Ascension Day

Ascension Day is often a bit puzzling to modern minds. 

The images of it can look very odd – Jesus disappearing into the clouds, with just his feet showing, hauled up by angels on clouds.

And after all, we have sent people into space. 

We know that the sky isn’t a blue ceiling with windows for the rain to fall through, and above it a heavenly realm, so the whole imagery of Jesus going up just doesn’t work in the same way for us.

But that doesn’t mean Ascension Day isn’t important.

We’ve had 2000 years of thinking of Jesus as the Son of God, a good man. We’re used to thinking of his crucifixion, as “Good” Friday – something ultimately good, not bad. But for those who were there at the time, both friends and enemies, that would have seemed a very strange idea. 

To them, Jesus was just a carpenter from Nazareth, an ordinary man from an ordinary family, no one outwardly special, certainly not Messiah material. There had even been rumours about his parentage – his mother had been pregnant when she shouldn’t have been. People knew that. No one seems to have known anything about shepherds and angels and wise men during his lifetime. And then he had taken it upon himself to wander the countryside preaching and stirring people up, mixing with sinners, when he should have been at home looking after his family. He’d got into arguments with religious experts, people with proper theological training and positions in the community. No wonder he’d been crucified. He had it coming. A disgraceful death for a controversial man who seemed intent on upsetting the apple cart and bringing the wrath of Rome – and maybe the wrath of God – down on his people. Whoever he was, there was no way he could be the Messiah – that’s what the average man or woman on the streets of Jerusalem would have told you. God wouldn’t have chosen him, and his shameful death proved that to them. 

But within days of his death, instead of slinking off home, his followers were saying that he was alive, that God had raised him from death, that far from being a disaster, the crucifixion had been the beginning of a new way, a new kingdom. You couldn’t make it up, or at least, you wouldn’t choose to. For them, the Ascension was the culmination of that story of triumph, and the proof to them that God had turned the world upside down in choosing and using Jesus; Jesus the crucified one, Jesus the one who had been beaten to a pulp, disfigured, mocked, left to die in ignominy, Jesus the failure, the loser. In the resurrection God had raised him to life, but in his Ascension, God declared that this bruised and battered person, still bearing his wounds, was his right-hand man, the son of the Almighty, worthy of honour, with a place in heaven.

However you picture it in your mind, the Ascension is the moment when earth with all its ordinariness, all its pain, all its decay and death is declared to be one with heaven. The early Christians valued the Ascension so highly because in it they saw that their own human experiences, however mundane or squalid, were part of the experience of God. In truth, I think heaven and earth were always far closer than people thought, that God was never more than a breath away, but we all have to discover that for ourselves, that God knows us and loves us far more than we know and love ourselves. But the Ascension of Jesus dramatically demonstrated that there was nothing that humans could do or go through which was alien to God, because his own son had gone through it too. 

That matters for all of us. When we feel far from God, when we can’t speak to God, can’t think what to say, can’t face him, the Ascension tells us that he knows anyway. All of that shame, doubt, anger has been taken up into the heart of God. When we feel insignificant, too small for him to bother about, the Ascension tells us that our little lives, like that of a humble carpenter, matter. Our ordinariness has a place in the heart of the Almighty. When Christ ascends and sits down at the right hand of God, he takes all of us with him, every person, every experience, every emotion. So, although this may seem a time for saying goodbye, a time of loss, it is nothing of the sort. It is the time when heaven and earth are united in one unbroken whole, and every person, from the least to the greatest comes home with Christ to find themselves made new in God’s presence.

Amen