way of understanding the Ascension is, quite simply, wrong on all counts.
The early Christians, like their Jewish contemporaries, saw heaven and earth as the overlapping and interlocking spheres of God's good creation, with the point being that heaven is the control room from which earth is run.
Heaven is God's space, and earth is our space.
To say that Jesus is now in heaven is to say three things:
- First, that he is present with his people everywhere, no longer confined to one space-time location on earth, but certainly not absent.
- Second, that he is now the managing director of this strange show called 'earth', though like many incoming chief executives he has quite a lot to do to sort it out and turn it around.
- Third, that he will one day bring heaven and earth together as one, becoming personally present to us once more within God's new creation.
The Bible doesn't say much about our going to heaven. It does say a lot about heaven, and particularly heaven's chief inhabitant, coming back to earth.
The point of God's split-level creation, heaven and earth, is not that earth is a kind of training ground for heaven, but that heaven and earth are designed to overlap and interlock (which is, by the way, the foundation of all sacramental theology, with the sacraments as one of the places where this overlap actually happens), and that one day they will do so fully and forever as the Kingdom of God is fulfilled.
The point of the Ascension is not that he is going a long way away but that he is being elevated to be the true Lord of the world.
The Resurrection, the Ascension and Pentecost are three parts to the same incredible story.
The resurrection has vindicated Jesus' claim to be Israel's Messiah; and Israel's Messiah is the world's rightful Lord, as any bible-reading Jew could have told you.
'I have seen the Lord,' says Mary Magdalene to the disciples, and the word 'Lord' isn't just a polite way of denoting Jesus; what we should hear hear is, 'I have seen the king of the universe,' 'I have seen the one before whom the nations will tremble', 'I have seen the one through whom and for whom all things were made.'
Moving on to Pentecost, the Spirit is given so that through the work of the church the kingdom may indeed come on earth as in heaven.
We still have a problem however…..
The atheist and the cynic simply put all these Gospel stories down to the inventive minds of a bunch of story-tellers.
Let's go back a moment to the Resurrection story: 'Go to my brothers and say to them, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God."' This is Jesus' command to Mary Magdalene at the climax of John's story of Easter morning.
Now, given the universal belief at that time of the unreliability of women in a law court, or almost anywhere else. It is one of the things which absolutely guarantee that the early Christians did not invent these stories.
They would never, ever, ever have invented the idea that it was a woman to whom had been entrusted the earth-shattering message that Jesus was alive again, that he was on the way to being enthroned as Lord of the World, and that he was opening to his followers, as a result of his victory over death itself, that same intimacy with the Father that he had enjoyed throughout his earthly life.
It is Mary: not Peter, not John, not James the brother of the Lord, but Mary, who becomes the apostle to the apostles, the primary Christian witness, the first Christian evangelist.
This is so striking, so unexpected, so embarrassing to some early Christians that it cannot be just a story.
It cannot be accidental for John and the other writers, and though the church has often struggled - to put it mildly - with the idea of women being called to genuine apostolic ministry, the record is clear and unambiguous.
So what does all this mean for us?
May our praying, our living, our thinking, our debating, our campaigning, our common life in Christ, not least our sacramental life as here at this Eucharist, our fearless witness before the world, be inspired by the Spirit who comes to us at Pentecost, and be focused in a fresh and much-needed way on the urgent issues that face us in our time.
Do not be fearful or muddled, but be a clear and uncompromising witness to Jesus Christ, risen, ascended, glorified and highly disturbing for our world over which he rules by right and in love. May your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.