Ascension Day 2024

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26           Psalm 1         1 John 5:9-13          John 17:6-19

Before I trained for ordination, I did a school assembly on Ascension Day where we took a knitted Jesus, some balloons and a cannister of helium gas and the children had to guess how many balloons it would take to ascend the knitted Jesus. 16.

At college, Ascension Day was a big deal. The youngest ordinand would get up before dawn, and ring a large bell, enthusiastically, to wake the college. Bleary eyed ordinands would climb to the top of the tower, to watch the sunrise, hear the trumpet anthem and sing the hymn that ends, ‘risen, ascended, glorified’ and drink champagne. A very English sort of celebration that I’m sure our first century Palestinian jew would find a bit odd.

And these two things are my only truly memorable encounters with the ascension. That is, until this year. And while we didn’t have the Ascension Day readings today, our gospel passage prefixes it, in this way:

Jesus says, ‘now I am no longer in the world…and I am coming to you’. And then, ‘we are one, and now I am coming to you’. His ascension is very much in his mind that at some point in the near future he will return to God, from whom he came. And, if you cast your mind back 40 days to Easter Sunday, we had that glorious account of his resurrection appearance to Mary where he said to her, ‘do not cling to me because I have not yet ascended to the Father’.

The ascension is deeply significant. So significant that it is a day of holy obligation where a mass must be said. And yet, because it always falls on a Thursday, it is often lost, midweek, which is why I wanted to reflect on it a bit here, because if I’ve ever thought of it at all, I’ve thought of it as a going upwards, like his disciples would see him take off from the ground and disappear into the clouds, headfirst, feet last. That is how it is depicted in art and stained glass and even in a pilgrimage site in the UK where ornately painted feet are dangling through a chapel ceiling…

This year Ascension Day coincided with the fortnightly mini retreat that Peter runs and we discussed whether we could combine that with a mass. And we talked and read and shared, and I am so grateful for that time because the fruit that grew from it was rich. Between us, and the writings of greater minds than ours, we began to see Ascension not as a going up, but as a reuniting – a returning of Jesus from being fully human to becoming once more entwined in the divine. A reunion.

We read from Fr Rob Edwards, quoting Thomas Merton, who wrote: “This is the grace of Ascension Day: to be taken up into the heaven of our own souls, the point of immediate contact with God.” He went on to say ‘Heaven is where God is present. God is present within each of us, closer to us than any human being. So when we are looking for God, there is no need to look up into the sky, as we often do, but rather to turn our glance inward.”

Ascension became not just an upward movement of the bodily Jesus to the divine heavens but actually an entwining of Jesus into the Godhead, and one that can involve us too. Jesus went back to heaven, but heaven is where God is and that might just as easily be within and around us.

And from our own Sister Alma we heard her reflections on Richard Rohr’s teaching where she mused, ‘All of our time with God is linking heaven and earth, and we are sharers in his divinity as he is in our humanity.’ And that made me think of something else that until then had been unrelated. As I am filling the chalice at the altar for mass so I pray, ‘through the mystery of this water and wine, may we share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself for our humanity’. And in that, the veil somehow becomes thin, and we might even dare to believe that our taking of the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, becomes our own ascension day. You see, as we come to this table – hands outstretched, bodies hungry, faith tentative – we take into our own bodies, the Christ. We are reunitied with him, entwined, he in us and we in him. Or as Thomas Merton might say, there is no need to look up into the sky to see him, but rather we can simply turn our glance inward.

Did Christ ascend to fully reintegrate into the godhead? Is that what happens to us in the mass, do we find our place once more in the godhead. Friends, I have not come anywhere near to the end of my musing on this, but these questions excite me and feel like they have the potential to change things.

They make me want to revisit each of those resurrection experiences where the risen Christ walked through walls and appeared on a dusty road, walked awhile, and disappeared again. They make me want to imaginatively occupy the BBQ on the beach or what it felt like to place my hand in the holes in his hands and side. If we can’t cling to him because he is not yet ascended, what would a touch feel like. I don’t know, but I feel like a tiny flame has been lit and I am keen to engage more. And I wonder if you have thought of this bit of the Jesus story before – in this way, or any way – and what you make of these musings.

To enable that, I encourage you to spend 10 minutes a day, until Pentecost next Sunday, or beyond, in silence with God. And maybe take some of these thoughts to God. As Richard Rohr’s says, ‘[the ten days] after the Ascension [gives ten] days of space and of absence, that ‘alone’ time, allowing the divine Spirit within, the room to stretch and act.

As you allow the Divine to stretch and act in you, and as you eat and drink in a few minutes, may we become less of what we are weighed down with and more of what we are soaring for. May we become who we truly are and may we know more of who Christ truly is too. Amen.