Video for Ascension Day 2025
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. In my tradition of recording Ascension Day videos from as high as I can get, I’m recording this from 40,000 feet above South Sudan. I recorded it on my way back from Uganda a few weeks ago. As I said a few weeks ago the postal service is fairly slow from the other side of the world, so its entirely plausible a card written now would only just be getting home in any case.
The Soviet Government of the 1960s declared their space programme had unequivocally found no evidence for the existence of God. Their astronauts had gone above the atmosphere and found God wasn’t there as medieval cosmology predicted he should be. Of course, the biblical metaphors of up and down referring to heaven and hell are just that – metaphors, which are not helpfully read literally. Perhaps this video plays the metaphor a bit too literally as well. Am I implying that the higher your altitude the closer you are to God? The Ascension story does talk about being taken up to heaven, but it also says a cloud hid Jesus from their sight. Elsewhere we have a picture of eternity and the temporal world as two realms, occasionally overlapping, but which will be re-united when Jesus returns as the consummation of history.
In the here and now our capacity to judge whether we are further away or closer to God is limited. We may associate closeness to God with intense spiritual experiences. However, some of the great exemplars of faith like Mother Teresa, whilst beginning her extraordinary ministry in response to a heavenly vision, reported a dearth of spiritual experience for much of the latter part of her life. Paul alludes to his extraordinary Damascus Road experience in his second letter to the Corinthians but then says his greatest experience of the reality of God is in his weaknesses. 2 Corinthians 12: 10, “That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Jesus said that the greatest evidence of God’s glory was not in the miracles but in him on a cross, where at one point he cries, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The old footprints poster, where the offscreen narrator asks why there was only one set of footprints in an especially trying time in life, implying that God deserted them, receives the response that it was then that God carried them. A bit glib of course, but with more than a grain of truth. If holiness is the quality that enables us to see and experience God more than anything else we recognise a quality that is often best forged in suffering, which is rarely pleasant.
Nonetheless the Christian mystics from St. John of the Cross to more modern ones like Thomas Merton, Henri Nowen and Strahan Coleman all stress that God is relentlessly loving, always seeking us out: a God who can be known and longs to be known. One strand of God imagery in the Bible is uncomfortably romantic. The words that establish the covenant between God and Israel in Exodus are borrowed from a classical Israelite betrothal ceremony, with all that that implies. Israelite disobedience is spoken of in terms of adultery. The prophet Hosea has the uncomfortable job of modelling God’s love towards Israel by marrying an unfaithful wife who keeps leaving him to return to prostitution. I confess as a bloke I find some of this language more than a little uncomfortable. Some doesn’t translate well into individual terms because the spouse in the narrative is always collective, i.e. the whole community, rather than individuals. However, when I licence new clergy part of the exhortation is from the letter to the Hebrews inviting them to fix their eyes upon Jesus. Contemplation, or the silent sitting with God, reflecting on his beauty, love and kindness is a well attested practice of prayer.
Ultimately, whether we feel close to God or not, Jesus’ exhortation at the Ascension was to wait until clothed with power from on high. The fact is that to be a Christian is to be in receipt of the Holy Spirit. God dwells in the heart of believers. The metaphor of up and down might be overstating things, but this metaphor reassures us that whether we feel it or not the ascended Jesus is with us always, until the very end of the age.
+Richard