Eve of the Ascension

April 30, 2008

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

At Coventry Cathedral in England, two spaces stand conspicuously side by side. One is what remains of the original cathedral building before it was bombed in World War II; the other is the new cathedral building completed over a decade later. The two spaces stand side by side because together they tell a story—the biblical story of death and resurrection. Behind the barren altar in one space is a cross of nails accompanied by the words, “Father forgive.” Behind the other altar is a giant, colorful, piece of art: a tapestry of Christ the ascended King.

I have just described to you the physical appearance of Coventry Cathedral and given you a rational explanation of why it is the way it is. What is harder to do is to describe to you what I felt spiritually while I was there. I felt an aura of holiness that I can’t explain with words. It was a different feeling from what I experienced in other English cathedrals whose vaulted ceilings lifted my eyes to heaven and warmed my heart. There was something that felt to me more complete, though, about Coventry. It more profoundly underscored for me the intersection of divine and human: of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christos Rex.

It was a place kind of like the one we celebrate today, the place of the Ascension, the paradoxical place where Jesus leaves us behind and simultaneously becomes more present to us than ever. It’s hard to explain, other than to say that Jesus always did like breaking the mold, working outside of comfortable and familiar categories, refusing to let us pin him down. Just when we think we’re about to grasp something, Jesus consistently directs our attention elsewhere—almost as if he doesn’t want us to grasp it—maybe because the quest for grasping something is a diversion; it is not really the point of faith. He knows that we need something more.

On Christmas we celebrated Jesus’ humble entry into the world; today we celebrate his grandiose departure from the world. Humble and grandiose are words I don’t usually associate with one another. They even seem contradictory. Are we to remember Jesus as the humble servant born in a stable among barnyard animals, or as Christ the King, seated at the right hand of the Father? Our forebears in the faith came to the conclusion that we should think about Jesus as both servant and Son of God. But still this seems a contradiction. How can it be both?

We don’t have to read far into the New Testament to see how this pattern plays out over and over again. It’s a familiar one. There are the moments of humility—Jesus’ talking to unclean Samaritans, approaching sinful lepers, being stripped, beaten, and crucified; and there are also moments of grandiosity—his being transfigured on a mountain, walking on water, processing into Jerusalem like a king.

In John’s gospel Jesus is simultaneously the cosmic Word and the more mundane “I am the bread,” “I am the good shepherd,” and so forth. We’ll hear again from John on Sunday, and not surprisingly we’ll hear Jesus waxing eloquently about being glorified: “So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” We might think of it as a sort of bookend to the prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John wants us to see the larger picture.

But today we hear from Luke, the physician, whose gospel account and its sequel the Acts of the Apostles, often bring to light the problems of this world. “He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty,” sings Mary. Jesus gives a Sermon on the Plain in Luke’s Gospel, not a Sermon on the Mount as in Matthew’s Gospel. He stands on the level of the people. He says “Blessed are the poor,” according to Luke, not “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” as Matthew reports. Luke wants us to see how God is acting within human history.

All the canonical gospel accounts, though, want us to make the connection through Jesus between God and humankind, between heaven and earth, between spiritual and temporal, between resurrection and death; and maybe that’s the importance of this occasion. The Ascension accounts make that junction unmistakably visible to us. However reasonable it might be to depict Jesus simply as a model of good works, and however desirable it might be to treat our faith as something separate from the world and its harsh realities, the Ascension refuses to let us go either of these ways. Instead, it underscores something profoundly sacred at their juncture.

I’ve been speaking in the abstract, though; I’ve gotten a bit too much into my head as I am too often wont to do, so let’s bring it down to the ground a little bit. Imagine what it must have been like for the people standing on the ground that fateful day, how it must have felt to see Jesus go away again. We don’t have to stretch our imaginations far to feel the turns of the roller coaster— emotions moving up and down, back and forth, every which way.

They had put their trust in Jesus as the great Messiah, but then he was crucified. Then, he showed up again—resurrected from the dead, and they celebrated again. But now, he leaves them again—ascending into heaven. “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” But don’t get too settled on his being there, because as the two men in white robes clarified, “this Jesus, who has been taken up from you in heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” And all they were told before all this happened: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” What kind of help is that, though? What about the meantime? We want answers now.

We’ve stood in those shoes, every one of us here; I think it is par for the course with being human. There are times in which all we can do is throw up our hands in disbelief, or walk one step at the time as best we can. There are times when we hear the words of our faith and they don’t make sense to us, or they’re not timely enough: they don’t immediately take away whatever problems we happen to be enduring. There are times when, like Jesus on the cross, all we can do is cry out that verse from Psalm 22: “Why, O God, have you forsaken me?” “Why?”

That fateful day in England, the people of Coventry learned at the very last minute that the bombers were heading their way, and that their cathedral was one of the targets to be bombed. British intelligence had managed to intercept German communications, and learned beforehand that the bombing was going to happen, but they learned this too late. All they could do is tell the people of Coventry beforehand: prepare as best you can. And so the people got together hoses, buckets of water, whatever they could find to put out fires, and they did everything they could do to save their beloved cathedral.

When the bombing was over the place was in shambles, these same people came together to clean it up. In the process, someone found large nails amid the rubble and fashioned them into the cross I mentioned before. They did whatever they could do to cling to their faith, their hope in God. It wasn’t easy.

Who could’ve imagined at the time that anything good could ever rise again? Who knew that one day the Queen of England and the Chancellor of Germany would be standing together in festivity on that very site, dedicating the new adjacent building? Who knew that the place would ever be filled with artwork from around the world? Who knew that some American guy who lives in Indiana would ever stand there and find the place holy?

It is that place where heaven and earth, God and humankind, divine and mundane come together in Christ. It’s not enough simply to meet the risen Christ and go back to business as usual. God isn’t willing to leave it there. God wants us to feel the power of the resurrection; God is willing to go out of his way to show us that it the resurrection is not trivial, something we can just throw to the side and get on with other things. God wants us to see that resurrection is not just business as usual, but something radical, something that is transforming the world and you and me.

The Ascension is one of God’s ways for showing us the power of the resurrection. Ten days from now we’ll celebrate another one: the Day of Pentecost. By worldly standards they are both absurd occasions—Jesus defying gravity and the Holy Spirit turning an otherwise ordered gathering into mass confusion with wind and fire and speaking in tongues. By God’s standards, though, these times are filled with power—visible power—the kind of power that intrudes into this broken world, intrudes upon our imperfect selves, and fashions it all into a new creation.

I don’t know why we wait in the meantime, “why it is not for you [and me] to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” I do know that this place, this shell of a building or whatever you want to call it, is not as empty as it seems. It is not empty at all. It is a profoundly holy place, a place where there is nothing to distract us from God’s reconciling love, a place of radical conversion, a place strangely simple and grandiose, a place where God is.

“And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”

Amen.