Sermon: Between ascension and Pentecost

Happy Easter! This is the last Sunday when I can wish you that since today is the seventh, and thus the last, Sunday of Easter. Next Sunday is Pentecost and these ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost are similar to Holy Saturday in that we are in in-between time. Something has happened - the death of Jesus on Good Friday, his ascension on Ascension Day - and with hindsight we know that something will happen - the resurrection on Easter Day, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And because we know what is coming the focus of our prayer has shifted and we prayed in the Collect for God to send the Holy Spirit. But for the original disciples these ten days were days of waiting, not knowing how long the wait would last or even exactly what they were waiting for. They were days of being in limbo with no guidance on how they use the time, just instructions to wait.

We know that they spent the time in prayer, gathering in the temple and at home. But sometimes waiting and not taking any initiative can be hard. It appears to have been so for Peter who comes across in the gospels as always impetuous for action. Acts implies that Peter used this post-ascension time to think about how to resolve what he thought was an untidy situation. Jesus had called twelve apostles, echoing the twelve tribes of Israel, and now with Judas' betrayal and suicide there were only eleven. What to do about it? Peter's solution was to appoint someone who could bring their numbers up to strength, both literally and symbolically. And so he suggested that one of the men who had accompanied them from the very beginning should become a witness with the eleven to the resurrection.

And they proposed two people, Joseph and Matthias. Both met Peter's criteria: they had both been with Jesus and the disciples since the baptism of John the Baptist right through to the ascension just a few days earlier. This is a reminder that Jesus was regularly accompanied by far more than just the twelve disciples - they had a special place in his life, certainly, but they were not the only ones who had given up so much in order to follow Jesus. We get occasional glimpses in the gospels of some of the other men and women who regularly accompanied Jesus and financed his ministry and offered occasional hospitality for what must have been quite a large entourage. And Joseph and Matthias were two of them. There was nothing to choose between them but there was only room in the twelve for one of them, and so lots were cast - a common way of entrusting the outcome to God - and Matthias was chosen. If any of you have been in a shortlist of two and had impeccable credentials but not been appointed you will know what it was like for Joseph. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of those pipped to the post. And to rub it in, he then disappears from the scene as a named character in the story in Acts.

But the interesting thing is that not only does Joseph disappear from the story, so too does Matthias. He is never named again among the apostles. He and Joseph are in the same boat both before and after this episode of the casting of lots: unnamed, they simply get on with faithful discipleship.

All of which causes me to wonder whether Peter was right to suggest what he did. Was he guided by the Holy Spirit in this, or just trying to tidy up what looked like a loose end? Remember that at the transfiguration he had wanted to perpetuate the moment when Moses and Elijah appeared, to hold onto these great people of history, and God's answer then had been decisive: this is my beloved Son, listen to him. Don't worry about them. Let go of the old, let it be the forerunner of the new that comes with Jesus Christ. And I wonder if Peter has fallen straight into the same trap this time. From the perspective of the old covenant, he has a point: there were twelve tribes of Israel and Jesus chose twelve disciples who, Luke tells us in the last supper story, were to share in some way in the judgement of the twelve tribes of Israel. In old covenant terms there was great symbolic meaning in having twelve. But with the ascension things were moving radically and rapidly on, and Pentecost was going to change everything still further.

Peter's purpose in filling the vacancy was that the person appointed should be a witness with the eleven to the resurrection, but the gospels are clear that there were many witnesses to the resurrection, starting - rather radically - with various women. Later, when persecution came it was not the apostles but the rest of the believers, no doubt including Joseph, who scattered across Judea and Samaria preaching the gospel whilst the apostles stayed in Jerusalem. And from the way Luke develops the story of the early church, the emphasis later shifted significantly from the twelve apostles to people like Paul. So I have some questions about Peter's suggestion just from the way the story is told.

But there are also some theological questions we need to ask, particularly in these ten days between Ascension and Pentecost. We in the western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, have a very weak understanding of the ascension, often just seeing it as Jesus' departure from earth: to paraphrase Shakespeare's famous instruction ‘exit stage right pursued by cloud'. We can miss the essential truth that Canon Conway reminded us of on Ascension Day: Jesus entered heaven as someone who was and is both fully divine and fully human. Thus on Ascension Day we sang Christopher Wordsworth's words, ‘Jesus reigns, adored by angels, Man with God is on the throne.' In the incarnation God in Jesus Christ took our human nature and was born on earth; in the ascension Jesus Christ took that human nature into heaven. The ascension, rather than the crucifixion and resurrection, is the culmination of the incarnation. Through the ascension of Jesus Christ humanity is in heaven, wounded humanity, because Jesus bore the scars of his crucifixion into glory - as we sing in the hymn that reflects the visions of Revelation,

Crown him the Lord of love,behold his hands and side,those wounds yet visible abovein beauty glorified.

Once Adam was barred from paradise, now the second Adam, Jesus Christ, opens the doors of paradise to us. Therefore, to continue with Wordsworth's hymn ‘Mighty Lord, in thine ascension, we by faith behold our own.' There is a place in heaven for us because there is a place in heaven for Jesus Christ. This opens the way for all people in Christ to pursue the calling of transformation, or what the Orthodox Church calls theosis. We do not become God but, being a new creation in Christ, we are called to share in the divine life.

Charles Wesley captures some of this in hymns. In a lesser known hymn, he writes

He deigns in flesh to appear,Widest extremes to join;To bring our vileness near,And make us all divine:
And we the life of God shall know,For God is manifest below.

And, in the much better known ‘Love divine', we sing,

Finish then thy new creation,Pure and spotless let us be,Let us see thy great salvationPerfectly restored in thee.
Changed from glory into gloryTill in heaven we take our place,Till we cast our crowns before thee,Lost in wonder, love and praise.

And a consequence of the ascension is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which happened at Pentecost. And that has enormous implications for the mission of the church which Peter was so concerned to safeguard. He looked back to the symbolism of the twelve tribes of Israel, but in fact God was doing something radically new. This was the beginning of a new creation: the culmination of the salvation accomplished in the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, the second Adam, was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And that was for all people, not just the twelve, making them all witnesses of the resurrection. And in the light of what happened when the believers were scattered all over the place but the twelve stayed in Jerusalem, I can't help wondering whether in fact it was Joseph rather than Matthias who had more opportunity to bear witness to the resurrection. Perhaps Peter hadn't realised it yet, but theologically the Ascension and Pentecost assure us that choosing just one person is not necessary, none of us comes second and twelve is very limiting, when comes to the baptismal calling to share God's life through Christ and to bear witness to the resurrection.

The ascension is central to our hope in Christ: we say that he died for our sins and was raised for our justification, but without the ascension we cannot claim with confidence, as the letter to the Ephesians does, that God has raised us up with Christ Jesus and seated us with him in the heavenly places. And there is then an irretrievable link between the ascension and the coming of God's kingdom: the two men in white robes who appeared to the disciples at the ascension told them that Jesus would come again in the same way that they saw him go. In fact, the Orthodox Church is so certain of the integral link between Jesus' ascension and his coming in glory that it in its liturgies, when worshippers are caught up into the eternal worship of heaven, they speak quite naturally of remembering things that have not yet happened - the whole of salvation history is caught up into one great dramatic act of remembrance. It's the theological version of Magnus Magnusson's catch phrase when he chaired ‘Mastermind', ‘I've started, so I'll finish': God has started, God will finish. The incarnation set something in motion that is unstoppable, and in the Eucharist, when - if we did but realise it - we are caught up into eternity, share the heavenly banquet and thus taste the future that God has promised us, we are enabled to remember the future. That is only possible because Christ has ascended and taken his, and thus our, humanity into heaven.

Alleluia, king eternal,Thee the Lord of lords we own;Alleluia, born of Mary,Earth thy footstool, heaven thy throne.
Thou within the veil hast entered,Robed in flesh, our great high priest;Thou on earth both priest and victimIn the Eucharistic feast.

Let us celebrate that feast. Amen.