Sermon: Christ the Glory of the Sky

I have always loved the word ‘sky’. It evokes what Freud called that ‘vast, oceanic feeling’, something mysteri-ous, primordial. We used to live in Wiltshire where the sky hangs huge and endless over that ancient landscape where since the begin-ning of time human beings have wondered at it and built monuments to it, like Stonehenge. Then we moved to Northum-berland where the sky is wider still, and lonelier over the bare-backed Cheviots, infinite, elemental; often brooding, lowering, intense. Under it, the Irish saints like Aidan and those who came after them like Cuthbert were made holy and made much of England Christian again. For me, the sky is one of the joyful mysteries of life.

Ascension Day is a feast of the sky. It stands for blue yonder, the transcendent, the wondrous – for ‘ascension’ is our word for what is ineffable, unsayable, that Christ our risen Lord and God cannot be contained within the frame of our human perspective or language. Yet the sky also has a forlorn, poignant aspect to it represented by those disciples gazing up at the cloud into which Jesus has disappeared. It’s like the empty house whose family has moved away and only memories linger as a reminder of what was once a home, or a railway station when your lover’s train has just left and you are standing on the platform alone. It’s as if the sky has swallowed Jesus up and we have taken leave of God and the door has been shut. The old custom of extinguishing the paschal candle on Ascension Day after the gospel had been read was a palpable symbol of abandonment, as if the Ascension was a feast of the real absence.

It seems to me that some of our basic human longings are summed up in Luke’s picture of those men and women gazing bewildered and wistful into the empty sky: the longing for a happy ending, for an end to perplexity and pain; for the reassurance that we are not alone. These hungers we all carry deep within us, perhaps never more than when we have glimpsed, as the disciples had, some meaning, some purpose in life, only for it to be snuffed out as if it had all been a mirage. We go back to the great questions that will not go away, that we hurl at the universe when life is hard: why injustice and pain; why disasters and accidents; why war and sadness and loss? We look up to heaven for some answer. But there is none. The shuttered sky is silent. No power comes to save us.

If we think about it, much of our Christian faith is constructed around experiences of absence. There is the cry from the cross, as Jesus dies with a question on his lips: ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ At the empty tomb, Easter faith is born with a message of absence in the face of loss and searching: ‘He is not here’. And in the Ascension story, once more it is where Jesus is not: ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’ Each time, it seems, absence, not presence, is the midwife of faith, gives birth to a new awareness of God, awakens a deeper longing. The medieval theologians called this the via negativa, a way of believing that recognises that God is in the inter-stices of our knowledge, not so much in the words we use to talk about him, or the images with which we picture him, in fact not so much in our knowing at all as in our unknowing, where words and images run out before the profoundest mystery of God. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe.’

This approach to religious faith is strikingly at home in the experience of the contemporary world. To many people, God is more absence than presence, and the world a place where, in Bonhoeffer’s words, we all have to get on with life etsi Deus non daretur, as if God were not part of life’s equation, and all we have to rely on are our own human resources. That is a key insight of the Ascension story into the nature of adult believing in a world that has ‘come of age’. As the great 16th century mystic Teresa of Avila put it, Christ has no hands but ours, no feet but ours. We bear him to humanity, we bring him forth to his world like Mary his mother. Without us he can do nothing: that is how he chooses it shall be.

Yet absence is not absence – that is the paradox of this story and the opposites it contains within it. The poet R.S. Thomas says:

It is this great absence / that is like a presence, that compels / me to address it

Its symbol is the cloud that, Luke says, received Jesus and took him out of sight. In the college chapel where I was ordained, there is a medieval window depicting it as a puff of cotton wool, with two feet sticking out under-neath. Yet I prefer to think of it as the mighty cumulonimbus of the God of the storm, with the Ascension like Elijah going in a whirlwind up to heaven. I am word-painting, of course, like St Luke. The Ascension is a story. Its symbols and metaphors belong to the imagination. But the cloud is the vital theologi-cal key to the whole picture. For in the imagery of the Bible, it stands, not for the absence of God but for the awesome shekinah presence of Yahweh in the pillar of cloud and fire, recalled in Isaiah’s temple vision, and on the mountain of transfiguration, and in the apocalyptic clouds of heaven ridden by the Ancient of Days. So it is not that Christ has gone away from us, but rather that he is ascended in order to be more fully present, ‘that he might fill all things’ as the New Testament puts it. The cloud is the sign that Christ the head of all things is forever the active, life-giving presence in all of life. ‘Lo, I am with you always to the end of the age’.

This season then, as we look forward to Pentecost, focuses on presence and glory. In the Christian understanding of things, they belong inseparably together. Today’s gospel from the 17th chapter of St John speaks of both in a few short lines. ‘I in them and you in me’ – this is the presence of the ascended Jesus in and among those who believe in him. ‘The glory that you have given me I have given them’ – this is the glory of his being among us as self-giving love, the glory of the only begotten Son full of grace and truth. This high priestly prayer of Jesus before his passion is given as our reading in Ascension week because it is a universal image of Jesus bearing humanity before God. It belongs to his being exalted ‘at the right hand of the Father where he lives to make intercession for us’, as the New Testament puts it elsewhere. So to go back to the disciples gazing into the sky, it is not that the world or our hearts are empty of him. On the contrary. The sky speaks of presence and glory. We look up at it, and are sent back into the world where our hands and feet have work to do in the name of Christ. It takes us to places where we become life-changing bearers of presence and glory. It tells us that all is well.

I said that for me the sky is one of the glorious mysteries of being alive. One of St Ambrose’s office hymns gives Christ the beautiful title Aeterna Coeli Gloria: ‘Eternal Glory of the sky’. And as the sky and the seas and the world are full of his glory, so our hearts are full of him too as we worship our ascended Lord and acclaim him as our King.