Ascension: Conceptualizing The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

There’s a section of the Jesus narrative that makes many people sceptical.

I mean, you might say quite a lot of it is hard for the very literally minded and the materialist.

But the section even Christians sometimes struggle with begins with the Ascension.

The physical language immediately raises our suspicion.

God is no more literally upward than any other direction.

This Clarke Kent ending sounds like an illustration, more than reportage.

Then there is Jesus return – when we’re told:

He ‘will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’

Again this suggests something hard to imagine – mythic –

And while we long for a peaceful and just society, this kind of intervention is out of all experience.

It also raises the very difficult question:

Where is the risen and ascended body of Christ?

Is it somewhere in any meaningful sense?

Luke is trying to give expression to the change that occurs between the Easter resurrection appearances and the gift of the Spirit in the birth of the Church.

He takes the resurrection seriously:

‘he presented himself alive... by many convincing proofs’ –

and we shouldn’t overlook that it’s the concreteness of this resurrection experience that defines Christianity as something fundamentally new and unexpected.

But the ascension draws to a close Jesus’ humanly embodied presence in the world.

So where is Jesus’ body?

I think what Luke is saying is that now Jesus’ body is with God.

Where is that – I hear you ask!

Well that raises a very difficult question.

At once we think of God as outside –

That corresponds to the image of height –

God is so very far above us.

Not in actual distance – God is not among the stars.

Contrary to popular belief very few religions have ever understood God in this way.

But as that which is not our created order – the things of this world.

Metaphysics – that which is beyond the physical.

But also as Augustine writes God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves.

God is at the heart of everything.

It is he in whom ‘we live and breathe and have our being’.

It’s hard for us to get our minds around this because we’re so used to a materialistic view of the universe where the world of atoms, electrons, quarks and the rest push out God with their sheer weight of matter.

God is no more something infinitely small as something infinitely far away.

Both the upward and the inward and metaphors for how we can know God’s presence with us in a non-physical way.

Now I’m no scientist and dislike theologians trying to do science as much as I dislike scientists who think they can do theology;

but if science can talk these days about superstring theory and 11 dimensions then the idea of a multi-layered universe doesn’t seem so implausible.

Jesus’ body, then, like God, is somehow still with us.

What then are we to make of the return of this Ascended Lord?

As we say – Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Well, in a sense, this is something that we already have experience of.

Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is a paradigmatic sacrament – a visible sign of an invisible presence.

Jesus is Immanuel – God with us.

In every Eucharist as God is made present in bread and wine, we have his return.

And that is a return we physically take into ourselves as we ask to be more loving, more Christ-like, closer to God, more a part of Jesus’ body.

And lest we get too intimidated by the requirement to be Jesus body, let’s remember it’s a broken body, just as the bread is broken at every service.

Jesus’ body reflects the brokenness of this world and the brittle nature of human hearts.

There is a sense then in which we can understand the Ascension and Return of Jesus as a metaphor for worship.

Our praise, our sacrifice, our prayers rise to God.

The movement of God, as he ‘came down to earth from heaven’ and returned, ascending to the right hand of the Father, is one which in worship we are carried along with.

In worship we celebrate Christ come among us in bread and wine, in the continual making of the Church, which is the body of Christ, lifting it up consecrating it before God.

And the Eucharist itself looks forward to when we will be fully present to God, though as our first reading in Acts tells us ‘it is not for [us] to know the times or periods that the Father has set’.

Something we are usually grateful for.

But actually just as our worship looks back to Creation, Incarnation, the life, death and resurrection of Christ – so it also looks forward to our redemption and the gathering up of creation;

the peaceful future of the kingdom of God.

If any of Christianity is true then our faith finally is that our home is with God;

that there is peace and reconciliation;

that an eternity awaits when the presence of God is more directly and abidingly known.

When war and disease and famine and death will cease.

Ultimately the Ascension and Return are indicators of this future, when we and all creation will be swept up into God.

For now our task is to inhabit Jesus’ body.

To ourselves be a sign of the redemption that is coming,

And to take that transforming love into our community.

Amen.