Thoughts on the mystery of the Ascension of the Lord

Ascension of the Lord 2015

I don’t know about you, but when I read, or hear read, some of the more fantastic Bible stories, I find myself trying to rationalise them so as to make them more reasonable, or thinking of them as stories whose details are unimportant but whose message remains salutary.  The Ascension, which we celebrate today and which is recounted for us in the first reading, is one of them.  Years ago, I couldn’t help but think of the chapel of the Ascension at Walsingham, which tastelessly featured Jesus’ feet sticking out of the ceiling – how it was ever thought that such an image might nurture people’s faith I can’t imagine.

In the story, which St Luke relates to us in the Acts of the Apostles, we’re told that Jesus took his leave of the apostles, having instructed them to wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we celebrate next Sunday.  The Spirit would empower them for the mission which they were to take over from him and which he had entrusted to them.  It’s so easy to get bogged down in the details of the ascension account itself, and find ourselves rather nonplussed by it.  And when we do this, we easily miss the message of the event and the feast.

The ascension is a major feast of the Church and has attracted the attention of many theologians and Christian thinkers down the centuries.  It’s an article of faith in the creeds and, of course, rooted in scripture.  In a famous homily written way back in the fifth century, St Leo the Great speaks about the period between the resurrection and the ascension as a time which points to the truths that were revealed by God in Christ. He says, for example, that it was during this period that the fear of death was taken away from Jesus’ followers, since they had seen him in his risen life.  It was during this period that Jesus established the apostles in their leadership roles and entrusted the keys of the kingdom to Peter.

Again, it was during this time that the risen Lord joined two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, rebuking them for their timidity and lack of faith and fearful hesitation, before disclosing to them the truth about himself.  St Leo says that ‘their enlightened hearts received the flame of faith; cool before’, he goes on, ‘they glowed when the Lord unfolded the scriptures to them’. And, ‘as they ate with him, their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread’.

So, God used these days between the resurrection and the ascension to teach the followers of Christ that the Lord Jesus, who was truly born, truly suffered and truly died, should be recognised as truly risen.  And this is why the Easter season is regarded with the significance and importance it is – it is truly the heart of the Christian Year.  We are given a concentrated period of 50 days to celebrate that Christ has triumphed over all that is at enmity with him – all sin, suffering and death; and in addition, every Sunday is to be understood as a celebration of the resurrection; this, in turn, is why Sunday has the importance it has, and why we need to recover this sense today.

St Leo reminds us that ‘all the disciples had been filled with fear by [Jesus’] death on the cross, and [that] their faith in the resurrection had been hesitant; but [that] now

they gained such strength from seeing the truth, that when the Lord Jesus went up to heaven, far from feeling sadness, they experienced a great joy’.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the disciples perceived what has been articulated by theologians ever since, namely, that at the ascension, human nature itself was exalted above the dignity of all the ranks of heaven, that it would truly be admitted to the Father’s eternity in all its fullness.

We can see, too, if we look, that what we celebrate today correlates with what we celebrate at the Annunciation and at Christmas – there, we celebrate the taking of human nature by God in the virgin mother’s womb; here, we celebrate the taking of our nature into the life of God.  Or, to put it another way: God shares our human life so that we might share his divine life – the marvellous exchange which lies at the heart of our faith.

However we choose to think of the ascension, what we can be certain about is that there is no unbridgeable gulf between God and human-beings; any perceived gap has been bridged, and definitively closed by Christ.  And, in turn, this means that there is no person who lies outside the scope of God’s saving grace.  It means that we cannot, as it were, ‘bring God into’ a discussion or a situation, precisely because he is already there. And it means that there is no necessary distinction between the sacred and the secular when we talk about the world.  There is only one world, and it is the world brought into being by God.  It means that human nature is inherently conducive to God and his grace.  Of course, there are many who reject this and who resist divine grace; but we might reasonably say that they are acting against their nature, which is why they can never find a lasting and genuine fulfilment and why they are likely to look for fulfilment in the wrong places.  Of course, we are all prone to this error whenever we act against our nature and forget the God who made us.

After the ascension, the apostles and Our Lady waited in prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that they could live and witness in the power of the divine life that gift would bring to them.  They were able to go out and bring people everywhere to faith.  We have received the same gift and, when we celebrate Pentecost next Sunday, we have an opportunity to consider afresh the nature of this gift and the capacities it bestows upon us.  For, following the Lord’s ascension, his active work in the world and his message of redemption falls upon his followers in each place and time.  It is now our time, and we have been set where we are to be his witnesses.  We have been given all the resources we need to ‘proclaim the Good News to all creation’.

Some thoughts as the end of the liturgical year approaches.

The following is a sermon preached at Choral Evensong in Blackburn Cathedral on Sunday 17^th November 2013

At the beginning of the Confessions, written by St Augustine at the end of the fourth century, are some very famous words which became axiomatic for Christian people’s self- understanding in relation to the Creator: ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee’.  These words remind us that, as human beings, we are constituted in a certain way; we are reminded of our contingency, and that our true home is in God.  We have a built-in supernatural destiny which we cannot secure by our own unaided effort, but for which we have a natural affinity precisely because of the way we have been made.

Pope Francis said recently that, in western culture especially, human hearts have become anaesthetized – that they no longer search for God.  And it certainly seems to be a feature of modern secularised society that people live as if the present reality around us, and which we perceive through our senses, is all there is.  This means that this present reality takes on an exclusive significance – it is all that matters; the sum total, indeed, of all that is.

So powerful and all-pervasive is this tendency to effectively dethrone God in favour of human pre-eminence, that it would be naȉve in the extreme to imagine that Christian people, and indeed the institution of the Church itself, have been entirely insulated from it.  It is so easy to find that one has slipped into a kind of ‘practical atheism’, where we live most of the time as if we are self-sufficient and self-contained, as our culture would have us believe.  How different, really, are our lives, from the lives of those whose lives we share and interact with but who do not share our faith?  The danger then, of course, is that our faith easily becomes a kind of veneer over the top; an extrinsic, incremental add-on which is not actually essential to normal human functioning.  If this is so, then we have lost sight of something absolutely fundamental about ourselves as humans: namely, that we are oriented towards an eternal sharing in God’s own life.  To lose sight of this is bad enough, but then how do we possibly commend the faith to others when it is seen as not even ‘essential’ to ourselves?  Here, we set ourselves up, ironically and unwittingly, as agents of the secular default position which increasingly dominates us and actually polices the divine, so that faith claims are scrutinised and evaluated according to the extent to which they corroborate the preconceptions of society at any one time.

At this time of the year, when we reach the end of one liturgical year and prepare to begin another when we get to Advent, the scripture readings and the liturgical texts are timely.  They call us from indifference and complacency, from cultural compliance and worldliness, to a deep repentance and a renewed wakefulness.  They call us to recognise afresh that our fulfilment comes not ultimately ‘in the world’ but in union with God hereafter.  The collects – today’s for example - make reference to eschatological hope, to the appearance of Christ in glory, and our desire to be one with him.

This evening’s first reading (Daniel 6) is to do with the faithful Jew being ready to suffer martyrdom, if need be, rather than give up fidelity to God.  It is an example of what the scholars call ‘witness literature’, in which God comes to rescue his faithful servants, saving them from certain death, which is then inflicted instead upon those who would harm them.  The story ends with the pagan king acknowledging the power of Israel’s God.  Texts such as these provided solace and encouragement for those undergoing religious trials: God would protect them, even against apparently insuperable odds; for their part, they were to remain faithful; and, like the Christian martyrs of later generations, they would embrace the principle that God, rather than humans, must be obeyed, for ‘he delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth’.  There was a more fundamental reality yet, than what they were experiencing in their trials; and God would secure their future, even beyond the present order of things.

In the second reading (Matthew 13:1-9, 18—23), it’s easy to miss its eschatological point, as indeed does the interpretation of the parable of the Sower provided in St Matthew’s text and which is generally reckoned to have originated in the primitive church.  What is important to recognise is that the beginning of the parable describes a different point in time from its end.  Initially, it is a description of sowing seeds; but at the end it is already harvest-time.  On the one hand, we have the frustrations of the sower’s labours; but then, we have the dawn of the Kingdom of God compared to the harvest.  The tripling of the harvest’s yield (thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold) signifies the eschatological abundance of God, surpassing all human measure.  To us, much of the labour seems futile and fruitless, but Jesus is full of confidence; for God’s hour is coming, and will bring with it a harvest of reward beyond all our imagining.  God brings from unpromising beginnings the glorious end that he has promised.  We are called again to look beyond, to a future reality far exceeding anything that we can conceive of.

The culture we now inhabit is a culture in a state of crisis.  In spite of the years of economic downturn, we still live in a situation in which life in this world, for most people in the west, is relatively amenable and pleasant.  It’s natural for people to want to hold on to it and, indeed, to become inured, blinded, to the Christian imperative to bear witness to a different set of priorities and values.  It’s natural for people to concentrate their efforts upon making life better for themselves, in the temporal sense.  But it’s also characteristic of our culture that, for all our advancement and apparently-increasing sophistication and material well-being, people do not seem happier; there is always something missing – something which this world can never provide and which always keeps people restless.  The Israelite people of old were urged to grasp that only God could satisfy their deepest needs and that they may well have to be prepared to look beyond the present reality.  Jesus’ parables similarly are parables of the Kingdom, which although already present among us is not as yet fully realised.  Our liturgical texts and readings over the next weeks, along with St Augustine’s famous insight, call us to look beyond ourselves and help others to do likewise.  This is, fundamentally, the mission of the Church.

Wednesday of Holy Week

Today's Gospel reading opens with Judas planning his act of betrayal, seeking his payment from the chief priests; and it ends with a head-on confrontation between Jesus and his betrayer.

Thus the passage is a kind of antecedent to the drama which is about to be played out, in which Judas does the betraying and the events which unfold reach their culmination in a direct confrontation between good and evil.  Jesus, the Son of God, and the embodiment of the goodness of God, is judged, flogged, and crucified at the hands of the wicked.

The betrayal of Judas itself is an antecedent to the betrayal of all the other members of the band of Jesus' disciples.  Yes, they had travelled around with him, listened to his teaching and witnessed his healing encounters with all sorts of people.  They had wondered who he was, and grown in their apprehension of his true identity.  Peter, indeed, had answered Jesus' question, 'Who do you say I am?' by saying: 'You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God'; and Jesus had attributed this insight to a revelation from God.  And yet, following Jesus' arrest, Peter - as Jesus had predicted - denied him three times.  The rest fared no better.  After following Peter in their protestations of loyalty, St Matthew tells us that, before Peter's denials, that 'all the disciples ran away'.

During Holy Week, Catholic Christians re-enact, in a sacramental way, the events of our Redemption.  We read the passages which lead up to the Passion and Death and then, on Holy Thursday, we celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper, followed as it is by the Transfer of the Holy Eucharist to the Altar of Repose and the keeping of a watch of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  On Good Friday, we celebrate the ancient liturgy of the Lord's Passion and Death, before waiting at the tomb and preparing for the Easter Vigil.  And we re-enact these events, not purely as a dramatic re-presentation, but so that we might actually participate in them. Through this participation, we find ourselves challenged: how would we have coped as one of the Twelve?  Might we even be Judas?  Can we enter into the heart of Mary as her Son suffered and died?  Might we have joined in with the mocking of the crucified Jesus, just going with the flow?

Human nature is basically good, but flawed and easily deceived.  It has always been so.  A faithful participation in the events of Holy Week teaches us profound truths about the human condition and the nature we all share, and even more profound truths about the grace of God which, as St Thomas Aquinas famously stated, 'perfects' nature.  Whenever we turn to God, seeking his grace, he will always infuse us afresh so that we can begin again to be the disciples of the Lord Jesus.

Tuesday of Holy Week

At the Supper, Jesus knows that he is to be betrayed by one of his own, and he knows which one.  He hands a morsel of bread to Judas Iscariot.  Fellowship is broken, Judas goes out and - the evangelist tells us, in a phrase of terrifying symbolism - that 'Night had fallen'.

It's interesting that whilst evil seems to have gained the ascendancy and the events of Jesus' passion and death unfold, there is a clear sense that Jesus remains in control somehow, a theme prominent in St John's Gospel.  Jesus knows in advance who it is who will betray him: he hands the bread to this individual.  Jesus speaks of the Passion as his glorification; to the casual onlooker, the whole business has not the slightest hint of glory about it; on the face of it, it is a miserable story of the cruel death of an innocent man.

But this innocent man, subject as he was to the judgement of Pilate, knows what is really going on.  He knows that Peter, of all people, will betray him three times over, just as he knew the identity of the betrayer.  And this innocent man, judged by the powers of darkness, is the One who actually brings God's righteous judgement to bear upon the world.  The one who is subjected becomes the one who subjects.  When people would look upon the crucified Christ, they would be confronted with a choice to make as to which side to place themselves on.

Whilst human beings were responsible for the arrest, judgement, suffering and death of Jesus, he gives his life willingly to show the depth of God's love for the world and for sinful human beings.  And whilst the Passion confronts us with a choice, the righteousness of God's judgement means that Peter, for example, - the one who repeatedly denied Jesus - can be restored to his place of pre-eminence among the Twelve and be the rock foundation upon whom Christ's Church would be built.  Because of the depth of the divine love, each one of us, regardless of what has been before, can be rehabilitated by God's righteousness.  We can, of course, choose to place ourselves elsewhere (like Judas), for God never compels anyone.  But if we turn to Christ in penitence and faith, and place ourselves under his righteous judgement, his grace will exonerate us and renew in us a sense that he is the One we must follow, and that the 'night' which 'had fallen' can be replaced by endless day.

Monday of Holy Week

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus visits the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  Mary anoints Jesus' feet with pure nard, a very costly ointment.  It is an extravagant gesture of devotion, gratitude and love.  Judas Iscariot regards this gesture as irresponsible, wasteful and reckless.  He criticises Mary's action on the spurious ground that the money could have been better used, for the benefit of the poor - or so he said.  But Jesus defends Mary's action and accepts it in the spirit in which it is offered.  It is a free gesture of love and devotion; it is, in a way, a reflection of the extravagance of the love of God for each one of us; a love which is free and unbounded.

Whenever we love, truly love, we share - participate - in something of the love of God, whose love is the prototype of all loving.  The marriage rite makes this clear, but there are other contexts, too, in which human beings love and become capable of the extravagant, almost reckless giving of the self which we see in today's Gospel.  And because God's love is deeper, stronger and infinitely more extravagant than our own, it follows (because our love is a participation in the love of God) that our potentiality to love is without limit.

This week, we are brought into the closest possible contact with the love of God which reaches out to every person on earth.  We see the full extent of his love shown forth in the death of Christ, and we are invited to respond in love.  Like God's love for us, and like the nard in the Gospel reading, this love is always going to be costly.  The way of love is never the easy way; it is always the harder and more-demanding way.  But it is a purifying way, a way which leads through the cross to a new manner of existence in which all suffering, cruelty and death is overcome.  This is what Holy Week is about, and it is what being a companion of Christ is about.

This week, we re-enact, sacramentally, the loving events of our Redemption.  But we do more than simply re-enact them.  We re-enact in order to participate in the movement out from ourselves and into the life of the God who is love.

Illiberal liberalism and political correctness - an unhappy combination.

Someone who was until recently a follower of mine on Twitter, and who was also among my Facebook friends, last week 'blocked' me on the former and 'unfriended' me on the latter.  This person is a trustee of the British Humanist Association and Vice-President of the Media Society.  He runs a PR company in London and is a former York city councillor and Labour parliamentary candidate.  His name is Paul Blanchard, and I name him for three reasons: firstly, he is very loquacious on social networking sites; secondly, naming him somehow 'earths' what I want to say; and thirdly, he gave me no opportunity to respond to his emotive barrage of insults before cutting me off.

What brought all this to a head - we'd had heated disagreements before in which there were times when he went beyond what most people would regard as common courtesy - was a post I put on Facebook following the election of the new pope.  Under the post, 'God bless Pope Francis', Blanchard wrote that the new pope had said that the adoption of children by homosexuals was 'a form of abuse' and said, sarcastically, that the Pope seemed like a 'nice guy'.  I had not heard what the then Cardinal Bergoglio had said, and I responded by saying something to the effect that I would prefer to see for myself what he had actually said on the matter; I added that I thought that the ideal was for children to be raised by a mother and a father.  This stimulated an interesting discussion, in which a couple of friends of mine disagreed with me, but in a perfectly reasonable and rational kind of way.  A good discussion followed, in which I was able to clarify my position.  I made no reference at any point to homosexual relationships or sexual activity within them - I restricted myself to the point with which I started; namely, that all other things being equal, a family unit with a mother and father, preferably married, provides the best and most stable environment for children to grow up.  This claim is, as is well known, backed by by clear evidence.

Some time later, Paul Blanchard decided to enter the discussion again; he called me 'homophobic' and accused me of being bound by the 'stupid' Bible (to which, incidentally, I had made no reference).  He had clearly assumed, without foundation, that I held the view that homosexual persons were not suitable people to bring up children, even though I was careful not to even imply such a thing; indeed, I acknowledged that there are excellent gay parents in precisely the same way that there are excellent single parents.  But I did re-emphasise that I believe that the norm, or ideal, is that children be brought up and nurtured by a mother and a father.  I believe that, since the relationship between a man and a woman is generative of life, gender and sexual complementarity cannot be assumed to be purely incidental to the nurture of children.  I might add that, regarding gender complementarity, I regret that women are still outnumbered in parliament and that, of all students training to be primary school teachers, only around one in ten is male.

I am quite happy for people to disagree with me and, indeed, I often post comments on Twitter and Facebook on order to try to stimulate or provoke a discussion.  But the exchange with Blanchard shows an alarming trend in contemporary society.  It's fair to say, I think, that we live in what could be termed a liberal environment in which personal freedoms are valued highly.  There has been a trend for decades now towards certain kinds of equality and non-discrimination towards people on the grounds of such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability.  This trend is to be welcomed, though I can't help but note the irony that whilst this has been going on, a reverse trend has been taking place within the economic arena, but that's another story, and for another day.

For all the progress that appears to have been made towards creating a non-discriminatory environment, it would seem that certain groups have become fair game for the most appalling ridicule.  The attitudes of people like Paul Blanchard bear this out very clearly.  For all their professed liberalism and regard for freedom, they are clearly very happy to ridicule religion.  They want to banish religion to the private sphere of individual lifestyle choices and, as a consequence, 'thin out' the fabric of public discourse.  The one thing that is not permitted in the liberal paradise is to say anything which appears to cut across the new orthodoxy.  So, when someone like myself tries to uphold traditional marriage and what many people still regard as an ideal for raising children, we are immediately denounced as homophobic, medieval, Bible-bound and so on - this is even when no mention at all has been made of gay sexuality, and when it has been conceded gladly that gay people can make good parents.  It seems that, in the brave new liberal utopia, anything goes except the view that perhaps not anything goes, or even falls short of an ideal.

Some of this unthinking condemnation of anyone who seeks to uphold what are often denounced as 'traditional' views is due to an increasingly suffocating political correctness.  This, along with a liberalism that, left unchecked, can easily mutate into a kind of tyranny, is a very unhappy coupling.  In the end, Paul Blanchard decided that he could not even bring himself to have anything more to do with me.  The free, open discussion which should be one of the principal characteristics of a truly liberal society is either banished altogether, or made to take place within a very narrow space which has been circumscribed in advance by those who trumpet their non-discriminatory credentials from the rooftops whilst at the same time bearing (most of) the hallmarks of a tyrant.  Any supposedly liberal society in which this is the case is severely impoverished, for the taboos which held people captive in the past have simply been replaced with new ones.

Paul Blanchard himself, as I made clear earlier, is no off-the-wall loose cannon.  He is prominent in organisations which make serious claims to respectability.  Imagine the way he and others express themselves outside the public arena and among  those who share their prejudices.

Institutions and The Widening Gulf between Indians and Chiefs
Democracy and representation in Britain are in crisis.  There is a widespread apathy towards politics and politicians.  There are various reasons for this.  The crisis over the fraudulent expenses claims of some MPs certainly hasn't helped, but it would be a mistake to identify this as a major factor, since the process leading to the current indifference was underway long before this phenomenon became known.  It is certainly true that the the main political parties are not as distinctive as they once were; it is much more difficult to describe what each of the parties stands for than it was, say, thirty years ago.  The three main parties seem very close together in their overall philosophy.  Even with regard to the current fiscal deficit, there is a general consensus among the parties that that cutting public expenditure is the solution; the parties differ only as to how quickly and deeply the cuts should be made and how much should be done by government to stimulate the national economy.  People often say that 'they're all the same nowadays', using this as a justification for their not bothering to cast their vote.

These, and perhaps other, factors have undoubtedly contributed to a tendency for fewer people to go to the ballot box.  There is a very real sense in people that their vote counts for little.  On top of this, it cannot be doubted that voting in a Westminster election has less significance than it did in the past.  This is because, increasingly, we are subject to legislation made beyond our shores, in Europe.  This makes the sense of 'distance' even greater; people feel even more powerless as more and more of the laws which govern our lives are made further away from us, in geographical terms.  Leaving aside the important matter of where in the European Union real power resides (European Parliament/Commission), voting figures in elections for the European parliament are pitiably low; and most people have no idea who their Euro MP is.  So whilst it cannot be said that the European parliament is actually undemocratic, it can certainly be argued that the whole European project, as currently construed, is inimical to true democracy and proper representation; most people are simply indifferent towards it.

So domestically and on the European level, we have a political situation in which the people are largely and increasingly non-participatory.  A gulf has opened up between those who govern and those who are governed.  Our 'democracy' has, for a variety of reasons, mutated into what might almost be desribed as an oligarchy.  The political 'establishment' has become a phenomenon in itself.  It claims to 'know', it consorts with those who are eminent in their fields and with those who are described as 'celebrities', and has cosy and unhealthy relationships with the leading lights of the newspaper media.  And on top of this, there has been a noticeable 'professionalisation' of our political representatives as the House of Commons in particular has become populated more and more by career politicians who are seen to have little or no experience of a 'proper job'.

The Church of England, supposedly counter-cultural (that's what the Gospel is) predictably, and depressingly, follows suit.  Its General Synod, supposedly representative but actually anything but, operates as if its power and authority has no parameters.  It has taken to itself the authority to pronounce on doctrinal matters, and on matters to do with the ordering of the Church's ministry.  It does its business by way of majority voting, as if matters of truth can be so decided.  It is as good an example of centralised power and the tyranny inherent therein as anything I can think of.  It has fed itself on the vacuum in authority of the House of Bishops which, for decades, has lacked the will and the courage to rein it in.  Synodical government has turned the Church of England into a debating society, within which there appears often to be a lack of the charity and mutual respect essential to healthy discussion.   Much of what it tears itself (and the Church) apart over are beyond the immediate concerns of the people in the parishes (who pay its burgeoning costs).  The synodical leadership of the Church of England has the characteristics of an oligarchy and appears remote from the grassroots of the Church.

Beyond the Synod itself, life in the Church of England for everyone has become more and more centralised, as diocesan bureaucracies become more extensive and intrusive.  Not only are there fewer people in the churches each week, but there are more bishops than ever before.  Most archdeacons do not look after parishes and even such as diocesan directors of ordinands are now full-time in those posts because the institutional church has, from the centre, sought to impose a prescriptive pattern of training for ordained ministry, which now extends even beyond ordination.  I can't remember which theoretician it was who said that two of the characteristics of institutions in terminal decline are increasing centralisation and increasing bureaucracy - whoever it was might have been commenting upon the contemporary Church of England.  It seems that those at the centre, when faced with difficulties, abandon any trust they ever had in those actually doing the ordinary, everyday work and try to control everything themselves; and so the institutional church continues to cut the number of stipendiary clergy in the parishes whilst leaving the bureaucracy intact and sometimes even increasing it.

In the political arena and in the Church of England, there appear to have developed huge lacunae between those 'at the top' and everyone else.  Politically, this leads to progressive disengagement on the part of the mass of people.  Within the Church of England, it leads to a progressive disengagement on the part of the laity and, therefore, to a reduced likelihood that the Church will be able to support itself financially in the future.  It's time that all who find themselves in any kind of leadership position began to remember that they are set there for the common good of all rather than for the benefit of the institutions themselves.