Laudabo Nomen Domini
+
The Parting of Friends
The season between Easter and Pentecost can be a dangerous time for preachers. Throughout most of the year we can manage with stories, parables, miracles, perhaps the occasional sheep. But suddenly, in these few weeks, we are expected to explain the Ascension, the Holy Spirit, and then, just when confidence is beginning to fail entirely, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is little wonder that some clergy mysteriously arrange guest preachers around this time of year!
The trouble is that people often want diagrams. They want the mechanics of it all explained. What exactly happened on Ascension Day? Did Jesus literally rise upwards into the clouds? Where is heaven? How can God be Three and One? There is always a temptation to turn Christianity into a kind of theological engineering project, as though salvation depended upon getting the diagrams correct.
But the heart of the matter, the heart of our faith, is not a set of theological diagrams. We are not called simply to agree with statements about God, as one might assent to a proposition. We are called to live within the reality those words are trying to express—to discover, from the inside, the transforming love of God in Christ. Faith is not standing outside the language and examining it; it is living within it, breathing it, allowing it to reshape us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against turning Christianity into a religion of the letter, as though discipleship were merely a matter of rule-keeping. The life of faith is something deeper, more demanding, and more alive than that.
So on this day, we do not need to imagine the Ascension as though it were a kind of celestial launch—Christ rising like a rocket into the upper atmosphere. That picture, vivid though it may be, misses the point. The question is not how it happened in a physical sense, but what it meant—what it meant for those first disciples, and what it means for us.
St Luke is the only Evangelist who gives us a full account. In his Gospel, he tells us that Jesus led his disciples out as far as Bethany, lifted his hands in blessing, and, in the very act of blessing, parted from them. And he continues in the Acts of the Apostles, writing that as they watched, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
It is a strangely gentle ending. No thunder, no trumpets, no drama—just a blessing, and then absence.
In St Luke’s narrative the Ascension brings to a close that series of resurrection appearances which we have been reflecting on through these days of Easter: moments of sudden recognition and swift disappearance. Mary in the garden. The disciples on the road to Emmaus. Thomas in the upper room. Breakfast by the lakeshore. Again and again, Christ is present—and then he is gone.
These were not random encounters. They were a preparation. They were teaching the disciples how to discover a new kind of presence, a presence no longer bound by sight or touch.
Christ speaks to them not as distant followers, but as those he loves. There is, in this moment, something of the pain that we know and recognise in every deep farewell.
He knows what it is to part, to leave behind the companionship of shared meals and familiar voices. It is, at its heart, a parting of friends.
And yet, this is not an ending. It is a widening.
Until now, the disciples have known Christ in the flesh, in a particular place and time. Now they must learn to know him differently—to see him with a deeper sight. The relationship is not ended; it is transformed.
St Augustine put it with characteristic simplicity: he vanished from their sight so that they might keep him in their hearts.
But this transformation requires something costly. It requires letting go. The disciples must release the Christ they can see and hold, in order to receive the Christ who will be present everywhere. They must lose, in order to find. And that is never easy.
It is a lesson we recognise, if we are honest. Much of life is shaped by such moments—times when we are asked to let go of what is familiar, what is dear, what has sustained us, so that something new may be given. The child walking into school for the first time. The friend, moving away. The closing of one chapter, before the next is clear.
C Day Lewis captures it beautifully in his poem Walking Away, as he watches his son Sean step into independence:
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
Love is proved in the letting go.
The Ascension is not Christ abandoning his disciples. It is Christ drawing them into maturity. This is the moment when they begin, at last, to stand on their own feet. This is the first time that they truly let him go. And in the letting go, they discover they have not lost him at all.
“Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”
And this is where the promise of the Holy Spirit comes into view. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus says, “he will guide you into all truth.”
The Spirit is not an external force, hovering at a distance. The Spirit is the very breath of God, given within us—working not just on the surface of our lives, but there in the depths of our lives. Not confined to the respectable, or well-ordered parts of ourselves, but reaching into all that we are.
The Spirit reconciles what we think we are with what we truly are. The Spirit exposes what fear would keep hidden, and gently draws it into the light. The Spirit liberates us—not into some abstract holiness, but into the glorious freedom of being fully alive before God.
And perhaps that is finally what the Ascension teaches us: that Christ is not absent from the world, only absent in ways we might have expected.
We spend so much of our lives longing for certainty, for visible signs, for God to stand plainly before us and remove the burden of faith. Yet the risen Christ departs from the sight of the disciples not to abandon them, but to deepen their vision. He withdraws from their grasp so that they may discover him everywhere.
Not only in moments of glory or religious intensity, but in bread broken and shared; in acts of mercy; in wounds borne patiently; in love that survives disappointment; in the lonely places where we thought heaven could never reach.
The irascible Welsh priest / poet R S Thomas spoke of God as the great absence in our lives, and yet it is precisely within that seeming absence that the soul learns to attend, to listen, to wait. The silence itself becomes inhabited. The emptiness becomes charged with presence.
The disciples stand gazing upwards into the cloud, but the angels gently turn them back towards the world. There is work to do now. Bread to break. Good news to proclaim. A kingdom to embody. That is where the Ascension leads us. Not away from the earth, but deeper into it. Not out of humanity, but into a fuller humanity.
And they go back to Jerusalem, St Luke tells us, not in despair, but with great joy.
Joy, because they have begun to understand that the love of Christ is no longer confined to one place, one voice, one body that can be lost again to violence and death. It has become vast as heaven itself, moving quietly through the world in the power of the Holy Spirit.
And so we too must learn the strange holiness of letting go. To trust that beyond what can be seen or possessed or controlled, Christ is still drawing near.
Not always in shining clarity. Perhaps more often in silence.
Not always in answers. Perhaps more often in longing.
Not always in certainty. Perhaps more often in trust.
Until, little by little, through prayer, and mercy, and suffering, and hope, the world itself becomes transformed by the presence of God.
Amen.