Nine days & Nine nights! Nine days & Nine nights!
That's how long it would take for a bronze anvil to fall from up in heaven down to earth. And it would take another nine days & nine nights to fall from earth right down into the underworld.
That's what the Greek poet, Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, said in his study of the origin of the universe & his history of the gods. It's an example of the way the ancient world thought & it's our starting point for thinking about The Ascension.
Just as with Easter & the Resurrection, so also with Ascension. As part of the Christian year, Ascension has its own share of problems. To some people we have to explain that it is not a celebration of some sort of space flight by the Risen Jesus. Rather we are to think of the Gospel story of Jesus "going back to his Father" as pointing to his share in God's sovereignty over the world.
As an event in the history of our salvation, the Ascension crowns with glory God's intervention into our human life. This intervention started with the Angel's announcement to Mary that she was to bear this special son. That birth marked the beginning of Good News & the Ascension marks its ultimate triumph.
Certainly we can see the point of a story in which Jesus is withdrawn from the earthly scene. His followers had eventually recognised that this man they had got to know as someone special, someone rather different, someone they had seen nailed to a cross, someone they had met again days afterwards & could see that he was no longer dead; they had realized that yes, he probably was the Son of God.
BUT - how could he go on being with them, sharing fish & bread & wine with them if, unlike them, he could not die? What was going to happen to him next? The obvious presence of a Resurrected Person here & now - for several thousand years, for ever - would make a difference. There would be no ambiguity, no choice for them & none for us. He would still have been around, known about throughout the world, still hanging around & no doubt getting in the way!!
He had to be got out of the way. God had to get him off the stage! So he leaves, exit stage centre, pursued by a cloud! In some medieval paintings we even see his feet sticking out of the bottom of the cloud as he goes! Walsingham pilgrims among you will, I'm sure, remember just the feet attached to the ceiling in the shrine church.
WE are the Body of Christ, so HIS body, even his resurrected body, had to be got out of the way, got off the stage, so that the rest of Church History could be told. For us to be able to Witness to the love of God expressed in Christ, the Body of the actual Christ had to go - exit upstage, pursued by a cloud!!
So, Jesus enters into the glory of his father & shares with God the control of the world. That is what the Church has proclaimed & that is the root of our problem. This problem basically has two parts - the chronology & the cosmology - or, to use shorter words, when did the Ascension happen & where actually did he go?
When did it happen? Here we have a problem with the New Testament stories. The Church's Kalendar has followed the story of St. Luke's Gospel & placed it 40 days after the Resurrection. During our worshipping lives we have become so familiar with this timing that we have tended to overlook the fact that in the other Gospels no such period of time is mentioned.
In Mark's Gospel, the Ascension is contained in a p-s at the end with no hint as to when it happened, a p-s almost certainly added later by editors. In Matthew, the eleven disciples go back to Galilee to meet the Risen Jesus there & the story ends with Jesus charging them to make disciples of all nations & baptize people & teach them. John doesn't give us any Ascension at all!
The 40 days which Luke gives us are symbolic. Like Lent, they stand for a period of waiting, a period of preparation before an important event. In fact, they mirror the 40 days in the wilderness before the start of Jesus' public ministry. For Luke, the 40 days between Resurrection & Ascension, as we heard in tonight's First Reading from The Acts of The Apostles, is again a period of waiting & preparation, before Jesus returns to heaven to sit at the right hand of God - or to put it another way, before he exits & leaves the church to get on with the work.
This notion of the Risen Christ returning back to heaven to sit at God's right hand presents the second of our problems - the cosmology - where did he actually go? It's a problem for those of us who watched the first landing by men on the moon in July 1969 [yes, almost 40 years ago!] & for those younger than us for whom the X-files & Dr. Who's Tardis hold no mysteries!
We now know, with the benefits of several centuries of scientific discovery, what people in Gospel times did not know. People in Gospel times believed in what they saw & what they saw was a flat earth with, above it, the blue canopy of the sky. They believed that heaven was a place just above the sky & that you could go there if you were very special - like Elijah or like Jesus.
We now know that if Jesus had gone up into the sky, as many of the artists of the Middle Ages portrayed it, even if he'd gone at the speed of light - he would still be travelling today, 2000 years later! We now know that space is very, very vast.
So, does keeping the Feast of the Ascension mean that the Church still believes in a God "up there?" We have to remember that in the ancient world, the heavens were the top deck in a three-decker universe. So, it was perfectly possible for people in the first few centuries of the Christian era to believe, to speak & to write about the son of their God who not only came down from heaven to earth but also 'descended' into hell & after three days rose & ascended again to heaven.
Many people today not only still appear to live in that three-layered universe but also still believe that Jesus' resurrection & ascension were literally physical & historical events. At this distance in time & with only the New Testament as our source, we cannot know what exactly happened after Jesus' crucifixion & burial.
We cannot claim resurrection & ascension to be the continuation of a series of historical events. Resurrection has nothing to do with the laws of earthly existence as we know it. And hitting the Gospel stories with a sledgehammer - until they fit the way things work here on earth - will do little to advance our understanding.
What we can claim is that something happened to that band of confused & frightened disciples after they returned north to Galilee to resume their fishing. Over perhaps many months as they recalled all they had seen & heard, links began to form in their minds between their images of the Jesus they had known & the expectations of the Messiah that were very much about in their Jewish culture. Was part of such imagining the idea that God had somehow raised Jesus into God's presence?
WE can be sure of certain historical events - that these formerly frightened men became inspired by the Spirit of Jesus to devote their lives to declaring that Jesus was Messiah - & to risk punishment, imprisonment & death.
This 'going up to heaven' is simply an expression which is the nearest we can get in human terms to describe how Christ shares in God's rule. Luke ends his story of the Ascension with the disciples 'gazing up into heaven.' But then he brings them down to earth by having two angels (well, two men in white robes) standing by them. These two angels had also appeared in Luke's story of the resurrection. Then their question was - 'Why do you seek the living among the dead?' Now their question is - 'Why do you stand here gazing into heaven?'
That question is also a question for us. Following on from The Ascension - whenever it was - the mission of the church is to be carried out. God's mission, under the guidance of God's Spirit & in which the Church has a part to play, is to be carried out, is being carried out. The disciples were not to spend their time speculating about when & how the kingdom was to come - & neither are we! They were to wait for the Spirit & then take Jesus' message to the world - & so are WE!
So, may our loving God bless you as you do that waiting for the Spirit & that taking of Jesus' message - as you also, in fact, "RISE UP" to live fully, love wastefully & have the courage to be all that you can be! Amen.
Sermon by: Malcolm Aldcroft