Ascension Sunday 1997

God has fully taken Jesus home

The Feast of the Ascension is a kind of penultimate celebration of Easter; Pentecost, the completion of the whole Easter mystery, is next Sunday. So what’s all this about, Jesus’ ascending to the Father? It is a metaphor for saying that God has utterly embraced this man who lived his life faithful to God, struggling to be faithful, like all of us have to do, and who achieved that fidelity. So the Ascension is a way of saying that God has fully taken Jesus home. But what does that mean to us? Well, if we look more closely, I think that something fairly important is implied here. As you know, I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks and I spent a lot of time sitting in buses and aeroplane terminals visiting a totally different part of the world than I’ve ever seen before. I’m struck again by all these people, all these people running around, living their own lives. All this reality, seemingly so anonymous, all voiceless... Well, what the Ascension says is that nothing in Jesus’ life was lost. Everything he was and everything he did was saved, maintained, retained, by God. The implication, of course, is that it’s true for all of us.

I don’t think that I’m all that weird in once in a while having a ruminative mood come upon me and finding that here I am, unknown by anybody, really. I think that’s true to a large extent--Who really knows anybody? All this reality of me, and all these other people... is it all wasted? Is it all just vaporised, evaporated, or become part of the electromagnetic energy in the world? I don’t want to be part of the electromagnetic energy in the world... The Ascension says that nothing is lost, and that I am known. I am known now, and nothing that I have done simply passes into oblivion. My normal thing is to say, "Trojcak, you’re okay after a fashion." No, no, no. That’s not what the Ascension says. It says this mass, the human enterprise, is ultimately held together by God and, therefore, is made available to everybody else in God. It is not some kind of private virtuoso performance that we’re celebrating in the Ascension. The promise is that this terrible anonymity and isolation, the Germans have the wonderful word uergessenheit, to pass into forgotteness, is not where we end up. We end up in God and with each other fully intact.

In conclusion I would just like to gloss this little passage from Mark; it is not Mark, by the way, if you go home and look at your Bible you’ll find the fifteenth to the twentieth verses of the sixteenth chapter of Mark are a much later addition to the Gospel of Mark. The earliest manuscripts don’t have it... It is one of the three alternate endings that were subsequently added to the Gospel of Mark and so we get this weird stuff that has given rise to the snake handling sect in the American South which everybody knows about because they drink poison and do all kinds of other weird stuff. I don’t know what goes into that, folks. Certainly it has produced a kind of pathology, I think, in the snake handling sect... But the point that they are trying to make, whoever wrote this thing, is that there are going to be signs somehow. Signs testifying to what? To the Good News. What is the Good News in the context of this feast? It is precisely what I’ve been trying to say. I will not drain away. I will not be lost, nor will anybody be lost.

What I would like to suggest as a sign is that if I believe that, if I ran my life that way, I would first of all be a very different kind of person than the one I in fact am, but, more to the point, I would precisely be the sign that Jesus was real, that Jesus’ destiny was real, that Jesus really had been taken by God, and that nothing is lost. I don’t think that is really so hard to imagine. If I really believe that I, like everybody else, am going to be kept by God, and that I am known by God, and in the very knowledge of God, I am kept... If I believe that, I would act in a different way, and acting in that way I would certainly testify that Jesus truly is the Good News, the Evangelic, the Gospel... And whether I can handle snakes, or drink poison, or even cure the sick, or get the dead up and about, I propose is a far lesser sign than that kind of life lived with that kind of attentiveness and that kind of sense of belonging to everybody and with everybody.

To other sermons

RT 8/5/97