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thoughts for Ascension Day
They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.
Can you remember the first time that you fell in love? I am not referring to the experimental infatuations of early adolescence, but the time when you really fell in love, in a major, "river deep-mountain high" sort of way. Absolutely everything that you valued in life up to then totally paled into insignificance in comparison with "the beloved". It was as though you had entered a completely different plane of existence where only the one you loved gave meaning to your life. "He worshipped the ground that she trod on," they used to say. And you did the daftest things to make yourself worthy of her slightest affection. I even joined the college men's hockey club because the object of my desire played for the college women's team. Since you know that my opinion of sport suggests that using anything less than four wheels to indulge in it sounds too much like hard work, then you will know how far gone I was!
Can you remember what you felt like when it all ended, when you saw her walk away, knowing that you would never, ever see her again? A part of you went with her, and there would always be a small quiet emptiness within you, no matter what ever else happened to you throughout the rest of your life. "The sun ain't gonna shine any more," as the Righteous Brothers sang in the nineteen-sixties, and they were not wrong. You did not know then that a greater love could subsequently heal the wounds of the loss of what you thought had be the greatest love of all time, but there was always the one remaining scar that you never showed to anybody.
People talk an awful lot of balderdash these days about what they term "relationships", but alongside the deep emotions and irrational passions of romantic love there runs the noble course of human friendships. Can you remember when a friend last did you a kindness that was so magnificent, so generous, so self-sacrificing, that you began to understand how Jesus really loved his disciples? Can you remember when life's circumstances caused your friend to move away and you thought to yourself, "I'll never find a friend as true as that again?"
The story of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, his final resurrection appearance – his final resurrection disappearance, effectively – can only really be understood if you make reference to what you may have experienced personally rather than to what you may have speculated about theoretically, or even theologically.
You see, you and I, and the disciples of Jesus, have all been in a very difficult position. We have not loved Jesus in terms of human romantic love – how could we? Perhaps only Mary Magdalene could have done that. But, on the other hand, a Saviour has been far more to us than even the best of earthly friends. We have not lost him because he has gone off to love another set of people rather than us, but as in the case of a lover or a friend who has departed from us or who, in irrevocable terms, has died, our eyes cannot now rest upon the one whom we love. We say that the Saviour has been far more to us than even the best of earthly friends, but you can open the door to earthly friends and sit them by your fireside and make them a cup of tea and show them personally how much you care.
The paradox is even more complex. In human romantic terms, you love somebody because you have seen them. I loved her the moment that I set eyes on her, you say… some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger… But in terms of divine love, you love a Saviour because you have heard of him, heard of what he has done, heard how he loved people like you and, by implication and faith, how he actually loves you now. But seeing – ah, now that's a matter for a future beyond the shackles of time and the narrow stream of death.
The disciples who stood upon the Mount of the Ascension loved Jesus, with all the intensity of the human heart, because they had seen and had known him, but also because they were going to see him again.
We all know about "some enchanted evening", but there is a moment in terms of human romantic love before the spark bursts into an unquenchable flame. Everything is quite ordinary, quite unremarkable – and then it hits you… and somehow you know, you know even then, that somewhere you'll see her again and again…
Somewhere you will see him… In the last chapter of the account of the revelation afforded to him by God, Saint John the Divine said of Jesus and of those who love him: They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. Beyond the gulf between the seen and the unseen, symbolised by the story of the Ascension, we shall see his face, and his name shall be on our foreheads. For most of the time, human life is quite ordinary, determined and conditioned by the terms of sight and proof, but suddenly a different transcendent reality imposes itself upon your heart and soul: They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads. It is as though you have become aware that, unseen, somebody is loving you with the greatest love that has ever been known in the universe. It is as though the mark of the cross upon my brow, put there nearly fifty-eight years ago, is throbbing with life, that the divine enchanted seeing is but the breath of God away.
And then the moment passes, and I walk down the mountainside to what I can actually see and touch once more. The difference is that now I know, beyond my present sight, our heaven of heavens awaits.