Ascension of our Lord - Notes - Saint Albans

We are celebrating today the great feast of the Ascension of the Lord. Jesus is now raised up to a full participation in the life of God. We affirm this fact of the Ascension every time we say the Apostles’ Creed, “He ascended into the heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father”. 

Now the question is  We live in the 21 century, do we still believe this prescientific teaching or does this doctrine sound mythological? What on earth does this teaching have to do with us? 

I think we shouldn’t take the Ascension in a literalistic way. The Ascension has nothing to do with a literal journey undertaken by Jesus into the time and space. If the body of Jesus is still travelling in the speed of Light, He’ll be hardly beyond the galaxy after 2000 years. Modern science confirms that there are millions and billions of galaxies in the whole universe. Jesus has now decisively passed out of our dimension of space and time, and into the dimension of God. 

So why is this important to us? We hope in Christ we can one day have a similar elevation, to share in the way of God’s being. Isn't it wonderful if we live in such a way transcending the limitations of the time and space.  Look, the fact I am standing here in St. Alban’s means I can not be anywhere else. I am limited by this Asian Chinese male body.  But, What will happen if I am not confined by my body which conditions me by the force and the gravity so on? What will happen if I can exist in that same wonderful way that God exists?  In some ways, that’s what the Ascension of the Lord opens us to this possibility.

Some of you might have heard or read stories of near-death experiences. I heard a few and they were very interesting and fascinating for me. It is not necessary for you here to convince you to believe near-death experiences. But my point is those stories are to open us to the possibility which maybe there’s a way of being transcending the ordinary limitations of time and space.  The Ascension I think wakes up this hope. It provokes our religious imagination.

Our Christian hope has to do with the resurrection of the body which I now believe it is a core of our faith. Or even better, the transfiguration of the whole self through God’s grace.  Remember in the NT, when someone asked what is resurrected body look like? Paul said “it’s like having a spiritual body”.  It’s still a body. Yes.  It was the body of Jesus ascended, but now a spiritual body that powers of a spirit, that is exactly what we are hoping for. 

The Apostles’ Creed ends with the statement “We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting,” and the Nicene Creed closes with “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Both Creeds talk about resurrection. It involves not the leaving behind of the body, but the transfiguration of the body. The risen Jesus appeared in an embodied state to His disciples, and He said to them, “Touch me and see that I have flesh and bones.” 

Therefore, the resurrection of the body is not an escape from matter, but a renewal of it. Let us see what St. Thomas Aquinas views the resurrected body look like? He imagines the glorified body as a body fully itself, but exercising its power at a higher degree of perfection. John Polkinghorne, an Anglican theologian and a scientist, he thinks that at death, that form is remembered by God, preserved in the divine mind, and then restored and reorganised with a new and immortalised materiality.

So a feast like Ascension gives us the chance to speculate, to meditate, to hope, to look forward to this wonderful day. We are not so much to lose our bodiless, as our bodiless will be transformed, elevated, transfigured, like Chris His own glorified body.  

Ok, let me give you some images. This is a square in two dimensions. Now I lift this square up into a third dimension. I suddenly make the square into a cube. In such transformation, the square is not lost, but it is been raised up to a higher level.  Again think about the triangle becomes the pyramid, In such transformation, triangularity has not passed out its existence, but has been transfigured into a pyramid. One more, Think of circle that becomes a sphere. The circle has not disappeared but it is been elevated into a sphere.  

These imageries I admit are too simplistic, but it gives some sense of what the resurrected, or glorified, or ascended body means. St Paul told us “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard what God has prepared for those who love him.” 

I love reading Greek Philosophy.  I admire Plato and Socrates. There is a sharp division between mind and body, between the material and the spiritual, between earth and heaven. I used to see my salvation as my soul escapes from my body to a disembodied state, a purely immaterial realm. That was my understanding of “heaven” which clearly influenced by Plato and Socrates. However, this understanding of heaven is contradicted by Jesus’ prayer. His great prayer “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” is clearly not a prayer that we can escape from the earth, but instead the earth and heaven may come together. 

Recently I developed my theology. The reason is I don't want to end up in a disembodied state in heaven. When one day I am in the heaven, I look around, you my sisters and brothers all have resurrected, glorified bodies. Then I ask God, merciful Father, Can I have one resurrected body like them? God responds, “Not necessary, Peter Jin, you don't need a body, you are the faithful follower of Plato, go to that way, Plato and Socrates are expecting you. In order to avoid this embarrassment with God in heaven, I made up my mind to change my Theology.

The Ascension also leads our deep desire to worship God. In the Gospel reading today, “After the ascension, the disciples return to Jerusalem with great joy. And they were continually in the temple praising God”. Once they have witnessed this transformation of Jesus into a high dimension,  Once they knew Jesus has been drawn fully into the life of God, what they wanted do, they wanted to praise God, they wanted to worship and they spent the whole day in the temple.  

Our worship here in St. Ablan’s, our Mass is a participation NOW in the heavenly life. rather than just gathering us to find deep inspiration.   

In terms of heaven, I have two quotes from C. S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas. C.S. Lewis clearly saw three most wonderful experiences in the life: 1. deep friendship, 2. sexual intimacy, 3. aesthetic pleasure are often with a kind of sadness—a sense that there must still be something more. Heaven is what matches up to that desire beyond desire, and to that searching beyond searching. The mind and the will still want decisively to see. Thomas Aquinas said There is a kind holy longing in us. There is an aching, a restlessness that pushes us beyond anything in this world toward a transcendent truth, a transcendent goodness, a transcendent beauty.

Ok, let me get back to point of The Mass is a participation NOW in the heavenly life.  Look, from the very beginning of our Mass, when we bless ourselves in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, we are situating our lives in the dimension of the Trinity. We are hoping, looking, for particiting in God’s life. How often in the liturgy we invoke the angel. Just before the singing of the Sanctus, when Fr. Philip calls upon the angels and encourages us: “may our voices be one with theirs in their triumphant hymn of praise.” What Fr Philip suggests is that earth might, with Christ, ascend to heaven and that heaven, in the person of the Holy Ghost, might descend to earth, and that the two dimensions might sing together in harmony. At the Eucharist, we anticipate the heavenly banquet when we are with all the saints and angels siting around the throne of God. Throughout the Mass, in our worship in our praise, we orient our lives on high, we look beyond the limitations of time and space, hoping and straining toward this life to come, the Ascension wake us up in this liturgical desire.

Our worship in St. Alban’s is the best way to foretaste the heavenly banquet. Brothers and sisters, we are so blessed to have this style of worship in here. Any Christians I think if they want to foretaste the heaven banquet, they should all come and to see how we worship this triune God.

Last but not least, two angles in the first reading we heard earlier appeared to the disciples saying, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?” What the angels hinted was “Hey, men of Galilee, under the influence of Jesus’ spirit, Get to work. Do all that you can reconcile heaven and earth. And get on the mission of the church.”  My dear sisters and brothers, On this great feast of the Ascension, keep our eyes fixed on this wonderful life to come in the spirit of praise and worship, look above and it is precisely then we have a great sense of our obligations here in this life.