On Thursday, Ascension Day, I invited as our preacher the new vicar of St Saviour’s. Reflecting on the mystery of the Resurrection and the Ascension, he naughtily observed “It is little wonder that some clergy mysteriously arrange guest preachers around this time of year!” He was gracious enough to say that in his previous parish, he had done the same.
Philip looked at the Ascension as a letting go, the means by which the disciples – the Church – could allow the Jesus they had known to vanish from their sight, so they might keep him in their hearts, and so that the limitations of time and space might give way to the infinity of eternity.
At the risk of plagiarising his best lines, he quoted a poem I didn’t know, by C Day Lewis, Walking Away, as he contemplates his son Sean stepping into independence, remembering past partings:
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.
I would like to reflect on two slightly different thoughts relating to the Ascension. The first is betweenness and the second is doubt.
Let’s start with doubt. I am never quite sure what the definition of faith is, but I am pretty sure it’s not certainty, and I am sure too it’s not knowledge. St Paul is suspicious of knowledge “knowledge puffeth up”.
The Ascension, particularly in the space age – we’ve had men and a woman heading to the moon recently, there is a sputnik in the Benedicte window – is confounding if it actually means that Jesus went up to heaven.
Stupid thoughts crowd my unscientific mind: when did he stop going up, what happened behind the clouds, when they shrouded the mystery of his disappearance. It’s clear this is mystery talk, but it’s not made easier by today’s two readings.
Attentive readers of might have spotted immediately the puzzle. At the end of Gospel of Luke, the Ascension happens on Easter Day itself: Jesus leads his disciples out, blesses them, and is carried up into heaven. It is swift, seamless, immediate. But when we open the Acts of the Apostles, written by the same author, we are told that Jesus appears to the disciples over forty days, before ascending. The same event, the same author—yet told and even dated differently.
What are we to make of this?
Does it increase our faith? It certainly irritates mine – why can’t the Bible say what it means?
Doubt, scepticism, puzzling, being confounded – they are all alright.
The nature of the stories that are told in it, by different authors, with different backgrounds and audiences and purposes is to cajole, intrigue and puzzle, not only to provide pat-answers and satisfying solutions. The Resurrection stories are all a part of this. Not to tease or upset us, but to avoid proposition and over-simplicity. Life isn’t simple and we all know that – so faith – the most important part of life shouldn’t be simple either.
Scholars suggest that Luke is not contradicting himself but shaping the story for a reason. At the end of the Gospel, Luke compresses events—he “telescopes” resurrection, ascension, and worship into one radiant conclusion.
In Acts, he stretches the same reality out, giving us forty days of appearances, teaching, and preparation.
One is a liturgical ending, the other a missionary beginning.
In other words, the Ascension is told twice because it does two things. It is both an ending and a beginning.
The Sunday after Ascension has a particular place in the Church’s year. Christ has ascended; the Spirit has not yet been given at Pentecost.
The Gospel reading from Gospel of John gives us Jesus’ great prayer in chapter 17. He does not ask that they be taken out of the world, but that they be kept within it. They are to remain in that place of tension: between heaven and earth, between promise and fulfilment, between what has been accomplished and what is yet to come.
And so much of life feels like that, does it not? Waiting for a diagnosis, or waiting for healing. Living between grief and acceptance (I have been working with a family in exactly that situation). Holding together hope and fear.
Luke shows us that even the Ascension itself must be lived twice: once as fulfilment, once as waiting.
Jesus prays not for our escape, but for our perseverance. He promises the gift of the Spirit and although we celebrate Pentecost next week we don’t have to wait until then to know its abiding presence with us. Week by week as we come together to receive the Eucharist, so the Spirit is outpoured on us in renewal of our Baptism and assurance of the presence of the Spirit with us.
So we are one with Christ “For they are thine, and all mine are thine, I come to thee Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.