Acts 1.1-11
Luke 24.44-53
https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=582458634
Today is Ascension Day. Having heard the lessons that you have heard, and having recited the Apostles’ Creed, you are in no doubt that we are celebrating Jesus’s Ascension, his going up into heaven.
Perhaps the nicest and most picturesque words in this connection unfortunately are not ones that we in Wales use, but they are in Psalm 47, verse 5, where the Church in Wales sees fit to translate the verse as, “God is gone up with a shout of triumph, and the Lord with the sound of trumpets”, whereas in the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer (which is also authorised for use in Wales), Bishop Miles Coverdale translated the Psalms, and what he said was, “God is gone up with a merry noise”. Gone up with a merry noise: and I am delighted to say that that expression, ‘gone up with a merry noise’, actually survives into Common Worship, the Church of England’s latest prayer book.
It reminds me of someone releasing a balloon, so that it shoots up to the ceiling, with a noise like a loud raspberry. I hope it’s not sacrilegious or blasphemous to have an innocent smile at the thought of Jesus disappearing into a cloud like a balloon – and Coverdale left no doubt what sort of noise it was, by what he said in the second half of the verse, (God is gone up with a merry noise,) and the Lord with the sound of the trump. The sound of the trump.
Am I seriously saying that the best we can do in the face of the Ascension is to make schoolboy jokes? Perhaps we are a bit embarrassed about the story, because honestly I don’t think any of us really believes that Jesus somehow levitated into the clouds, with or without sound effects, and disappeared from sight. I suppose you could say that, if we believe in the Resurrection, that’s so difficult to believe that adding an Ascension doesn’t really make any difference in terms of credibility. In for a penny, in for a pound.
It does bother some people, even faithful people in our churches here in Penarth. I took a service the other day and we recited the Creed; on the way out as I was shaking hands with everybody, one of the faithful said to me, “By the way, he descended into hell: where is hell? Where exactly is that?” And as far as I can tell, they were not trying to pull my leg.
What do these apocalyptic miracles really mean? Are they in any sense true or factual? Those of you who have heard me preach before, will know that at this point I like to bring out the story of the first spaceman Yuri Gagarin, who apparently was asked by President Khrushchev whether he had seen anybody up there – and he was able to confirm that he hadn’t. There weren’t any people with white beards sitting on top of the clouds. But it didn’t actually put Yuri Gagarin off going to church. So far as I know he was a regular churchgoer and he remained one after going up above the clouds.
But equally, if someone who doesn’t normally darken the doors of church came in and listened to what we were saying and what we were professing to believe, they might react with a certain amount of ridicule. So I would say that we ought to be able to cope with the idea that the Ascension is a story. It is the sort of story that you would have to have made up in order to explain why Jesus was no longer there, after a substantial period – it says 40 days – of resurrection appearances. If there hadn’t been an Ascension you would have had to invent one.
Well, maybe that sounds insufficiently respectful, and if so, I hope the Lord will forgive me. But I think it’s important to wrestle away at the true meaning of the Ascension story. As I was in my study writing this, I looked up and there, high up on the windowsill, was Tikka Masala, my beloved Bengal cat. Bengals love to climb up things. My other Bengal, the late lamented Poppadum, who lived to cat 100, 21 years old, was an inveterate tree climber. She scared the pants off us by getting stuck at the top of really tall trees. But she never actually fell, fortunately. She was queen, queen of all she surveyed. Top Cat indeed.
People like going up. If you are ‘high up’ in society, it means you are superior – and indeed ‘superior’ is a Latin word which means above, on top of, something. All the ‘high’ words, or at least most of them, have very positive connotations. To be ‘on high’ is to be at the top, to be superior indeed, to be in charge.
There is a slight exception which is that, certainly at the time of Jesus, it did slightly depend in what context you got up to your high place, whether this was a good thing or not; because if you were strung up, as Jesus was in the crucifixion, then ascension was not divine or praiseworthy but was a sign of disgrace. But that does seem to be an exception that proves the rule.
The idea of the divine being ‘high up’ predates Christianity, of course. The Greeks believed that the gods lived above the clouds on Mount Olympus, and in the Old Testament the Canaanites worshipped the Baals ‘on the high places’. They erected sacred poles and altars in high places. They were obviously meant to be the sort of place where God would be found. The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t just believe in one Ascension, Jesus’s Ascension, but also they believe that his mother Mary ascended into heaven too.
If you are a logical positivist, as I was when I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy – and I was fortunate enough to attend some of the last lectures given by Sir Alfred Ayer in Oxford – you learned that for something to have meaning you had to know what would contradict it: and I wonder whether there is that kind of connotation to the very mysterious thing that the two men in white say to the disciples. ‘This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ Jesus is going to come back, which is a reversal of the Ascension, a contradiction of it. And perhaps as such that flags up for us the possibility that this may look far-fetched, but it’s not. We may not understand how something works, but all we need to know is that it does work. So I think we are allowed to let our imaginations run riot on Ascension Day. God is indeed gone up, with a merry noise.
hughdbryant 