Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Holy Cross, Seend, and St Peter’s, Poulshot
Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11
“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?”
The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.
You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.
No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.
They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.
But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.
And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.
That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.
What does Jesus mean by being glorified? Here, He means being raised up on the Cross. Being put to death in this particularly gruesome and hideous way is how Jesus opens the way to new life. Jesus is glorified in facing all the evil and cruelty that the world can produce, so much that He is killed by it – but because He was truly God as well as truly human, death could not hold Him and so He destroyed death.
Jesus says something else about glory. He says that He has been glorified in the apostles. Despite all their failures – the worst of which will be revealed immediately after Jesus finishes this speech – Jesus is glorified in them. This is because of their faith in Him, even though it often faltered. Jesus is also glorified in us, here this morning, the people who gather today in the fellowship the apostles founded – that’s quite a mind-bending thought, isn’t it? Jesus is glorified in us, because of our faith, faltering and flickering though it is – it is that faith that will allow Jesus to carry us into heaven.
And what is this glory preparing us for? The new life which Jesus has opened the way for us – which is eternal life. How much of our lives are governed by the march of time, and how much of our suffering is caused by us being unable to reverse it? “If I could turn back time”, runs the old song. There are so many mistakes we would avoid if we could live our lives again. Regrets are part of life, but can so easily curdle into bitterness. Failures can end up wounding us so much that we stop trying to live the lives we truly wish to live.
Perhaps having the freedom not to be soured by our regrets or enchained by our failures is a means of experiencing a foretaste of heaven while still on earth. If we are able to try again and again, with all the wisdom that experience gains but without the fear or cynicism that too often accompanies it, then we are experiencing something of the heavenly life.
What heaven is and what we shall be in it is a mystery. But Jesus promised eternal life, so liberation from time must be part of the story; and that freedom will allow us to grow in ways that are impossible for us now; we shall be capable of moving in entirely new dimensions, like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly.
Given that it promises to free us from the tyranny of time in the end, it is paradoxical that Christian life, like all of life, is sometimes a waiting game. Celebrating that is built into the Christian year. Advent is, of course, the great season of waiting, but this short period between Ascension and Pentecost is also a time when we contemplate waiting.
After Christ’s Ascension, the apostles went to wait in the upper room – not evangelising or lobbying the authorities, but praying, with Mary and the women. This was the embryo of the two-billion-strong Church of today, waiting to be fertilised, waiting to be filled with the power of God. They still do not understand what is coming; Pentecost will not match their expectations either. The Kingdom that arrives will not be the one they have been imagining over campfires in Galilee. It will be stranger, harder, and tremendously larger. It will cost them everything in this life, requiring them, in the end, to die one by one at the ends of the earth – Rome, Armenia, India.
We are not so different from them. We too sit in upper rooms of our own making, half-formed in our understanding of what God is actually about, hoping for the restoration of a Church or a country or a life that perhaps was never quite as good as we remember. Yet Christ in His prayer at the Last Supper does not pray that we be removed from the world, or that we remake it, but that we be kept in the Father’s name. The first task of waiting for God to move is not striving but trust.
Will you trust God enough to allow Him to use you for what He needs rather than what you think you want? We still don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next. But we do know that God has a future in store for us that is not only stranger than anything we could imagine for ourselves but also much greater. We do know that if we trust Christ’s promises, the final end will be in heaven, a place without regrets, where we will remain who we already are, yet also be transformed into something we cannot yet understand.
Now to God the Father who reigns in heaven, to God the Son who leads us to heaven, to God the Holy Ghost who fills us with the love and peace of heaven, be all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
