Sunday, June 1, 2025
/The Seventh Sunday of Easter
The Rev. Liz Parker
Last Thursday, in case you missed it, was the Feast of the Ascension. My husband used to catch people out by saying, “Ascension Day falls on a Thursday this year.” In fact, Ascension Day falls on a Thursday every year because, according to the Book of Acts, Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after his resurrection on Easter.
The doctrine of the Ascension is based on the story in Acts of the risen Christ leaving this earth and passing into heaven.
But the story is a little sketchy about just how it happens.
The whole description takes up only part of a single verse:
[Jesus] was lifted up,
And a cloud took him out of their sight.
The remarkable thing about the doctrine of the Ascension is that it’s a doctrine of the absence of Christ.
So, is it any wonder that the Ascension is the most forgotten feast day in the Church Year? After all, who wants to celebrate absence?
As we try to wrestle with this story and this doctrine, the first thing we need to get straight is this notion of heaven. Obviously, heaven is not up in the sky.
It’s not somewhere in the stratosphere or even in outer space.
In fact, heaven is not at any location on our space-time continuum….
…because the word heaven is a metaphor for a completely different dimension altogether, a spiritual dimension, which interpenetrates and interlocks the other dimensions we live in - something like Narnia, in the CS Lewis books, where the other dimension is reached not by going up, but by going through – a wardrobe, in fact. But that is fantasy.
The early Christians knew the word heaven was a metaphor. According to Bishop N. T. Wright, they didn’t believe in a three-decker universe, with heaven up in the sky and hell down below. He writes,
“When they spoke of ‘up and down,’ they were using metaphors that were so obvious they didn’t need spelling out.”[1]
So, when we say that, 40 days after he was raised from the dead, Jesus ascended from earth to heaven, we’re saying that in his risen body he passed from our earthly dimension into the spiritual dimension. He returned to the Father.
That’s pretty amazing, if you think about it—that when Jesus ascended he took our human embodiedness into God. Hmmm.
Now we all agree that in the Incarnation, the Son of God, who has always been divine, became human. But don’t think, as I once did, that at Easter,
Jesus stopped being human and went back to only being divine.
Not So! In the incarnation, the divine became human. And in the Ascension, the human was taken into the divine.
If we had more time, we could take this a lot of directions:
--Like, what does the Ascension say about the dignity of human nature,
and the dignity of the human body?
But I don’t want to go there now. Right now, I want us to face the hard fact
that Jesus ascended, as the Bible and the Creeds teach.
His embodied humanity has passed into another dimension.
On one hand, this is hard. His absence is a cause for heartbreak.
On the other hand, it explains a lot.
It explains why the world is still a mess and why we are broken-hearted.
Jesus is Lord. He is King of all the earth, but not in his fullness.
That fullness has not yet come—which is obvious, if you listen to the news.
The doctrine assures us that this tragic world we live in--is not all there is;
and the way things are now--is not the way things will always be, on this earth.
In fact, we find in both scripture and the creed, that the Ascension is the set-up for its sister doctrine—the second coming of Christ, the Parousia.
Take the Creed: he ascended into heaven
And is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead,
And his kingdom will have no end.
The Ascension leads straight into the Second Coming, our reason to hope that the messy world we live in will one day be mended and set straight.
But even this is not the whole truth of the Ascension.
--Yes, Jesus takes his humanity into God.
--And, yes, as a result, he is, in an important sense, absent from this world.
But, in another equally important sense, he is present in a new way,
present as the Holy Spirit.
The de-scent of the HS at Pentecost is the flipside of Jesus’ a-scent into heaven.
As Jesus said, It is to your advantage that I go away,
For if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you;
But if I go, I will send him to you.
Pentecost is the flip-side of the Ascension.
Jesus went “up” (speaking metaphorically) so that the HS might come “down.”
You can hear that joining of Ascension and Pentecost in today’s Collect as well:
O God…you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ
With great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:
Do not leave us comfortless,
But send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us….
Next week, at the Feast of Pentecost, we’ll celebrate this remarkable truth that Jesus passed from being present beside us, so that he might be present within us. Alleluia!
[1] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, p. 115.