Acts 1.1-11
Psalm 47
Ephesians 1.15-23
Luke 24.44-53
Thursday the Church commemorated the ascension of Jesus, when – after forty days from the resurrection, forty days spent with his closest friend in fellowship and teaching – Jesus returns to his Father. I used to find preaching about or discussing the Ascension particularly unnerving, because whatever I said about it, whatever theological slant I gave it, I was always aware that I might be asked the question: “Why did Jesus have to leave at all?” I realised that apart from retreating into pat, metaphysical answers, I had no real response. After all, Jesus was risen from the dead, why did he have to go back? Why couldn’t he remain and become a sort of CEO of the new kingdom movement, at least oversee the beginning of the project for a few years? But, more recently, I have begun to understand it as imperative that Jesus returned to his Father, because it was only with that happening that his followers would ever really grow up and take responsibility for their own lives and for their own calling. Jesus’ departure from his friends seems particularly relevant to us living in the post-modern world, in the era beyond the “death of God.” Perhaps, the greatest challenge for the Church today is this very question: Whether we are willing to grow up and let go of infantile and infantilising images of God and of religion. Whether we are willing to engage with both in a way worthy of responsible adults.
For
some reason we human beings are all too willing to cede our responsibility or
initiative. We are often quick to find
someone or something to blame, and ever
keen to vest another with the authority which is only properly our own. But the call of God in Jesus is to move
beyond that. The call of God in Jesus is
to grow up and enter into maturity – spiritual maturity, emotional
maturity. Had Jesus remained, this could
never have happened. As the theologian
John McNeill writes, “As long as Jesus remained alive and present, his
disciples had their center of authority outside themselves and were not
therefore, totally responsible for their actions. They were striving to meet the expectations
of someone else. They had not yet become
fully creative and responsible adults.”[1]
As long as Jesus remained with them they could more easily opt out of
the reality of the human condition and the adult demands it makes on every one
of us. Had Jesus remained they would
have been able to continue with that childish image of a god who is our friend
and our friend only, and who controls every eventuality. Yet, in the ascension of Jesus, it was
confirmed that that was not to be an option, not for them, neither for us.
Jesus’
ascension radically challenged the disciples’ conventional understanding of God
and their relationship to God. It revealed a God who demands of human beings an
appropriate self-reliance, who does not resolve all our problems, nor fights
our battles. And this was a major
ideological and theological shift, one that we are only recently beginning to
really take seriously. Instead of the
god who like in ancient Greek dramas descended from the heavens and set all to
right, we are revealed a God who ascends into the heavens and allows us (as
Paul writes to the Philippians) to “work out our own salvation with fear and
trembling.” (Philippians 2.12b) This God
allows us to reason, think, doubt and even if we want reject God, all for the
sake of our having the opportunity and responsibility of making decisions of
real integrity. This God allows us to
struggle with our humanity and thereby reveal our divine image and likeness. And why does God do this? Well, it seems to me that it is only with
people like that – people who are autonomous, capable of making informed
decisions, able to direct and confront their lives – with whom mature relationship
is possible, and at the bottom line it is about relationship. In the Gospel of John we heard last week Jesus
saying to his followers, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the
servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends,
because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John
15.15) Here Jesus highlights the relationship with human beings that in him God
is proclaiming. It is a relationship
based not a model of inequality and servitude, but one which is based on
mutuality, partnership and freedom. It
is a relationship based not on commodities – what one can do or produce for the
other – but on the personal encounter of autonomous beings for the sake of
relationship itself. On our part it
demands that we cease thinking of God as some big daddy in the sky, a sort of
cosmic Santa Claus who fights our battles and grants us treats if we pray hard
enough or behave well enough. It
challenges us into real relationship with God.
In fact, you must admit that if we treated our fellow human beings the
way we so often treat God, we would be accused of self-serving opportunism,
indeed of using another. Why should that criteria change because the
relationship is with God?
Because
God offers to us the possibility of real relationship, God also offers to the
us the invitation into partnership. We
are not mere pawns of some all-powerful deity; neither as Paul says are “we…enslaved
to the elemental spirits of the world.” (Galatians 4.3) The ascension of Jesus highlights one of the
fundamental beliefs of Christianity and one of the fundamental truths of human
existence – our free will and therefore agency.
God will not force the divine will for creation upon us, but rather
invites us to share and take an active part in that vision, that vision
which Jesus called the kingdom of
God. For God to do otherwise, would mean
that we would have to have been created to be something less or other than the
image and likeness of God. Granted, God
sends to us the Holy Spirit to comfort, guide and inspire – but not to possess
us or somehow overrun our freedom and possibility of choice. In that freedom and choice God makes the
invitation to partnership. Our world is
the creation of human and divine cooperation.
We are free to choice its path and direction, always knowing that we
must take responsibility for the consequences and eventuality of those
choices.
The
Roman Catholic Franciscan Richard Rohr believes that for every hundred years
since the birth of Jesus, the human race has matured one year in our ability to
understand the message of Jesus; that makes us about twenty years old. Understood in this light the message and
mystery of the Ascension is an important one, particularly important at this present
time in our history. It challenges the
Church corporately and each of her members individually to grow up, to take
seriously their responsibility as adults and their inheritance as friends of
God, called into maturity and invited
into partnership. It reminds us of the
dignity we have as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.
[1] John Macneill, Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of
Life for Gays, Lesbians, and Everybody Else (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) p.
9.
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