Ascension Day: a reflection

Even in these times of ordeal, we must celebrate. All around us, people are lonely and afraid. They are suffering and dying. They are grieving, lost and sad. There isn’t a household in England that the virus hasn’t touched in some way. We could easily feel as forlorn as the disciples gazing at the sky Jesus has disappeared into. Like them, we could imagine he had abandoned us. 

Yet as it says in the funeral liturgy of the Orthodox churches, ‘even at the grave we sing ‘alleluia’. Forty days after Easter, it is still the season of resurrection. Christ is risen. In our troubles it’s all the more important to celebrate and allow this marvellous springtime to help us say ‘yes’ to life. For death is swallowed up in victory. 

And today, Ascension Day, we celebrate Jesus as Christ the King, our Sovereign enthroned in glory. It is as he has been proclaiming throughout his ministry, that God reigns. Ascension affirms that the exalted Christ ‘fills all things’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, so that he may be in our midst and all around us, among us and within our deepest selves. Far from having left us orphaned and alone, he is Immanuel, God-with-us in time and eternity. And he invites us to embrace his reign and renew our citizenship of this glorious kingdom. Our hearts are full of joy.

Jesus’ ascension is of a piece with everything he has been to us in his incarnate life. In the New Testament his exaltation is spoken of in the imagery of the coronation of the kings of Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes a chain of texts from the Psalms to show how the hopes and longings projected on to Israel’s human rulers are realised in Jesus who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2); ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever’ (Psalm 45). 

But if we follow that imagery back to its source we find we are drawn to the duties of kingship as well as its privileges.  The king is to be God’s servant, loyal to the covenant. He is to be the agent of peace and justice, the guardian of the vulnerable and poor. In another psalm (82), God sits in a cosmic court with the heavenly beings gathered round him. Are they worthy to be called gods, he asks?  The test is simple. ‘Maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute; rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’  

But these lofty princes fail dismally and are condemned. ‘How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?’ ‘I said you are gods, nevertheless you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.’  In high office they have forgotten who they are and why they have been raised up. They have forfeited the right to govern. They have ascended the hill of the Lord only to be toppled by the sin of pride.   

Not so the exalted Christ.  For he bears the imprint of the nails on his body, and takes us with him into God’s very heart. As we should have been singing today in the Ascension Day hymn:

See! the heaven its Lord receives
Yet he loves the world he leaves:
Though returning to his throne,
Still he calls mankind his own.  

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as our great high priest who even in his exaltation is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters and to be with us. ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect was tested as we are.’  That letter could not be more emphatic on this point that Jesus passes the test of what it means have ascended as the highest of the exalted ones, above all principalities and powers. High and lifted up as he is, nevertheless he is present to the lowliest of his family to deal gently with us, and especially with the needy whom he calls in St Matthew ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters’. 

So humility and service, not pomp and pageantry, describe the ascension of Jesus. For he is the same Lord who healed the sick and spoke kindly to the neglected, washed his disciples’ feet, felt the agony of Gethsemane and went out to die.  Any other messiah would not have been born in a stable with nowhere to lay his head, been executed between thieves, risen secretly behind the stone, or ascended on an obscure hilltop with only a handful of witnesses to tell of it.  

But this Messiah has taken the form of a servant, never more to lay it by. His ascension is as ‘kenotic’ as his incarnation and crucifixion: an act of humble self-emptying, for this is how he is not only in time but in eternity. There is one glory for the Lord who took the form of a slave: one abasement, one lowliness, one meekness, even in his exaltation and enthronement.  

Only this Messiah could still bear the marks of the nails as the risen Lord. Only this Messiah could be pictured as a Lamb upon a throne. Only this Messiah could be our great high priest who feels for humanity, intercedes on our behalf, and serves us by washing our feet. Only this Messiah could humbly come to us in bread and wine so that we might welcome him and exalt him in our hearts. 

We want to know in these times that God is not far away from any one of us. It’s the marvellous paradox of Ascension Day that while in one sense Jesus has ‘gone away’ as he said he must, yet he is closer to us than our own souls. He walks alongside us to lighten our burdens and share our joys. We can trust him to comfort us and help us, answer all our longings and make us whole again.

Ascension Day 2020
Ephesians 1.15-23, Acts 1.1-11, Luke 24.44-53

A Homily on Charles Simeon

At a gathering of catholic clergy, what are we to say about Charles Simeon, the evangelical clergyman who ministered for half a century at Holy Trinity Cambridge, and who died on this day in 1836? I read his biography when I was an undergraduate at the other place. It was approved Christian Union literature, that slim blue paperback with three silhouette caricatures of Simeon as a preacher on the cover. The author was Handley Moule, the early twentieth century bishop of Durham. I was touched by it, more than I expected. I kept it all through my ministry, though I’m afraid I left it behind in the Deanery at Durham when I retired.

What was it about that book? I think it was the character of the man himself. It wasn’t that he sat loose to the doctrines that characterised evangelicalism: justification by faith alone, the sufficiency of atonement through the sacrifice of the cross, the centrality of the scriptures, the final coming of Jesus as saviour and judge. All of these he embraced and preached ex animo. But it was the experience of Christian faith that mattered most to him, how every believer needed to have a personal relationship with Jesus. It all flowed out the profound change of life he had undergone as a young man preparing to receive communion in Kings College Chapel. He was overwhelmed, he said, by a sense of God’s redeeming love. Like John Wesley a generation earlier, his heart was “strangely warmed”. It’s the classic evangelical story of conversion.

When you have ministered in a place as long as Simeon did, you become a legend in your own lifetime. No doubt the decades at Holy Trinity, where he had met considerable opposition to begin with, were looked back on later with a kind of apostolic glow. It no doubt coloured the way Bishop Moule wrote about him as a fellow evangelical who was, perhaps, an important role model for him.

I put the book down persuaded that Simeon was the best kind of Church of England evangelical. His personal qualities seemed to breathe the spirit of our epistle reading today from Colossians, what it was that St Paul gave thanks for in them: “your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven”. Simeon was renowned as a great preacher and evangelist whose sermons drew crowds from miles around. And yet, I guess, the most compelling sermon he gave was the life itself. As the preacher spoke, so the man lived. 

For all of us in public ministry, our evangelical example, the gospel we embrace and embody in our own habitus or way of life, is the sermon that is remembered when a thousand others have been forgotten. Conversio mori, the conversion of life, isn’t the prerogative of only one sector in the church. The Rule of St Benedict sets out what this vow means in the life of the community and of each individual. And Benedict would certainly have endorsed a famous saying of Simeon, when asked what he had learned most as a pastor. “The three lessons which a minister has to learn” he said, “are: 1 Humility. 2 Humility. 3 Humility. How long we are in learning the true nature of Christianity!”

“The true nature of Christianity.” To humble ourselves before God is the very heart of the converted life, whether it is before the scriptures, the holy sacrament, or the divine image in the neighbour we serve in his name. To humble ourselves before him, whether it is in worship or penitence, adoration or fear, preaching or presiding, listening or praying or loving or serving, in times of trouble or of joy. Our vocation as priests, as ministers, as evangelists is, I think, to be a public embodiment of the virtue of converted humility and humble convertedness. We know it when we see it in others. May it be seen in us too, this great work of God in our lives and ministries, and in the depth of our souls.

Given at a gathering of the Society of Catholic Priests at St Martin's, Byker, 13 November 2018

Two Young Men who Ran Fast: St Cuthbert and St Francis

I think of St Francis as the Cuthbert of Italy. I put it that way round because here in Cuthbert’s shrine, we recognise that Cuthbert is the senior saint by 500 years. What do they have in common, these two saints who lit up the worlds they moved in and have been remembered and loved ever since? Famously, there is the ecstatic love both had for the natural world, not a sentimental affection for furry creatures but a reverence and courtesy towards all living things that sprang directly from how they saw creation transfigured by God’s presence.  You could imagine Cuthbert singing The Canticle of the Sun. There is the compassion they both had for human beings at the extremes of wretchedness and need: they embraced the poor and outcaste as God’s special possession.  There is the simplicity and humility they were both admired and loved for, their willingness to take up the cross and for its sake become nobodies. And finally their burning witness to the good news of Jesus. ‘Why not be turned into fire?’ asked Francis once. It was the fervour of their lives that made their testimony so life-changing for others. ‘Preach the gospel: use words if necessary.’

But I’d like to focus on what strikes me so strongly in both these beloved saints we honour.  They were both young men, privileged and powerful, like the character in today’s gospel reading, running up to Jesus and eagerly kneeling in front of him.  To me, he captures something of the spirit of Cuthbert and Francis, at least as the story begins. He wants to know what he has to do to inherit eternal life.  He does not walk or stroll but runs: he wants to know.  This is not the lazy insouciance of someone who is not greatly troubled by the answer, whose question is merely a courtesy or a way of alleviating the boredom of being rich.  He wants to know because he needs to know and he will not go away unless he gets an answer.  So Jesus tells him, not without first pressing him to examine his assumptions: ‘why do you call me good?  No-one is good but God alone’.  Be sure of the premise of your question.  Does this would-be denizen of the kingdom of God have any idea who this good Man is who has stopped to teach him what citizenship means? 

Yet we can admire this youth who though young and rich and powerful is not so arrogant as to forget the importance of curiosity.  His running up to Jesus tells us something about his motivation and desires. He wants to be a disciple, a learner in the school of Christ, and embrace the kingdom of God that is coming upon the world which Jesus’ teaching points to so urgently.   So he runs towards Jesus and all that life in him will offer: wisdom and purpose, truth and joy and peace. He will do anything it takes to inherit eternal life. 

Anything?  Jesus tests him on this next, for now it is not only the premise but the resolve that must be examined.  ‘You know the commandments: don’t murder, or kill, or commit adultery, or steal, or practise falsehood, or defraud; and honour your father and mother.’  It is a kind of spiritual triage: who can come out of it with clean hands and a pure heart as the psalm says?  Yet still he is there, undaunted, looking up into Jesus’ face, full of desire to do the right thing and not disappoint the man whose words are charged with promise.  ‘Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.’  Does Jesus smile at a young man’s naivete?  Or does he give him the benefit of the doubt: not that he has been perfect (‘no-one is good but God alone’), but that he has sincerely lived by torah all his life, the divine law that is the source of all that is wholesome and good in human life?  To follow torah is to learn virtue, train our moral compass, live wisely and grow in the image of God.  All this he has done from his mother's arms.

He will not turn away.  And here St Mark’s story makes the most telling point of all.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him.’  That little detail, like the young man running, paints a picture a thousand words could not even sketch.  He loved him.  It is the only time Mark, Matthew or Luke ever say that Jesus loved someone.  Indeed, if you search the word ‘love’ and its cognates in the first three gospels, you will only find it used of God’s love for his Son, and our obedient love for God and neighbour, apart from here.  ‘Jesus, looking at him, loved him’, a verb Matthew and Luke can’t bring themselves to preserve when they tell this story.   Why not?  Is this love for a winsome youth too specific, too particular?  What was it that Jesus loved?  His dogged persistence in not letting go?  Jesus was drawn to people like that: the Canaanite woman who was not put off by his insulting riposte that it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs; the wayward Mary Magdalene so desperate to be loved.  A parable told of the widow who wouldn’t give up pestering the judge until he gave her what she wanted.  This young man is another unlikely companion: there aren’t many rich people in the gospels as dogged as this when it comes to the kingdom of God. 

And then the denouement.  We don’t want it to come, wish that it could have been otherwise, for we too have come to care about this young man and his destiny.  ‘You lack one thing’ (how his heart must leapt at that: just one thing!). ‘Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.’  And at once the light in his eyes starts to dim.  ‘When he heard this he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions’.  It’s as if there has been a kind of death.  For it is a real bereavement: the hope, the vision, the promise suddenly knocked away from him, and only the stern, unyielding demand of the good Teacher echoing in his ears as he slinks away, the cruel summons to give up his life for the sake of the kingdom he wants so badly. 

‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’ says Jesus, and this is the point of the story.  He goes on to reflect with his disciples on where lasting value lies: not, he says, in material gain but in following where the good news leads.  Contemplating the renunciation of what we have and what we are for the sake of the kingdom of God: that is the only test of how much we really want it, how eager we are to embrace it.  I think of Cuthbert, the privileged young man who had a vision of St Aidan and abandoned his old life to run towards the monastery at Melrose.  I think of Francis the privileged young man whom his angry father disinherited and who gladly ran into the arms of Lady Poverty, giving away everything he had to the beggars of Assisi. It is stories like these that tell me that Christianity is true, and how far I have to travel before it becomes true in me.    

Most of us are not rich and not powerful, and many of us are not young any more.  Perhaps our running days are over, perhaps the gleam in the eye is duller than it used to be, perhaps our naïve but eager curiosity has been displaced by life’s abrasions into settling for the easy compromises of a cosy, untroubled existence.  So how do we keep the spiritual flame burning bright?  By practising singleness of heart, the kind of simplicity that by making us a nobody, cleanses our sight, focuses our intention and gives us back the longing with which we always wanted to run towards the kingdom of God.  We only have to run towards it, say yes to it, grasp hold of it.  This was Cuthbert, and it was Francis, two young men who obeyed the call, became poor and found where true wealth lay. Could it be you? Me? I feel for the rich young man who began so well, but could not do it, or could not do it yet. Yet I’m confident of this: that even when he turned away, the good Teacher did not stop loving him.

Durham Cathedral, 5 October 2013 (Mark 10.17-31)