Text: Acts 1: 1-11; Ephesians 1: 15-23; Luke 24: 44-53.
Let us bow our heads in prayer –
O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love: help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden, and surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ. Amen.
__________________________
I always like the thought that each Sunday many other Churches throughout the country, and the world, are all following the same readings and the same theme for the day as we are. The various preachers, I am sure, take quite a different approach to the readings, and no doubt we all choose different hymns and pray different prayers, but we are all focussing on the same words from the Scripture, and sharing the same aspect of our shared faith.
Having said that, I am going to do a particularly Anglican thing, and instead of choosing the readings for today, I have focussed on the readings for the nearest major festival of the Church’s calendar. Which, as we all know, was the festival of the Ascension on Thursday. Had you realised it was forty days since Easter? Doesn’t time fly!
As I am sure you are aware, Luke’s Acts of the Apostles is the only New Testament Book that specifically mentions a physical ascension forty days after Easter. The longer version of the ending of Mark’s Gospel records that Jesus “was taken up into heaven and sat at the right hand of God”, at some unspecified time soon after Easter; Luke’s Gospel seems to time His being “carried up into heaven” as taking place on Easter day; Matthew only says that they met Jesus on a mountain back in Galilee, several days’ travelling from Jerusalem, where “they worshipped Him”, and in John there are only the references of Jesus to going to His Father.
What exactly happened, and when it happened is not the least bit clear. Each Gospel writer has a different account. However, the combined message of the four Gospels is clear: that after his tragic, cruel and unjustified death on the Cross, His disciples at some time, and in some way, had an overwhelming experience - of Christ risen, ascended, glorified.
And each of them, in their own styles, in their own theology, wrote to express their understanding of Christ risen, ascended, glorified, which is the theme of Ascension day in the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book.
The three concepts involved in this theme for today don’t sit comfortably in the minds of most 21st century westerners. We don’t think of heaven as “up”. In an age when we have all flown high above the clouds and have watched televised journeys into space, and heard and seen weather reports talking about the movement of currents and cloud formations over the Tasman - for us the mystery has been taken out of the clouds and the space above the clouds. So for us, the idea of Christ ascending upwards is not always helpful because for us up and ‘the heavens” are quite a different thing than they were for the writers and first readers of the Gospels.
In the same way, “glory” is not a concept that we are either familiar with or comfortable with. It has tended in our time to be debased by experiences of politicians and other leaders, and indeed nations, making attempts at self-glorification. Ours is an age of people employing public relations firms to build them us, while ordinary people specialise in putting these same leaders down.
We bring our leaders down to size - our size. On many occasions that is not a bad thing. But I suspect that this general atmosphere of cynicism and denigration has killed off our ability to experience anything with a sense of wonder and simple, uncomplicated adoration. Sadly, we can’t even admire a beautiful natural scene without being aware of the damage to the land and the air that is evident somewhere in that scene.
Therefore, an awareness of God’s glory doesn’t come easily. We are, quite simply, out of practice at experiencing glory. We are not geared to respond to anything in that uncomplicated way.
We may know more about the nature of the atom, and the origins of this world and the universe than any people before us, but when it comes to a relationship with God, a faith in our Creator, I suspect that we are ignorant illiterates compared to, e.g., the writers of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden or the prophets Isaiah, Hosea or Ezekiel.
They had a directness and a simplicity in their experience of God and God’s glory that we have lost.
And so it is that when we try to re-express the divine experiences of those early followers of Jesus who were around to witness His death and the extraordinary experiences following his death, we end up using language that is not part of our accepted modern vocabulary.
I’m not suggesting that we turn back the clock. We are not the same sort of people as those who lived in the time of Jesus, because we have experienced life differently from them. We know things that they did not know. Many of those new bits of knowledge that we have about the world and about ourselves are good knowledge. And many of our new experiences are good experiences. But they do make us different people.
Now, maybe for you, understanding Christ as “risen, ascended, glorified” holds no problems. But that will be because you have already retranslated it into thoughts, feelings and experiences that are within your own experience; or maybe it is because you have assimilated it in total, undigested, and allowed it to become part of you despite its foreign-ness. That, I believe, is a less satisfactory way of coping.
But, if you have heard the words, and they haven’t touched you at your heart, and moved you forward in your faith, then, like me, you have some work to do! Translation work, that is.
For me, God’s glory is God’s “Godness”. My experience of that is at times a sense of wonder when I discover, for example, something of the amazing intricacies of a life form, or the immenseness and complexity of the universe, or the living inter-relatedness of the life systems of this planet. Not to mention meeting my own son at his birth! My awareness of God’s glory often touches me when I experience in one way or another God’s love of me and all creatures - that can fill me with a sense of safety and security that nothing else will give me.
For me, Biblical images of clouds of glory and blazing lights are not all that helpful. I have to translate such imagery into my kind of language. But that’s OK. It’s just hard work, that’s all.
And likewise with the imagery of “up there”. Jesus “ascending” doesn’t help me as a mind picture. Jesus reflecting God’s love and goodness so closely that he is a “spitting image” of God does mean something to me. Thinking of the legacy of empowerment that He left His friends, and which has in turn been passed on to us - that sort of thought helps me to comprehend Jesus’ specialness and relevance in my life in a much more real way
If you have trouble with the imagery, I don’t suggest that you copy mine. That is a very personal thing related to my own life experiences. Rather, work on your own. Ask yourself: How do I express the Godness of God and the Godness of Jesus? And I’d love to hear your answers. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment