Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on Ascension Day 2024

‘While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.’ (Luke 24: 51)

Literally, do you suppose? Some would seem to think so. Go to the Mount of Ascension today on the outskirts of Bethany and you may be shown a rock with marks in it that could just be taken for footprints. ‘The last footprints of Jesus’, the guide will tell you, with unconvincing assurance.

Or go to the Shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk. At the far end of the church, there is a little Chapel of the Ascension with a pair of plaster feet sticking through the ceiling and disappearing into a painted cloud.

The trouble with such primitive pictures of a literally skyborne Jesus is that they can diminish an important truth.

For the truth that Luke is urging on us in symbolic language tonight (Luke 24: 44–end) is about the sovereignty and authority of Jesus, whom the disciples had known in the flesh but now acknowledge as their Lord—no longer limited by time and space, no longer visible among them, yet undeniably a life-giving Spirit in their midst.

That experience demanded of them, as it demands of us, a new way of thinking about the one who first attracts us as a human being—Jesus of Nazareth—but who is now infinitely more. For them it meant changing their outlook in two radical ways.

First it meant they had to look for him in a different guise, to be able to discern him in unexpected people and places. Second, it meant they had to accept that his claim on their lives was not partial but absolute.

When a man like Peter used the three words— ‘Jesus is Lord’, that form the first Christian creed, he was saying:

‘When the deepest questions are asked—questions about the nature of God and the meaning of our lives and our suffering and our dying—those questions can best be answered in terms of Jesus Christ; in terms of what we have seen and heard, and of what we now understand to be the meaning of his life, his suffering, his death and his resurrection.’

But for Paul the experience was subtly different. Unlike Peter, Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh. He came to know him as a life-giving and life-changing Spirit experienced in the worshipping life of small communities of Christians, like the Church in Ephesus, whose faith in the lordship of Christ had so impressed him.

These first Christian communities found Christ not by gazing into space but by turning to look into one another’s eyes, turning to listen to one another’s words – by receiving forgiveness from one another’s lips and the broken bread at one another’s hands.

For Peter and Paul, and for all Christians ever since, the second truth of the Ascension is equally important.

For to say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ is also to accept that his claim on our lives is an absolute one, and to be prepared to be changed and renewed by ‘the immeasurable greatness of his power’ (Ephesians 1: 19) at work within us.

To say ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to accept his unchanging standards of love, truth, compassion, integrity, and justice, and to seek to fashion our lives according to those values. Nothing less than that.

To say ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to say that for us every human being matters and is of immeasurable worth, whatever their background, culture, or creed. Nothing less than that.

And to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ is above all to live with hope. It is to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, which at times seems so overwhelming, the powers of disintegration and destruction need not have the final word.

Calvary and Easter, the Passion, the cross and the resurrection, show how what is false, evil, and destructive is in the end not as powerful as what is true, just, and creative.

To recognize the Christ in other people and in unexpected places, to accept his absolute authority in our lives—these are the powerful truths of the Ascension.

God knows they are costly and disturbing truths to live by, and none of us do very well by them. For once you start working out the implications of the lordship of Christ and try to bring every part of your life under his sovereignty, then life gets harder not easier.

But then, of course, that’s only half the story.

For there is a hidden factor. It has to do with waiting, waiting on the Spirit. ‘Stay here in the city,’ said Jesus at the very end of this evening’s gospel, ‘until you have been clothed with power from on high.’

We are to wait a little while. Between now and the Day of Pentecost we are to ask for the life-giving and life-changing Spirit of Jesus Christ—to open ourselves afresh with a childlike trust to ‘the fullness of him who fills all in all’ (Ephesians 1: 23), even as he invites us to follow him into the unknown.