This morning I drew out of the children that Ascension means: SAMTSIRHC
Show them this written large on a big piece of card.
It’s ‘Christmas backwards’ day. That explains everything we just heard about in the Gospel!
At Christmas God sent Jesus to earth as a child. On ‘Christmas backwards’ day, God takes Jesus back to heaven from earth as the first resurrected man.
He takes us up with him. Jesus shows us today that he came to bring us to God and God’s heaven
The Son of God/ became the Son of Man/ so that children of men /could become children of God.
To believe in the ascension is to recognise that in Jesus a human being lives over all things in God. Nothing gives us more hope for the human race than the ascension of Jesus. The angels tremble before the glorified humanity of Jesus Christ truly God and truly human.
What’s all this though about heaven above and seating on the clouds?
There’s a joyful great and ultimate achievement feel about the ascension but it’s clothed in an ancient symbolism that needs unpacking. In the scriptural account Jesus is taken beyond sight into a cloud for God is beyond sight. When the Creed speaks of Jesus taking his seat at God’s right hand it speaks of mission accomplished by the Son of God but with a picture in words of a reality beyond human imagining.
Why the ascension and seating with God?
How else, God replies through Scripture, could I be with everyone in every age to bring them my comfort and challenge? Before he ascended Christ the Lord promised that the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name … will teach you all things (John 14:25-26a).
God brings his love to one point and time in Jesus so that he can reach out to every point and time, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Philippians 2:11).
In the glorious ascension of Jesus Christ human nature is changed and raised up to God so that angels tremble before it.
As the English Hymnal Office Hymn for Evening Prayer today expressed it:
Yea angels tremble when they see how changed is our humanity;
That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained, and God, the Flesh of God, hath reigned.
In the glorious ascension of Jesus Christ human nature is changed and raised up to God so that angels tremble before it. We humans are raised above all things. Children of men raised to be children of God!
The towering greatness of the universe is shrunk before our greatness! Angels tremble before the awesome dignity of a human being who is the first fruits of a renewed humanity.
What a truth! What a motivator for seeking justice upon the earth - that this due dignity be rendered to every human being!
If the ascension is truth, it’s truth to set people alight if ever there were truth at all!
We live at a time when so many of the worlds problems are perceived a due to a lack of investment linked to a lack of trust.
Today’s feast reminds us by its consequences of the great hope we have to share with the world.
God has invested in our condition – that’s the truth above all truths about human beings.
We’re made in God’s image to be like God, sharing the divine nature.
So we lift up our hearts – this service is a day by day invitation to such uplift, an uplift that traces back to Ascension Day.
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend – and with him continually dwell.
By lifting our hearts this evening in the Holy Eucharist we make an act of obedience which is a submission to God’s truth, the truth of Christ. This act of self-commitment has power to give us life beyond this world. It’s a birth into a higher life.
As Thomas Merton wrote: To believe is to consent to a creative command that raises us from the dead.
Our Lord ascended and as we grasp him, and all that he is to us and has done to us, taking him at his word, he gives life to our mortal bodies.
The Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God.
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