The Sunday after Ascension, 21 May 2023, Austwick
The resurrected Jesus had a habit of appearing out of nowhere, and leaving in the same mysterious way. His ascension was his final disappearing act, as he left his friends staring into the cloud which had enfolded him; and to add to the strangeness, two men in white then appeared, to tell the disciples that Jesus had been taken up into heaven, and would one day come back in the same way.
All of this gives the resurrected Jesus a ghost-like quality, but let us recall that Jesus persistently assured his friends that he was no ghost - he was a human being fully alive: ‘Put your fingers in my wounds,’ he told them, and they did, and they believed. ‘Eat this bread I am breaking with you,’ he said, ‘Come to shore and share this fish with me’. The resurrected Jesus cooked breakfast; the resurrected Jesus had a healthy appetite. Jesus, when he ascended, was a man fully alive.
What this means for those left behind gazing upwards, wondering where God has gone; what this means for us, is that ‘Now there is in heaven One who understands us’, a man fully alive to every human experience, a man especially attuned to struggle and suffering, this One now in heaven ‘who intercedes for us’. Our God in heaven is no distant deity, but One just like you and me. What confidence this can give us that when we pray, we are fully heard, and fully understood. [1]
And what this also means for those left behind gazing upwards, what this means for you and me, is that ‘Jesus is no longer restricted to one place, but, seated on the throne of heaven, he is present in all places.’ When he lived in first-century Palestine he showed us how God acts in a particular place at a particular time. Now, ascended, he is everywhere all at once; he has departed East Jerusalem to now live, ‘not in one place, but in each heart.’ [2]
Now, his friends and followers, you and me, all have the joyful chance to act with him and for him in our particular place; to take what we have learned from him, and to apply those lessons here: what he taught about loving God, and loving our neighbours, and loving our enemies, and the way he manifested those teachings when he lived in Galilee, by his routines of regular prayer, by his generous self-giving acts towards those on the edge of society, by his words of forgiveness on the cross.
‘Now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world,’ he prayed to his Father. And to his followers, that day on the Mount of Olives, he said, ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’
Now, we know that the disciples were slow to comprehend much of what Jesus told them, particularly about what was coming. Understandably so, for what he told them about his future and theirs was unprecedented, unparalleled. We might excuse them if, in those first encounters with the risen Jesus, they thought they were seeing a ghost. And any of us who have experienced loss might identify with these disciples, that in those moments and days after he first left them, they were haunted by his absence.
All that he had promised while he was with them, all the potential of a better life…. evaporated.
All the hopes he had awoken in them of a kinder, more loving world…. withered away.
His healing touch, his broken bread, his spoken words…. de-materialised.
In such times of loss life can seem hopeless, like ‘the present has given up on the future’. [3]
But those who gaze upwards, wondering where God has gone, are not left alone. For in just these sorts of times God ruptures the present with an ‘eerie entity’ which does promise a future; ‘the spectre of a world that could be free.’ [4]
The followers of Jesus are haunted by a vision of all his earthly promises being fulfilled. The more we devote ourselves to this wonderful vision, the more it comes to life; and this awakening is enabled by One who the Church calls a 'ghost'.
By the Holy Ghost, our dreams of a better life in Christ, re-emerge with real potential.
By the Holy Ghost, all the hopes that Jesus awoke, of a kinder, more loving world, take shape. In the broken bread of communion, in the spoken words of liturgy, Christ re-materialises to us.
By his Spirit we know his healing touch: through prayer, and through the life of the community of those who gather in his name, to minister his love to each other and to the world.
The late theorist Mark Fisher made the chilling observation that our society ‘has given up on the future’; that the old secular promises of continuing human progress have been revealed as lies; that the old materialist promises of a wealthier, healthier life for all, we now know are built on human misery and the exploitation of the earth. Capitalism is revealed as being an increasingly ruinous system; and where ‘it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism’, despair sets in. [5]
Fisher held the view that ‘When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.’ [6]
For Christians, we may find ‘the unactivated potentials of the past’ in the words of scripture which carry such power to transform broken lives, and to repair a broken world.
Let the gospels witness to the regenerative power of Jesus’ life and teachings; let the Acts of the Apostles and the later New Testament books show today’s believers how to live and thrive in communities of faith which will transform the world around them. Let the Psalms help us sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Let the prophets inspire our social action in a world we have the power to change.
‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Austwick, in all North Yorkshire and the UK, and to the ends of the earth.’
Notes
[1] Wild Goose Worship Group, Stages on the Way: Worship Resources for Lent, Holy Week and Easter.
[2] John L. Bell, The Saviour Leaves in John L Bell / Graham Maule, Enemy of Apathy (songbook).
[3] Mark Fisher, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology.
[4] Matt Colquhoun, Acid Communism. Krisis, Issue 2, 2018. Quoting Mark Fisher and Herbert Marcuse.
[5] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative?
[6] Mark Fisher, The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology.
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