Today, Ascension Day, is regarded by the Church as one of the greatest festivals of the Church’s year. It’s one of the festivals of the Church that can be regarded as having true ecumenical status because it’s held in equally high regard by both the Western and Eastern Church. In the West, by both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, Ascension Day is a Day of Eucharistic Obligation, a day when all communicant Christians should receive Holy Communion. So there can’t be any doubt that, in the eyes of the Church, Ascension Day is a very important day.

And yet for all that, I think Ascension Day is often treated as something of a poor relation when it comes to festivals of the Church. That might be something to do with the way Ascension Day is portrayed in imagery. In the Anglican Shrine Church at Walsingham, for example, the Ascension is shown as a pair of nail-marked feet surrounded by clouds on the ceiling of the one of the church’s side chapels, and I’ve known many pilgrims to Walsingham burst into fits of giggles when they’ve seen that image for the first time. That obviously means it’s very difficult for them to take the Ascension seriously. But I think the main reason for the relative lack of importance that many people seem to place on Ascension Day is that it’s sandwiched between the greatest day of the Church’s year, Easter Day, and that other great festival of the Church, Pentecost, when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church.

Ascension Day I think seems to get lost in the middle somehow. It’s perhaps seen as the filling in the gap between Easter and Pentecost, perhaps as a link between these two great days that simply has the purpose of fulfilling the words Jesus spoke to his disciples shortly before his death; 

“… now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’  But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.  Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” 

But Ascension Day is much more than that, it’s much more important than that.

And really, we shouldn’t be in any doubt about the importance of Ascension Day because we’re reminded of it at every Mass and Eucharist. Every time we say or hear the Eucharistic Prayer we promise to remember and rejoice at Jesus’ Ascension. And what’s more, we say that Jesus’ Ascension is ‘glorious’. So what is so important and glorious about Ascension Day?

Well, first of all, if we say that Jesus’ Ascension is glorious, we must mean that it gives glory to Jesus and to God. One of the things I’ve spoken about in sermons before, is that to give glory, or to glorify God means to say something about God. And Ascension Day goes say a great deal about God and about Jesus.

In St Luke’s account of the Ascension, he says that a cloud took Jesus from sight. In the Scriptures, clouds are often a sign of God’s presence or God’s glory. We read that repeatedly in the Books of Exodus and Numbers. We see it again at Jesus’ Transfiguration when a cloud covered the disciples who were there and a voice from the cloud proclaimed Jesus as God’s Son and Chosen One. So the image of Jesus being taken away in a cloud is a clear sign that Jesus was taken into God’s presence. And that’s exactly what out Gospel reading tonight says:

‘So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.’

So the first thing the Ascension tells us is that God raised Jesus to heaven, and in turn, that tells us that what Jesus said about his relationship with the Father is true. So it also tells us that we can trust Jesus and his promises.

And our trust in Jesus and the Father is reinforced when we look at the Ascension in the light of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Jesus promised to send the Helper, the Comforter, the Advocate, the Spirit’s given many names according to translation. In fact, as we heard tonight, the promise of the Holy Spirit was amongst the very last words Jesus spoke to his disciples before he ascended:

‘And while eating with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

Pentecost tells us that promise was kept.

Jesus’ Ascension also tells us something about Jesus as our heavenly Advocate and High Priest. The men in white, whom we believe to have been angels, told the disciples that Jesus would return from heaven in the same way that they’d seen him taken into heaven. We usually think of that as meaning that Jesus, having ascended into heaven in a cloud, will return in a cloud. It may very well mean that, but it means something else too.

Jesus ascended as both Son of God and man. He’d been resurrected from the dead, but he was still human, that is the whole point of the Resurrection after all. And if he returns in the same way, he will return as both Son of God and man. So having been born both fully human and fully God at his Incarnation, Jesus is both fully man and fully God forever, and he is now seated at God’s right hand as both our heavenly Advocate and High Priest.

As it says in the Letter to the Hebrews,

‘…  he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews then goes on to say,

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

As High Priest, seated at God’s right hand in heaven, the sacrifice Jesus offers to make propitiation, to placate God’s displeasure at our sins, is his own sacrifice made once, for all, on the Cross.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that Jesus will one day return from heaven. That’s something Jesus also promised, and his Ascension tells us that we can trust Jesus to keep his promises. But, as we also heard tonight, when that will be only the Father knows, so there’s no point in us speculating about when that might happen. But Jesus’ Ascension does tell us something that is of more immediate concern to us.

In his Resurrection, Jesus was raised from the dead as a man. That tells us that we can also be raised from the dead. At his Ascension, Jesus was raised to heaven as a man. That tells us that we can be raised to heaven too. Perhaps not in a cloud as Jesus was, but nevertheless, where Jesus has gone in his humanity, we can go in ours, from life to death, and from death to new and eternal life in heaven. That is also a promise we have from Jesus, whose promises we know are trustworthy.

The importance of Jesus’ Ascension, and of Ascension Day itself, may be lost to some extent in some strange and peculiar imagery. It may be undervalued because, coming as it does between the great festivals of Easter and Pentecost, Ascension Day is overshadowed to some extent by those great festivals of the Church and of our faith. But it shouldn’t be. Ascension Day is regarded by the Church throughout the world as one of the great festivals of the Christian year and great events in the story of our salvation. And, when we think about what Jesus’ Ascension tells us about God the Father, about Jesus His Son and our brother, and about the Holy Spirit too, it is every bit as glorious as we proclaim it to be at every Mass and Eucharist we celebrate.

Amen.

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The Propers for Ascension Day can be viewed here.

Entrance Antiphon

Speak out with a voice of joy; let it be heard to the ends of the earth.
The Lord has set his people free,
alleluia!

The Collect

God our redeemer,
you have delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life,
so by his continual presence in us he may raise us to eternal joy;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)        Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
                                   Psalm 98
                                   1 John 4:7-10
                                   John 15:9-17

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         Acts 10:44-48
                                   Psalm 98
                                   1 John 5:1-6
                                   John 15:9-17

Over the past few weeks, our news media seems to have been concerned with perhaps 3 main stories. One is, of course, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is understandable given the scale of the pandemic and the effect on people throughout the world it’s had and continues to have. Another thing we’ve heard a lot about in recent weeks is political scandal, and whether that’s who paid for Boris Johnson’s flat, or Keir Starmer being thrown out of a pub, political scandal is always in the news. The third major strand of news in recent weeks has been the European Football Super League. Why that should be more newsworthy than Russia, America and China facing-off in various parts of the world is something of a mystery to me I must admit but then, unlike me, many people do seem to agree with the ex-Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankley that football is more important than life and death.  But amongst all this, one item of news that seems to have slipped under the radar, is the death, last month, of Hans Küng.

I don’t know how many of you have heard of Hans Küng, or have read any of his works but he was, I think, one of the great figures of the Church from the second half of the 20^th Century onwards, and one the Church should have paid far more attention to than it did or has. Küng was a Swiss RC priest, but his main claim to fame was as a theologian and author. He was one of the main theological advisors, and the youngest, behind the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 as a result of which, the RC Church acknowledged for the first time that other denominations of the Church are Christian Churches, albeit Churches which, in their eyes, are in error.

And that reflects something of Hans Küng’s own beliefs. His passion was for Church unity, in fact he called disunity in the Church a scandal and a disgrace which should never have happened. But, unlike the mainstream of Roman Catholic thought, he believed that everyone, all Churches, were to blame for disunity. So, whilst he believed that the RC Church was the true, original Body of Christ, he also believed that the RC Church was in error too, and so, equally guilty of causing, deepening and perpetuating disunity in the Church. 

Küng set these ideas out in a book published in 1968 called The Church. That was a book he dedicated to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey and he hoped that his book would form the basis of reconciliation between the Church of England and the RC Church that would lead to full communion between the Churches. But we know that didn’t happen and the RC Church were none too pleased about some of the things Küng had written in his book and he was called to explain himself. 3 years later, he published another book called Infallible? in which he called into question the doctrine of papal infallibility. That eventually led the Church to stripping Küng of his license to teach in the Catholic faculty at Tübibgen University where he was professor of theology. Küng called this his experience of the Inquisition, although the university actually got round the problem by forming a new faculty of ecumenical theology that was outside the Church’s jurisdiction and Küng carried on as professor of theology at Tübibgen until he retired in the late 1990s.

In addition to his belief that the RC Church was also in error, perhaps what really ruffled the Church’s feathers was Küng’s understanding of what needed to happen for Church unity to become a reality. The mainstream RC stance at the time was that other Churches had to change and conform to RC doctrine and practice if unity was to be possible. But Küng’s belief was that all the Churches had to change to make unity a reality. He said that Church unity wasn’t a matter of one Church submitting to another or being absorbed into another, but a matter of all Churches submitting to Christ and becoming absorbed into him.

And it was Küng’s belief that, as the Churches did this and grew closer to Christ, they would automatically grow closer to each other and become more united. And that is an understanding that, I think, flows readily from the image of Jesus as the vine and his disciples as the branches that we read in this morning’s Gospel.

The image of the Church as a great vine or tree is a very common one. Christ is the vine, or the trunk, and we, his disciples who make up the various Churches are the branches. But there is a problem with this image if we look at a vine or tree, or at most plants. Because, as we look at a plant, whatever it is, what we see is a main stem, or trunk from which the branches grow, and through which the branches draw their nourishment. But, as we look, we notice that, as the branches grow, they grow outward, away from the stem. And from the big branches there grow smaller branches. From the smaller branches there grow still smaller branches and so on, each branch growing further away from the main stem and becoming smaller as they do so. We also know that we can take cuttings from plants, we can remove them completely from the main stem but, if we plant them, of perhaps graft them into another plant, they’ll still grow even though they’re no longer connected to the stem that originally gave them life.

And isn’t that exactly what we see in the Church? It’s perhaps an oversimplification, but originally, there was the vine, Christ, and one branch, the Church. About 1,000 years ago, the branch split into 2 main branches which we know as the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. 500 years ago, the Western branch split into what became known as the RC Church and the Reformed or Protestant branches of the Church. Our own branch, the Anglican Church grew from somewhere in between these two branches. The Methodist branch of the Church grew from the Anglican branch and then itself split into many other branches. In fact, today, there are 80 independent Churches all calling themselves ‘Methodists’.  And so it has and still goes on.

What makes this situation worse, is that these branches shoot and grow because those who found them, tend to think that the branch of the Church they grew from is in error. They think that the branch they grew from has lost its connection with the stem, with Christ the vine. And so they try to grow in a different direction which they believe will bring them closer to the vine. What can make matters even worse is that these branches of the Church can start to believe and act as though they’re the branch which has the closest and most direct connection to the vine, perhaps even that theirs is the only branch that is connected to the vine at all. This seems to have been the pre-Vatican 2 RC understanding, that the RC Church was the only true Church, the only branch that was really part of the vine of Christ. But the RC Church can’t be singled out for adopting that kind of attitude. In one parish I served in, ourselves, the Anglicans, and the Roman Catholics, were effectively excluded from the Churches Together group in the area when a new Baptist minister took over its leadership and refused to include us in any communications or invite us to any events because, and I quote, “Roman Catholics are not real Christians and you’re too close to them.”

It must be said that this situation has existed for a long time and the Church has suffered from people with this kind of attitude throughout its history. In the early Church when the Church was far less divided than it is now and, in effect, the Church could speak with one voice, small branches which wanted to grow in their own way were usually asked to return to the main branch of the Church and only if they didn’t, were they denounced as heretics. Often, because it was obvious that these small branches had separated from the main branch of the Church, they died out. But over the years, the Church has become more divided. The number of small branches of the Church has grown and grown and now the Church can’t speak with one voice.

This in fact is one of the main problems with the doctrine of papal infallibility. In principle, the Pope can only make an infallible statement when he speaks for the whole Church because then he speaks with the authority of the whole Church. But in practice, the Pope doesn’t speak for the whole Church and so he can never speak with the authority of the whole Church.

And it’s this lack of the Church’s ability to speak with one authoritative voice that makes Hans Küng’s words so powerful and so worthy of our attention and respect. Ultimately, there is only one authority in the Church, and it is the vine himself, Jesus Christ. And so, if we want to be connected to the vine, either as individual Christians or as a Church, we need to be connected to Christ. We need, as the saying goes, to be rooted in Christ, to be grafted into Christ, and to draw our nourishment from Christ so that we can grow from him and in him. We need to make sure that we’re not growing and drawing our nourishment from some distant branch of the vine that’s grown far removed from the vine himself, and the way to do that is to make sure that we grow closer to Christ.

Hans Küng said that division in the Church was a scandal and a disgrace that should never have happened. His words echo the words of the Church Fathers, those Christians who were closest in time to Jesus and the Apostles. For the Fathers, disunity in the Church, schism, was the worst of all sins because it was caused by a failure of Christians to do the very thing they’re called to do above all else, it was caused by a failure of Christians to love one another. 

The closer we are to Christ, the less likely it is that we’ll fail to love one another and so the less likely it is that Christians will fall out with one another to the extent that it will lead to divisions and disunity in the Church. And the closer we are to Christ, the more likely we’ll be to remember and take to heart his prayer that his Church, and we must always remember that it is his Church and not ours, that his Church will be one. Perhaps then, there will be enough people in the branches of the Church who share Hans Küng’s passion and desire for Church unity to bring it closer to the reality, not only that Hans Küng wanted it to be, but that Christ, our vine, intended it to be.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the Fifth Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.