Dear Friends,
We continue in these last Easter days before Pentecost to ponder the Ascension and its implications.
When cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin returned to earth, Soviet journalists were quick to ask if he had seen Heaven. His answer in the negative was widely used in anti-religious propaganda. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that atheists just don’t get it! An overly literal and simplistic reading of the Ascension also risks missing the point—has us looking in the wrong place—as we seek to make sense of the story. Even the angels in the account in the Book of Acts ask, “Why do you stand staring into heaven?”
In the Ascension, we are reminded that our calling is to be, as literally as you like, ‘the Body of Christ’.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
No hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on the world.
Yours are the feet he will use to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands he will use to bless people now. (S. Teresa of Avila)
The Ascension is not ultimately about absence, not an excuse for other-worldly abdication. If the Incarnation has any meaning—if we really do believe that this Jesus shares our humanity—then in the Ascension we are somehow carried with him to the very heart of God. We who share flesh and blood with him, as we remind ourselves when at Mass the wine and water are mixed, are invited to enter into the divinity we have known in Christ.
In the Ascension, paradoxically, we are grounded in eternity. We are grounded in God. That is a hope that sustains us, a reality that will not be broken by anything: not departure, nor times of darkness, nor death.
We are in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. This morning’s Gospel, part of Jesus’ great High Priestly Prayer, speaks to the wounds of division upon the Body of Christ, and to us all: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Amen. May it be so.
This week a new Vestry meets for the first time; please hold them and their work also in your prayers. Today, incidentally, is the eighth anniversary of my Priesting. Such a small landmark on the journey when compared to the other clergy of the parish, but a delight to be celebrating it with you!
And so we end this Easter season as we began: Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
May God bless you all.Fr Tim Hurd
