Ascension Day

Address

9 May 2024

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

He ascended into heaven. Christ is gone up into heaven.

We need to understand that Up is something that all of us here are almost completely disabled from understanding. Here we are, in the company of frequent fliers. We are people whose minds have been fed with wonderful, but essentially domesticated images from the Apollo programme and the Hubble telescope. I wonder if you can imagine UP, before aeroplanes and spacecraft?

In the ancient world, which means the world until the 20th century, UP is where you cannot go. You can climb until your legs give up and your lungs burn, but you cannot touch the sky or move beyond the earth. UP is what you can yearn for and never attain. UP is what you can dimly see, and never fully understand. Until very recently UP is, by nature, inaccessible to all human beings forever. UP is, next to death, the great mystery, and it stands for what is permanently beyond our grasp.

Now understand that Christ is Gone UP. Christ is at one with the unattainable Other. Christ is Transcendent. Christ alone of all humanity is beyond, beyond death and beyond height, in the unattainable and unimaginable elsewhere. But what does that mean to us?

I wonder whether you ever have a sense of being torn between two places. Perhaps somewhere where you have been happy, where you have intense memories. Sometimes I think my students are torn between home and College. Home is loving, supportive, comfortable, largely free, boring. College is wonderful, exciting, occasionally expensive, exhausting. When they are at home they want to be at college, and when they are college, they want to be at home.

If you are a Christian, and the faith has taken root in you, then part of your heart is with Christ, and you are torn between two places. This world with its loves and trials and hopes and possibilities. Heaven with its perfection, its peace, its Christ.