Happy Christmas!
You probably think I have had a bit of a brain fade, but there
is a sense in which today is really the end of the season of Christmas, not of
Easter.
At Christmas we celebrate God coming down to us, in the shape of
a baby, vulnerable and helpless, as all babies are, pure and innocent, as all
babies are. God comes to us as a clean slate, a new beginning , someone as yet
untouched by the world into which he has been born, just as all babies are. But
he is born into a maelstrom of hardship, sin and hatred, as all babies are too.
His hands will grow calloused in the carpenter’s workshop. His feet will ache
from walking the roads of Galilee. And in the end he will hang battered and
bloody, on the cross. Even when he rises from death, his body will still bear
the scars the world has inflicted on him.
And that is the body which, according to the stories we hear on
Ascension Day, rises into heaven. Not the cherubic baby, with silky smooth skin
and tiny, perfect, sea-shell ears, but the body marked by the hardships of life
and death.
It was shocking – offensive even – to the people of Jesus’ time
to imagine that God could be found in the form of a crucified man. Crucifixion
was a disgrace, a sign of God’s rejection. Jewish law forbade those who were
diseased or disabled entry into the Temple. Mangled bodies were unholy, a sign
of God’s rejection, a sign of failure. Gentile Greek thought idealised physical
beauty too – there was nothing unusual about this equation between physical and
moral beauty. The Greeks even used the same word – kalos – to mean beautiful and morally good; think of all those
ancient sculptures which celebrated the perfect body. Morality and appearance were inextricably
linked. That’s something we’ve never entirely shaken off, but at the time of
Jesus it was almost unquestioned. How, then, could Jesus possibly be God’s Messiah?
That’s why the early church set so much store by Ascension Day,
why it mattered so much to them. It was the proof to them that you could be
battered, mangled, suffering, a complete failure in the world’s eyes, and yet
be loved and honoured by God. And that’s why it seems to me that this day is
the completion of Christmas, the completion of
Christ’s work of incarnation. At Christmas, Christ came down to us, to
be where we are. But on Ascension Day, he took us back with him into heaven,
wounds, scars and all. He took into heaven the mess of the world, a world where
young men grow up so twisted inside that they think it is a good idea to blow
up children and young people enjoying a pop concert. He presented that world to
his Father, the world which had torn him apart, whose scars he bore, and his
Father didn’t turn away in disgust. Instead, in the beautiful words of
Revelation 21, he turned towards it – towards us - and turns towards us still,
wiping every tear from our eyes, and making all things new.
It doesn’t matter that today we know that heaven isn’t in the
sky, that the “up” and “down” of this story doesn’t really work for us anymore.
The message is the same. We are where God is, just as we are. God is where we
are, just as God is. There’s no barrier, no wall, nothing that divides us.
There’s nothing that we can do, or can have done to us, which keeps us apart
from God. We don’t have to hide what is broken or ugly in us. We don’t have to
reject what is broken or ugly in others. That means that we are set free to
love and to forgive ourselves and others too. In the face of sin and evil such
as we have seen this week, we are set free to cry “Lord, have mercy,” instead
of “Lord, take vengeance”.
Just as he was, scarred and battered, Jesus was taken into the
heart of his Father on Ascension Day. Just as we are, scarred and battered –
scarring and battering -we are taken into his heart today too, so that he can
make all things new in us.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment