Ascension Day

This morning I spent a couple of hours packing bags in Tesco, raising funds for Hope House. Chatting to people as I did it, obviously some of the time I was talking about Hope House and the work it does. But conversations also drifted onto the events in Manchester, that bomb that deliberately targeted children and families, since my time in Tesco included the minute’s silence held nationwide at eleven o’clock.

After the silence one man said angrily, “This country’s finished. It’s in a mess. Somebody needs to start doing something!” I have a feeling that I might not have agreed with him who that somebody might be, and what they should be doing. But I certainly did share with him a sense of anger and shock and helplessness. The young singer those young people had gone to see said, “I have no words.” How can anyone choose to act with such cruelty and lack of pity against innocent young people? It beggars belief.

Someone said to me the other day, “Why does God let something like that happen?” And this morning in Tesco someone else commented, “It’s a godless world we’re living in.” In these few words I can’t do much to address the problem of evil in the world, let alone the specific point of how anyone committing such a hideous crime could believe that they were serving and pleasing God, as I presume the bomber did believe. But those who worked on his confused and credulous mind to persuade him that his God would be served by indiscriminate killing are I believe even more guilty, and have even more to answer for, than the bomber himself, who was, in a way, just a weapon they made and used.

Anyway, the person who asked why God lets these things happen went on to answer his own question by saying, “God sits there up in heaven and doesn’t care what’s happening down here, that’s what I think.” said I can understand and sympathise with that point of view. But I don’t share it.

Today is Ascension Day, so I suppose our theme is Jesus going back to heaven. Today is the day when he was taken bodily up through the clouds, leaving the disciples back down there to get on with things without him. That’s the story St Luke tells, at least. As it happens, only St Luke tells this story, so one question to ask straight off is why should that be? Why don’t the other Gospel writers tell the same story?

The reason they don’t is that only St Luke needed to tell it. He told it twice - firstly as a means of ending his Gospel, and then secondly to begin his second book, the Acts of the Apostles. So, today then are we just here to commemorate a mere literary device?  No, there’s more than that to Ascension Day; but I think today’s more about what the story means than about the physical details themselves. And what the story is told to convey is something agreed on across all the Gospels: that Jesus was with his disciples for a period of time after Easter Day, but then was no longer visibly and physically present with them.

He was with them to make sure that the truth of the resurrection had firmly lodged in their hearts and minds; and to make sure they were ready for what would happen next. What that meant for them and means for us is this: firstly, that Jesus left them in order that something new could now happen; so that the gift of the Spirit could fall upon them, giving them courage, insight, vision, love. Through his Spirit, far from abandoning his world, God in Christ continues to be actively involved through the life of his Church, through its fellowship and witness and service.

Secondly though, Jesus left them to take his place at the right hand of the Father, from which, as our creed reminds us, he shall come again to judge the world. Ascension Day is about the active presence of Christ in the world, the promised gift for which his disciples waited in Jerusalem; and it’s about the kingship of Christ, and that we and the world stand under his judgement.

The last verse of Timothy Dudley-Smith’s great hymn “Lord of the Years” reads: “Lord, for ourselves; in living power remake us, self on the cross and Christ upon the throne.” With admirable economy Bishop Timothy sums up in these two lines the essential mission of the Church. Self on the cross and Christ upon the throne. Ours must be a cross shaped mission, marked by self sacrifice, measured in lives lived with others in mind; that’s what the Spirit of God lovingly inspires in the Church. And it’s to be an obedient mission, a mission true to the mind and heart of Christ, to his example, teaching and instruction. “A new commandment I give to you,” he told his disciples: “that you love one another, as I have loved you.”

So Ascension Day is a celebration not of the departure of Christ from his disciples, but of his abiding and enlivening presence with them - and in the Church that continues his work today. Not that this allows for any easy answer to the question “Why?” Why Manchester, why Westminster? Why Paris, why the attack a month ago that killed a coachload of schoolchildren in Syria? Why so much evil and sadness in the world? Why so much evil, loveless and false religion? But I am confirmed in my belief that what Christ calls from us today is a prayerful waiting on his words, and that we accept him as our Lord and King, and living lives of service that reflect his sacrifice and proclaim his love. And that in the face of false religion, religion that teaches hate and demands and destroys lives, our sacred call is to live that true religion whose hallmark is love.