We have completed the six weeks after Easter which match the six weeks of Lent, and now, we come to the concluding events: Ascension today and Pentecost next Sunday. I have always felt that the process of the Ascension is seems so weird. The hymn that we sang at the beginning of Mass simplifies this in that there, the Ascension is talked about as a kind of homecoming: Jesus was with God, he came down, and then, he went back up. For Jesus’ followers, however, this is not at all the original meaning behind this event. The New Testament texts certainly do not convey this kind of meaning. There is a precedents for ascensions. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, Elijah ascended. Moreover, some of the religious literature of this period that was written by Jews depicted Moses as ascending. Even the pagans possessed their own form of ascension, as Romulus, one of the founders of the city of Rome, ascended too. Hence, we obviously need to delve into this issue in order to properly interpret it.

Whatever happened, and it certainly did not occur in this kind of Cecil B. DeMille fashion which Luke writes about, the Ascension was significant for Jesus. But, if the Ascension is only significant for Jesus then it is utterly useless and we might as well forget it. So, we can at least begin by asking, what was the significance of the Ascension for Jesus? Jesus fulfilled our destiny. He was made by God for God, and went to God. Thus, the Resurrection is the first moment of this process and the Ascension is, in a very real sense, the completion of Jesus’ human destiny. Simply put, we believe that Jesus is with God. But, the fact that God raised this particular Jew from the dead clearly means much more than just an individual human destiny.

If we look at what is entailed in the notion of Ascension, the first thing that seems obvious is that for Jesus the normal context for human life is no longer present. That is, Jesus does not live in time and space, as we do. This has all kinds of implications for us. I would suggest that the whole world is now available to Jesus. He is not simply located in a sixty-mile length of the land of Palestine. In other words, Jesus’ destiny is completed because he fulfilled the Jews’ destiny: to bring God’s saving grace to everyone in the world. And so, because Jesus’ local and temporal existence are no longer the constraints of his being, now the whole world is available to Jesus. This is what the religious interpretation off the Ascension represents.

Maybe I am extraordinarily slow, but it is only within the past few weeks that the notion of Jesus as the Saviour of the world has had some real impact on me. I am a victim, if you will (as we all are), of the kind of fourteenth-century pietism which constructs a Jesus-and-me spirituality. But before Jesus is mine, Jesus is ours. That is, Jesus is mine only in so-far-as I am aware that Jesus is ours. And this does make a difference, at least for me it has. As I said previously, this is weird. Jubilant Sykes is going to sing, "Give me Jesus". But the Jesus that he is asking for, and you can tell as he sings it, is the Jesus who is everybody’s Jesus, and then, my Jesus. This relationship does not work in the opposite manner. But to take on the real ascended Jesus is to understand that Jesus is saving everybody. We can discover this by harking back to the Gospel of Matthew: "Not a sparrow falls from the sky without God being aware. The hairs of our head are numbered". And then, of course, with regard to Jesus himself, the is this stunning judgement passage in which he talks about responding to anybody in need: someone in jail, a stranger, people who are naked, hungry, poor, or abandoned. When you respond to the unfortunate in this manner, you are responding to Jesus who is everywhere. And this is what the Ascension, at its best, means.

We constantly feel we should appropriate our relationship with Jesus and we feel, because we are so unsure of ourselves and so terribly insecure in our own lives, that if we cannot have our own Jesus, then nobody else should. This is rubbish. The whole business of understanding Jesus’ identity is knowing that Jesus is the Jesus of everybody in the world - - Buddhists, atheists, Hindus, and us. This works in tandem with what I was trying to say last week about the provisionality of the Church. In fact, it ought too make clearer the provisionality of the Church in that we can see that the Church is here as the only institution on this planet that does not exist for its own sake (however badly we carry off this project). And, to a large extent, it is consistently bad. The Church is here to somehow persuade people that the Jesus whom we say we proclaim is the Jesus who is for everybody, not just for our individual or institutional selves.

This understanding of our relationship with Jesus is extremely important because I consistently find lines such as this in the prayers of the Liturgy: " O God help us whom you have baptized and whom you have redeemed with the blood of the Cross". In other words, "Watch over this salvation club that you have built here on Earth". This perspective represents a radical foreshortening. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to say: "Now, the destiny of Jesus as a human being is clear. He has gone to the Father and he is now universally available. This is my destiny as a human being as well and this is what I am called to do". So, we can really sing and pray, as Jesus taught us to do, to Our Father.

To other sermons

Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com