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I Sing the Body Ascended

Ascension, Year B : 20 May 2012

One of my last duties before leaving St Peter’s, Willis St was to prepare a young professional woman for Confirmation who was much loved in the parish for her flamboyant personality. Shortly before the big day she announced that she had acquired a tattoo in honour of this important milestone in her life. What was more we were all treated to individual viewings of this unusual piece of body decoration as she turned around, pulled up her shirt, and pushed down her belt line to just above one of her shapely buttocks.

What a world we are living in, I reflected, when tattoos, once the sure sign that someone had spent time in jail or the navy, are now being proudly sported by attractive young people, who adorn the most intimate parts of their bodies with unusual designs. Yes, the cult of the body is advancing steadily in our society. Botox injections, cosmetic surgery, male make up kits - more and more people agree with the old song title that you need to keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved.

But all this care and concern about the human body has a point - it is through our body that we are present in the world; it is by means of our body that we are connected to other people. The very way in which you are thinking about who you are, the ways in which you are experiencing the world around you as you sit there this morning, are reliant on your body. It is impossible to think about who I am or what I am as a disembodied reality.

That is why Christianity takes our bodilyness very seriously. It is why the Word of God assumed a human nature, took human flesh, in order to make God real to people. It is why the resurrection of Jesus is the story of the appearances of his spiritual body that is recognisably his earthly body to the people who knew him well. They are able to touch him; they watch him eat fish in front of their eyes. And it is why the resurrection appearances draw to a close with the Ascension of his body to the right hand of the Father.

Scepticism about the Ascension focuses on the helicopter flight into heaven, and modernity’s rejection of a three-decker universe in which God is always up above. But as usual the literal minded miss the point. What is being drummed into us this morning is that the bodily ness of Jesus has not ceased to be as he concludes his resurrection appearances, and resumes his life in glory in the heavenly places. The human nature of Jesus has gone with him into his Triune life with the Father and the Spirit. He has not discarded his human nature, his fleshly existence, like an actor discarding a costume. Man with God is on the throne. The Word of God is indissolubly linked with the humanity of Jesus for all time. And just to make sure that the followers of Jesus get it, they watch that body make the transition into its new mode of existence.

Christian theology has in a sense still not fully come to terms with the staggering implications of what I have just said. Unpacking all the riches of this enduring intimate union between God and humanity is a work in progress, and has really only just begun.

Here are a few of the follow on consequences. It means that God is still fully committed to the human race in our unfolding journey back to the bosom of the Father. It is not as though after the mission of the Son is concluded his full attention has shifted to other places and other races in this vast cosmos. Now the fortunes of God and humankind are inextricably intertwined - he is deeply interested in us, and knows our human condition thorough and through having experienced it at first hand.

It also means that heaven and earth are joined - the dividing wall between the two is now thin, and often crossed by the back and forth commerce of heavenly beings. Our prayers can reach up to the saints in heaven who convey our requests onwards, deeply interested as they are in what we are up to. Above all Jesus is now the junction box as it were of all Christian prayer. True Christian prayer is always Trinitarian prayer to the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit. By his Ascension Jesus becomes our great High Priest, seated at the right hand of the Father, who ever lives to make intercession for us. This role is bestowed on him by the Ascension.

Yet most important of all the destinies of God and humankind have now been clearly stated. As Maximus the Confessor put it, God has modified his being, has put himself through a process of humanization, in order to be usefully and effectively with us, so that we can become one with him, united to him, can undergo a process of divinization. That means that we now have a high calling, which is to share in the divine nature, to take after God, to become like him. God has made it possible for us to modify our being, to become junior partners with God in our mode of being, to come home to the ground, source and goal of our being.

That doesn’t mean that we will become disembodied Spirits, pure beings dissociated from all our fleshly failings, cool, calm, utterly rational creatures, who have left behind all that is particular and peculiar to us. God likes us for our quirkiness, and our whimsicality, and the funny little features that make up each of our individual identities. C.S. Lewis got it right when he wrote:

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Men propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature.

And remember we will have spiritual bodies in the life of the world to come. In the Patristic Church there was much debate about what age we will all be in our risen bodies in the life of the world to come. The consensus was that we would be 30, the age at which Jesus began his ministry. So they too wanted to keep young and beautiful forever.

The American poet Walt Whitman wrote a famous poem called, I Sing the Body Electric in which he celebrated the very fleshiness of men and women’s bodies as one of the best things about being alive. I have called this sermon, I Sing the Body Ascended because in this wonderful salvation event we celebrate our eternal destiny as spiritual bodies living in intimate union with Jesus, our Divine and human Saviour.