Sermon: Ascension Day 2010

KENOTIC ASCENSION

It's only a week since we went to the polls: how long ago that seems.  But now, at last, we have a government, and we pledge our prayers for all its members as they begin their difficult work on our behalf.

What we want to be reassured about in our political leaders is that they have not been elevated far above our sight and our common human experience.  We need to know that they are not absentee incumbents but still part of us and share our aspirations for the nation's future.  We know how risky high office can be; we have seen it corrupt the best of men and women, and some of us know from within how easily we begin to have inflated ideas about ourselves and our power.  Perhaps Ascension Day holds up a mirror to those who find themselves exalted in public places.  ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' asks one of the Ascensiontide psalms.  ‘Even he that hath clean hands and a pure heart; and hath not lift up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour.'   Perhaps that rite of entrance into the sanctuary is especially intended for the Israelite king, to remind him of his place in the divine scheme of things, and not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think.  And let us bring this closer to home.  In this coming year a new bishop will be chosen for this See of Durham, who will be exalted, literally, to what in medieval times was the highest throne in Christendom.  He too will need to cultivate the virtue of humility if he is to ascend gracefully into this privileged office not as a prince-bishop but as a servant of the servants of God. 

In his ascension, Jesus mounts the throne of his glory: this is what we celebrate today, and our hearts are full of joy. But it is not the ‘happy ending' to an earthly career, the tidy closure we would like to see at the end of the story.  Nor is it the restoration of an earthly kingdom, as the disciples so much wanted, or even the promise of it.  Still less is it that he has abandoned us as if he were a disappeared messiah, though it may seem like that as we gaze like the disciples into an empty sky and wonder what it could all mean.  It affirms what Jesus has been proclaiming throughout his ministry, that God reigns, and he calls us to embrace his reign with joy and become subject to it.  It affirms that the exalted Christ ‘fills all things', as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, so that he may fully be Immanuel, God with us, and around us, and in us.  It affirms that it is our own destiny to be exalted with Christ, and that is wonderfully to elevate and ennoble our human nature.

And this is where Jesus' ascension is of a piece with everything he has been to us in his incarnate life.  In the tradition, his exaltation is spoken of in the imagery of the coronation of the kings of Israel.  In the Letter to the Hebrews, the author invokes a catena of quotations from the royal psalms to demonstrate that in Jesus who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, the hopes and longings projected on to Israel's human rulers are at last realised.  ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.'  ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.'  But if we follow that imagery back to its source we are inevitably drawn to the obligations of kingship as well as its privileges.  The king is to be loyal to the covenant between God and his people; indeed, he is the guarantor of all that it promises: peace, wellbeing, justice, the care of God's humble poor. 

In another psalm God sits in a cosmic court with all the heavenly beings gathered round him for judgment.  Are these beings worthy of their exalted status, to be called elohim, gods?  The test is simple.  ‘Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute; rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.'  But they fail it dismally.  ‘How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?' So they are toppled from their thrones.  ‘I say, you are gods, nevertheless you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.'  Götterdämmerung is the destiny of those who aggrandise themselves, who forget who they are and to whom they owe account.   In Jewish tradition this saying is applied to corrupted leaders who have forfeited the right to govern.  They have ascended the hill of the Lord, only to topple ingloriously by the sin of pride.

 Not so the exalted Christ.  For he bears the imprint of the nails on his body, and takes us with him into God's very heart. 

See! the heaven its Lord receives  /  yet he loves the world he leaves:

Though returning to his throne,   /  still he calls mankind his own. 

Hebrews speaks of him as our great priest who is not ashamed to call humanity his brothers and sisters, ‘merciful and faithful', able to help those who are tested because he himself was tested by what he suffered.  ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect was tested as we are, yet without sin.'  That letter could not be more emphatic on this point that Jesus passes the test of what it means have ascended, not simply as one of the elohim but above all other principality and power.  Exalted as he is, nevertheless he is always present to the lowliest of his family, the hungry and naked and imprisoned whom St Matthew calls ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters' and who represent humanity in all its need.

I am saying that humility and service, not triumphalism, characterise the ascension of Jesus, always the same Lord who healed the sick and spoke kindly to the neglected, washed his disciples' feet, struggled in Gethsemane and went out to die.  Any other messiah would not have been born in a stable, executed between thieves, risen secretly behind the stone, or ascended without ceremony on an obscure hilltop with only a handful of witnesses to tell of it.  But this messiah has taken the form of a servant, never more to lay it by.  His ascension is as kenotic as his incarnation: his self-emptying is how he is not only in time but in eternity.  St John would tell us that the cross needs to shape our vision of the ascension: they are one glory, one enthronement, one exaltation.  Only this Messiah could still bear the marks of the nails as the risen Lord.  Only this Messiah could be pictured as a Lamb upon a throne.  Only this Messiah could be our great high priest who feels for humanity, intercedes on our behalf, and continues to serve us by washing our feet.  Only this Messiah could be both priest and victim and humbly make his approach to us in bread and wine, so that we might welcome him, and exalt him in our hearts, and find that in him all our longings are met and our hungers satisfied.