COULD someone stand on a soap box at Hyde Park Corner and preach about the ascension as gospel or good news? In this series, I am making that claim about each part of the creed. Approaching the ascension that way involves treating it quite differently from the many rather embarrassed sermons that I have heard on Ascension Day over the years.
The ascension belongs to the gospel, and bears witness to the gospel, because it is so much about Christ, and about God’s unshakeable commitment to being with us and for us. It is good news because it shows that our humanity has been taken into God’s presence: Christ going ahead of us rather than abandoning us, and interceding for us there.
The gospel message of Christmas is “God is with us.” That returns at Ascensiontide, when we remember that Christ has passed into the presence of his Father in his flesh, which he will never lay aside. As St John Chrysostom put it, the Son “clothed himself with our flesh, not as again to leave it, but always to have it with Him” (Homily 11 on John).
This message of God’s unbreakable commitment to us, and union with us in Christ, had to be fought for. Marcellus of Ancyra, in the fourth century, taught that Christ’s human nature was temporary, destined to dissolve back into the Father. Against him, the Council of Constantinople (381) expanded the emerging Nicene Creed with the phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end”. Christ will never divest himself of our humanity. For the Second Person, the ascension is no return to disembodied Godhead.
THE gospel is proclaimed in the ascension as “God is with us.” We can add that “We are with God.” Christ is our forerunner, taking our nature into God’s presence, with the promise that, where the head is, there the members will follow (to use language redolent of John 12.26, 14.3, and 17.24, elaborated for instance by St Leo the Great in Sermon 73).
That brings us back to the idea that Christ does not so much depart from us as go ahead of us (John 14.2-3). Asking what it might mean for the ascension to be a “cause” of our salvation, Aquinas points to precisely this. (He also writes that the ascension stirs up the Christian’s active reception of that salvation, by lifting our hearts to God, and leading us into faith, hope, and charity — Summa Theologiae III.57.1 ad 3, 57.6). Think of a guide scouting out a track ahead of us: for him to secure the path feels entirely different from his leaving us to wander off.
For Hans Urs von Balthasar, the ascension is Christ’s return to the Father, bearing his prize. It is “a return to the starting point of his mission, now laden, however, with the whole harvest of the world that he reaped through that mission” (Credo, 63). Again, we can connect the ascension with the Christmas message. In the words of a hymn by St Ambrose of Milan from the fourth century (as translated by J. M. Neale): “From God the Father he proceeds, To God the Father back he speeds, Runs out his course to death and hell, Returns on God’s high throne to dwell.”
Christ does not return empty-handed from that great odyssey: he returns with his hands laden with those whom he has redeemed.
Paradoxically, then, the ascension of Christ proclaims the good news of Christ’s presence, not his absence. Christ takes our humanity into the presence of the Father for all eternity, and in that he goes from being, to some, locally present to being universally present to all.
Central to that is the sending of the Holy Spirit — “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16.7) — which we will come to in the next of these columns. To this we can also add the sense in which Christ comes into the soul or life of each Christian (what Aquinas called his “invisible” mission, or sending), and his presence “to the end of the age” in the eucharist (which must be part of what he means in Matthew 28.20).
THERE is also good news that Christ is not present before the Father in some static or resting state. He is there to do something, namely, to plead for us, in the flesh that he took and has not laid down: “He always lives to make intercession” for those who come to God through him (Hebrews 7.25, cf. 4.14-16).
This is the gospel message that Christ — and his righteousness, sinlessness, and faithfulness to God — avails for us, first doing for us what we could not do for ourselves, and eventually conforming us to that very righteousness, sinlessness, and faithfulness to God. Aquinas linked this to the incarnation: as the Old Testament High Priest entered the holy place to stand before God for the people, so Christ has entered heaven in his human nature to pray for us, “that God may take pity on those for whom the Son of God took human nature” (ST III.57.6).
Aquinas also links it to Christ’s Passion, insisting that the risen and ascended Christ retains his wounds gloriously: the scars are not effaced, but transfigured (ST III.54.4). This features in later hymnody both in the familiar words of Matthew Bridges “Behold his hands and side, Rich wounds, yet visible above. . .”, and, in some less well-known lines by Charles Wesley: “Five bleeding wounds he bears, Received on Calvary; They pour effectual prayers, They strongly plead for me. Forgive him, O forgive, they cry, Nor let that ransomed sinner die.”
FINALLY, we might say, with Karl Barth, that the ascension speaks to us of the good news of God’s patience. We are situated, Barth wrote (Dogmatics in Outline, 124), in the time when Christ “is seated at the right hand of the Father”, and the Creed passes here from a series of completed actions — was born, suffered, was crucified, rose — to the present tense (“is seated”). Barth called this the time of the Church, the time “that God leaves us, in his great patience, so that we may think and understand and believe” (Faith of the Church, 89-90). “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3.9).
Back to the soap box at Hyde Park Corner. What might the preacher say? That the ascension announces the good news that our own humanity has been carried into the life of God, and that Christ has gone ahead of us rather than away from us. Where he now is, he intercedes for us all. That, surely, is a proclamation of good news. Following Christ, who climbed the Mount of Olives, we, too, might “get up to a high mountain” and be “a herald of good tidings . . . lifting up our voice with strength” to proclaim the good news of the ascension.
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
An Old Testament Passage
“I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.” (Daniel 7.13-14)
ALTHOUGH we tend to associate the apocalyptic passages of Daniel with Advent and the Second Coming, this passage lines up with the ascension, and has long been understood that way by Christians. The “one like a human being” comes to the “Ancient One” and comes, indeed, “with the clouds of heaven”, as echoed in the ascension story in Acts (1.9). That phrase “like a human being” features in the Aramaic text of the Old Testament as “like a son of man”: language that is taken up in the Gospels, where it points to Christ as the archetypal and representative human being, as he is in his ascension to the Father.
We might also think that the word “like” here points to there being something extraordinary about Christ, namely his divinity: not that this makes him less human, but that there is an inexplicable “more” to everything about him.
For other texts, consider 1 Samuel 2.1–10 (Hannah’s Song), Psalm 68.18 (not least as taken up by Ephesians 4.8), and Psalm 110.1.
A New Testament Passage
“In my Father’s house are many rooms. . . I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14.2-3)
THIS reading does not feature as the Gospel for Ascension Day or the Sunday after Ascension Day, which is a shame. We more often hear it at funerals. It sets up Christ’s departure, not as a matter of loss or sadness, but as a matter of going before, to prepare a place for us.
The Letter to the Hebrews puts the same point in priestly terms: Christ has passed through the heavens as the High Priest passed through the veil into the holiest place, bearing our humanity with him (Hebrews 4.14, 7.25). He is there for us, praying and interceding.
No wonder that this passage from John features so prominently among burial readings. It is such a good funeral text because it is, first of all, an ascension text. It tells the bereaved that their beloved has not departed into territory unfamiliar to God. Christ has gone ahead, in flesh like our own.
For other texts, consider John 20.17; Ephesians 2.4-6; Colossians 3.1-4; Hebrews 4.14-16, 7.25.
Quotations from the Fathers and Aquinas
“He inhabits this tabernacle for ever, for he clothed himself with our flesh, not as again to leave it, but always to have it with him.” — John Chrysostom, Homily 11 on John
“Flesh hath purged what flesh had stained, And God, the flesh of God, hath reigned.” — the ancient hymn Aeterne Rex altissime (c. fifth century), translated by J. M. Neale
“Ascending on high, he led captivity captive” (quoting Ephesians 4.8, working with Psalm 68.18): those whom Christ takes with him are “captives indeed of a happy taking, since they were acquired by his victory.” — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III.57.6
“To sit at the right hand of the Father is a mystery belonging to the incarnation.” — Rufinus, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed 32
“This is the consummation and fulfilment of the other festivals, and a happy conclusion to the whole story of the Son of God.” — Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon on the Ascension of the Lord