Thursday 21 May 2020. I’m walking along the prom, quite early, and it’s rather cloudy but pleasant. (Certainly not like Thursday just gone) I see over the sea a striking column of light from the sky to the horizon, sort of slicing the clouds in two. Pretty special, more so given that it was Ascension Day 2020 and we were well into lockdown during the pandemic. So, I told myself that I had seen a meteorological manifestation of the ascension, and I was very happy about that. Especially given the times we were living in, during most of 2020. It was actually just a shaft of light between the clouds, but I didn’t care. I was determined that it was that manifestation.We are coming to the end of the liturgical season of Easter, the Easter story. The time had come for Jesus to bring full knowledge of God to the world and in doing so to bring eternal life. This He has done by His death and resurrection. And His subsequent ascension. But what about His disciples? They have put all their trust in Him over the past three years, but they will be left behind in the world after He has been taken from it. They will need God’s protection after Jesus leaves this world, even more so in all that lies ahead for them. And they will indeed meet some turbulent times ahead.After His resurrection, Jesus spent forty days appearing to His disciples, teaching them about the Kingdom of God, and offering them reassurance in their faith. But on the fortieth day, something extraordinary occurred. Jesus was taken up into heaven, not in secrecy or solitude, but before the very eyes of His disciples.So today we are celebrating Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, the actual feast day having been Thursday just gone. But just what is the Ascension and why do we celebrate it? It happened 40 days after Jesus’ resurrection and at first glance, it may seem like a departure—a goodbye. But in truth, it is a turning point, a commissioning, and a promise all in one. Luke tells us that Jesus was “taken up before their very eyes” (Acts 1:9). This is not just an exit—it is an exaltation. Jesus does not fade away; He is lifted up. This lifting up is not simply physical—it’s spiritual, symbolic, and royal. The Ascension marks the enthronement of Jesus. The Lamb who was slain is now the reigning King. The Ascension does not mark the end of Jesus’ work—it marks the continuation of it through us. So rather than it being the end, it is pretty much the beginning. The real work starts now, once He has Ascended.Perhaps, as the disciples stood on that Mount of Olives, a mix of emotions swirled within them. Wonder at the sight of their beloved teacher being lifted into the clouds, yes, but also perhaps a sense of loss, of being left behind. They had walked with Him, learned from Him, their lives irreversibly changed by His presence. And now, He was going. They thought they had lost Him at the crucifixion; then they found Him again at the resurrection. Now they appear to be losing Him again, or at least, that must have been how it initially seemed. But the Ascension is not an ending; it is a beginning, a transformation. It marks the completion of Jesus' earthly mission and the inauguration of his universal reign, where He sits at the right hand of God the Father, and from where He intercedes for us to the Father.But He didn’t leave the disciples, or us, powerless. He promised the Holy Spirit, and ten days later at Pentecost, that promise came true. The Spirit is the power and presence of Jesus still among us. So while He ascended in body, He remains with us in Spirit. The Ascension marks the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells his disciples that it is to their advantage that he goes away, "for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you" (John 16:7). The Holy Spirit, the very presence of God dwelling within us, equips us, guides us, and empowers us to continue the work that Jesus began. We are not alone; we are not abandoned. We have the divine Advocate alongside us, among us, working within us and through us. We are not passive recipients of grace—we are active bearers of it. Christ’s mission to redeem and restore is now our mission too. It is once we leave these church walls that we enter the mission field, not while we are within them. Out there…….that is where the real work of mission takes place.As the disciples are standing there gazing into the sky, two angels say, “This same Jesus… will come back in the same way you have seen Him go” (Acts 1:11). The Ascension is not just about where Jesus went—it’s about where history is headed. It’s about where we are going, where He is taking us.He will come again. Not in weakness, but in glory. Not to be crucified, but to reign forever. Every injustice, every sorrow, every broken heart will be met with His returning presence. And every tear will be wiped from every eye…..The time between Ascension and Pentecost is a time when prayer is really important. Prayer is important all the time, it’s our means of closely communing with our God, but as the disciples awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit prayer was perhaps their greatest comfort. We can emulate them as we pray for more people to say ‘Yes’ to Jesus, for more people to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. And when we find it hard to pray, or what to pray for, we must remember that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans, as St Paul assures us in Romans.Let us be empowered by the Holy Spirit to be his hands and feet in the world. And let us live with our hearts and minds fixed on the heavenly realm, eagerly awaiting his promised return. The Ascension reminds us that Jesus' work is not finished; it continues through us, his body, the Church. As he ascended, he commissioned his disciples, saying, "You will bemy witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth" (Acts 1:8). This same commission rests upon us today.So to re-emphasise, as Jesus was lifted up, as He ascended, He did not leave us behind. He sent His Spirit, at Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week, and He will come again. Until then, we worship, we witness, and we wait. This is the blessed hope that sustains us as we journey through life, facing trials and uncertainties.Therefore, let us go forth, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to be witnesses to the love and grace of our ascended Lord. Let our lives reflect the hope that is within us, the hope of sharing in his eternal glory.
It can be harder to get a new message through to those who are comfortable with how things are than to those who suffer at the hands of a currently unjust situation. Many of the poor in the old DDR of Eastern Germany were very keen to see reform, but the more equal members of the party were not so keen, and you only have to speak to a Romanian over the age of about fifty five to hear the same thing about that nation, and thank God they rejected the chaotic nationalism offered to them at the most recent election. A Muscovite influencer may also extol the current regime, whereas a different story is heard in Tiksi, where Moscow is but a distant rumour. We find the same here as well, as the recent council elections have shown, to the feigned shock of our own elite. This all has as much to do with deeply felt political beliefs as it has to do with how hungry people are and on occasion, how much people who have disenfranchised themselves feel that they have been disenfranchised by others. But the hungrier you are, the keener on change you will be. It is a commonplace that most of those who were first attracted to Christianity were from the hungrier parts of their society. ‘Consider your own call’, St Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘not many of you were wise, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is weak, what is low and despised in the world’.Most of those who wrote the books of the New Testament, however, were a little better fed, for they had obviously had enough of an education to enable them to write in more or less correct Greek. The exception to this is the Book of Revelation, from which today’s second reading is taken. In the third century, a learned Egyptian bishop knew that some people in the church rejected this book, considering it to be unintelligible and illogical. It was not a revelation, that is to say, an unveiling, at all, they said. Rather it was itself veiled by a great thick curtain of unintelligibility and even now, it divides people, particularly along the line of biblical inerrancy, which is a foolish title for those who believe that everything in the bible happened exactly as it is written and will occur exactly as it is predicted, even when the entire book begins with two contradictory creation narratives and ends with a cast of thousands of monsters and seas of blood. Nothing is impossible for God of course, not even that He might often speak in allegory or, indeed, parable.Denis of Alexandria was clear that the book was inspired by God, even if he hedged his bets about it being one long vision given to John on Patmos, although he did strongly suggest that its author could not also have written the Gospel or the letters of John, which themselves seem to form one canon of literature quite separate from the Revelation. One of his rationales is that whereas they are written in Greek that is eloquent and certainly learned, the language of Revelation is vulgar and often utilises poor grammar. Yet, if the author of Revelation cannot write without showing himself to be reasonably uneducated, he also shows himself by the standards of that time to be financially poorly off as well, however and this is a big and important however, in what he wrote we are able to glimpse how the Gospel of Jesus Christ transformed his life and outlook. That is, the Revelation is written by someone who knows the Gospels well and has a strong faith, which is worth more than education and wealth.This same Gospel informs the authors strong belief that life is simply not just to be lived as a rite of passage to Heaven, where divine opiates wipe away all pain. The acceptance of the Gospel opens his eyes to the wickedness and injustice and oppression of the world he lives in, as it should do to ours as well. While this fills him with anger, it also fills him with hope, with the confidence that human society, not beyond the grave, but in the here and now, can be and will be transformed into the just society God intends it to be.In the Holy city, come down out of heaven, to the earth, there will be no avarice, no oppression of the poor, for the baubles and the precious metals that the rich like to grasp to themselves will be as common as dirt in the street. And there will be no need for a Temple in this city, for the city itself will be the dwelling of God with human beings and the Temple in Jerusalem, home of avarice and theft, can assume the insignificance that it its due – earthly things may pass away, but the new Jerusalem, the heaven come to earth, is eternal.In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that the time will come when God’s true worshippers will worship him neither on the mountain of the Samaritans, nor in the temple in Jerusalem, but will worship him in spirit and in truth. The John of Revelation longed for the coming of that moment, when God will dwell with human beings, not in a temple, but in love and truth, two virtues so deeply lacking in he world. He has seen what will come to be if human beings will allow that divine Love to come into their hearts and change them. He has seen the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down, out of heaven, to the earth, and he is telling us, urgently, to get ready for it.
It might not feel it, this beautiful morning in the beautiful season of Easter, but in the Gospel it is a dark night, and the darkest of all nights, the night of the Agony in the Garden and the abandonment of Jesus by His Disciples. The Gospel reading begins ‘When Judas had gone out’. There is a direct correlation between Judas going out and the darkness and the shadow of the coming evils of the trial and death of Christ and the knowledge that love conquers evil and the Son of God illuminates even the darkest night.We are reminded of the words of Jesus, ‘The light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil’. So the darkness is to be dispelled by a new commandment ‘that you love one another as I have loved you’. But what is new about it? And why does this commandment remain new for the world two thousand years later? Why do we come here to this building to worship the source of love and to offer ourselves to the love that overcomes death and darkness?First of all, because love is more than a commandment — it is a gift and it points to the gift of Jesus to the world by his Father. It’s a gift that we are asked to offer to each other here as well, and to model beautifully, in whatever way we can. Doing things lovingly is reflects the glorification of Jesus through his passion and death and passes that on to us and our children, and through his passion and death we too will be glorified with the glory given by the Father to Jesus. But more, through this the Father himself will be glorified. This is the point of our love, to glorify God in and through each other and to enfold ourselves into that love. In a short while we will have our Annual Parochial Council Meeting at which we look at what happened last year, elect new officers for the coming year and, above all, seek new ways to love one another and our community. This is the guiding principle of our faith and our existence here – to love.Secondly, the new commandment of love is the expression of a covenant made with the world through the shedding of the blood of Jesus. The distinctiveness of this covenant is that it is an act of total self giving, an act of sublime generosity which reveals to us the Father’s generosity in giving us his Son.If we keep this covenant of love, we are told, ‘all will know that you are my disciples’ — so we will in fact make the Spirit of Jesus present for all time to and within the world and specifically here, in this place. But we need to ask, how do we show this love? How are we changed by it? How does it make its home within us?We need to reflect upon how John seems to understand the Trinitarian life of God, the relationship of the Son to the Father, and the relationship of the Father and the Son to the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian life of God is not something ‘static’ — it is intensely dynamic. The Father sends the Son, and through them both, the Holy Spirit. In Baptism we receive the Holy Spirit and, as it were, make a return journey. Through the Holy Spirit we are united with Jesus and we ‘return’ with him to the Father. There is a processionality of love, through the creation wrought by the Father, the incarnation of the Son and the life of the Holy Spirit, living and moving in each other and catching us all up in that complex but infinitely simple dance of love, or hope and of new creation and creativity, in which we all find our home and our gifts may be used to the full, holding nothing back, not even our own selves, but giving ourselves to each other in a ceaseless act of love and surrender to the greater, cosmic, divine heart.We are brothers and sisters of God and like Jesus we can call God ‘Abba’ Father; and we are made divine, not by nature as with Jesus, but by the gift of the new covenant of love which is greater than any other covenant and remains new and is made anew in every sacrifice of praise on our altar and on the altar of our heart.When we love deeply, we know the sensation of that love with reciprocity. Likewise with God, this occurs through the Word of God, the life of the Church and through the Holy Spirit constantly making us new and calling us to life in Him and with each other. This love makes it possible to show the love of God to the world, because we will bear it so clearly in our own lives that it cannot be hidden, if we will just allow ourselves to be lost in love.We become a light that dispels the darkness of evil, a light to the world. ‘By this will all people know that you are my disciples.’ But it will cost, as it cost Jesus, as there is no love without the cross, but this easter, we can rejoice that He has overcome the world and all things can be made new. Here is love, offered to us, all we have to do is take it.
This Sunday we call ‘Good Shepherd Sunday’ and for good reason, but it is also sometimes reduced to a plea for clerical vocations, which debases the readings we hear and leads us on to the dangerous clericalism that equates clergy with shepherds and everyone else as sheep. It is not to be so with us! The early church used the Good Shepherd, rather than the Cross, as its symbol and it is certainly the best known image in the New Testament with roots deep in salvation history: David, the boy shepherd, was chosen to be king of Israel; he was the anointed leader of the people of God, to guide and lead them towards God and his kingdom.The same early Church in its ministry of living the Good News of the Kingdom of God had perhaps encountered difficulties - what is true and what is false teaching. Great concern for the people of God is expressed; if the people are misled, if they are persuaded by a false voice, they could be prevented from attaining the Kingdom of God – in other words, how do we know, in the midst of the confusion of this world and its many competing voices even in the wider church, if it is the voice of Christ we hear most clearly?This concern was expressed also in last Sunday’s Gospel, when Our Lord appeared again to the Twelve after his rising again from the dead. The answer we were given is love. If you love me, you will feed my sheep, and the answer is so critical that Peter is made to give it three times, the third of which contains his confession of faith ‘you know everything’ – ergo, you are God. Last Sunday’s Gospel was also about the large catch of fish and about eating; Jesus prepared fish and bread and invited them to eat, this reminds us that the shepherd leads his flock to where they can eat, grow and develop, not to infantilise or spoon feed them.The Apostles would also remember the last time they were with Jesus before his death, when they were with him on Holy Thursday, in the upper room for the last supper and the first Eucharist; he fed them, they were in communion with him, united. They would also, however, remember their subsequent behaviour, because Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him, and the apostles abandoned him. When Peter was asked three times if he loved him, he would have remembered that he denied him three times. There were problems in the early church as there are problems now, and they revolve around shepherds who are wolves, priests and bishops who had accepted the call to be shepherds and betrayed the trust placed in them. This great scandal reminds us of the universal call to share in the shepherding, the guiding of the Church, and that we are called to lead and serve at the same time, to be involved in the world as it is and to point it to how it could be, but to do so authentically, not as an elite semi removed from it. Smell of the sheep, as Pope Francis often said, be together, be one.When Pope Saint Gregory the Great was elected Bishop of Rome, he shrank from what he called ‘this intolerable burden’. But he did accept and became a great pastor. We now know that some who undertook the great responsibility of pastoral care were quite unworthy, that they betrayed the command given to Peter and the apostles to guide, lead, teach and cherish and led into darkness. Do not let this happen to you, question your shepherds and make sure you share that burden with them, you are not only sheep, but you are also shepherds, we are all partly sheep because we follow Christ, who gave us all a charge to love each other. I was so happy to hear Pope Leo XIV on Thursday night, when he said, ‘To all of you, brothers and sisters of the whole world, we want to be a synodal Church, a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, always seeks charity, always strives to be close especially to those who suffer’. Well, may God bless him and keep him.And as for wolves and predators, well, Jesus did warn his disciples that he was sending them out as sheep in the midst of wolves. And we have always suffered from a double danger, liable to attacks from the outside from wolves and robbers and from false shepherds or leaders within, who have agendas that are theirs and not Gods. You see, the Bible doesn’t say that bad things won’t happen to Christians. It’s not ‘if I walk through the darkest valley” but “Even though I walk I through the darkest valley” which seems to suggest that it is more of an occupational hazard than a rare occurrence.Don’t treat the Good Shepherd as one of the Emergency Services coming to our aid when we’re in a bad place. Our Good Shepherd is with us as we wander through the green pasture as well, and life is so much more blessed when it’s lived in the knowledge that God’s presence is with us always and when we love each other.‘And surely I am with you always,’ says Jesus in Matthew 28. ‘..to the very end of the age.’ And as Pope Leo said, ‘This is the peace of the Risen Christ: a disarming peace, humble and persevering, it comes from God, God who loves us all unconditionally. God loves us, God loves you all, and evil shall not prevail. We are all in God’s hands. Yes, we are all in the hands of the Good Shepherd and we are all called to share in that work.
