Salvador Dali, Ascension, 1958
Ascension
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
May 4, 2016
Tomorrow is Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter and ten days
before Pentecost. It is a Greater Feast
of the Church, and commemorates the end of the 40-day ministry of the Risen
Lord to his disciples after his resurrection.
We will be celebrating the day at Trinity Ashland by enhancing our
regular Thursday noon Healing Eucharist with special prayers. I hope that you come to Thursday noon worship
tomorrow to observe this important high feast day.
Many of us are uncomfortable with Ascension because it seems
to use a view of the universe that is so contrary to our modern scientific
view. The story of the Ascension assumes
an ancient way of seeing things: heaven and God are up there somewhere, we are down
here, and Hell and the Underworld are somewhere down there, far beneath our feet.
In this view, reflected in the Creed, Jesus “came down from heaven” and
became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly
human. He descended to the dead in the grave or hell, then rose again, and ascended into heaven where he is now seated at the right hand of
God the Father.
But we don’t see the universe in this up-down sort of
way: as Eucharistic Prayer C says, the
universe is a great expanse of
interstellar space, even
intergalactic space, and the earth is a single tiny fragile planet, our “island home.” We don’t take the up-down language literally
at all. When Yuri Gagarin came back from
the first human orbit of earth in 1961 and Nikita Khrushchev said that he
hadn't seen heaven or God up there, most of us thought it a rather silly thing
to say. (Apparently, Gagarin himself
might have agreed: he had his daughter
baptized in the Orthodox Church just before he set off for the flight, and kept
icons in his home.)
We thus do not see God as up there, or even somewhere out
there, but rather, behind and within all things. The up/down language has always been seen in
Christianity as a metaphor. The idea is
expressed well in a trope of ancient Greek philosophy taken up in many Medieval
and Renaissance Christian writings: “God
is an infinite circle whose center is nowhere, and whose circumference is everywhere.”
The idea of an ever-present but always transcendent God
suggests another metaphor for those troubled by Ascension Day as being about
some kind of divine elevator: Jesus came
out of the Ground of Being when he became flesh, and returned to it at the end
of the 40-day ministry. In this sense,
Ascension Day is a “Return to the Ground,” a "Retreat to the Horizon," or a “Re-absorption of the Water of Life
into the Earth” Day if the start or end point of the movement or process is the
Ground of Being.
Ascension thus is a symbol of Jesus’ return to the
transcendent God, and perhaps a hopeful hint of the ultimate intention of God
for all his creatures. As T.S. Eliot
writes in “East Coker,” “In my beginning is my end. … Love is most near itself
when here and now cease to matter. … In my end is my beginning.”
Again, try to make to Holy Eucharist tomorrow at noon.
Grace and peace,
Fr. Tony+
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