One of my most vivid early memories can be dated precisely to the twelfth of April 1961. My grandmother had died the previous November, and we had been clearing her tiny terrace house in Haltwhistle. Getting on the train to travel home felt like being expelled from a childhood paradise. I’ll come back to that idea of Paradise as a place in a few moments.
Once we were home, I took myself to bed significantly before the usual time for the ten-year-old me but I was very soon shaken awake by my mother.
“You must come down and watch the news! The Russians have sent a man into space!”
After that first manned space flight, Yuri Gagarin was widely quoted as saying that he been into space but that he hadn’t seen God or Heaven. He never said it – the comment was made by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and, many years after Gagarin’s early death, a friend revealed that, like so many people of his generation, Gagarin had been discreetly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant and that he made sure that his daughter Yelena was baptized shortly before his space mission, in case he did not return safely.
Khrushchev’s piece of atheistic propaganda was prompted by the once widespread belief that the universe had what Bishop John Robinson called “a three-decker structure” – earth in the middle, hell down below and heaven up above. There are striking images of the Ascension of Jesus Christ from past centuries inspired by that belief, including frescoes and paintings in which He has almost disappeared upwards into a cloud and only His feet can still be seen.
Our reading from Acts might seem to suggest the kind of vertical take-off those paintings and frescoes depict, so how can we understand the Ascension now that we know, as Khrushchev put it, that heaven is not “up there”? A three-dimensional explanation won’t do but our understanding of dimensions suggests a way forward. We experience four dimensions because we ourselves and the world we inhabit clearly have three and we also know the passage of time, which is the fourth. It may help to think of heaven, of Paradise, of being in the full presence of God, not as being in a place but as experiencing dimensions of which, during our earthly lives, we are only intermittently aware; dimensions glimpsed, as it were from the corner of our eyes.
Our Celtic pagan ancestors and their Christian successors had a sense of this, for they spoke of “thin places”, places where those extra dimensions can be glimpsed. Places can be geographical, they can be buildings such as our church and they can be acts of prayer and worship, including our Eucharist. The altar around which we shall presently gather is a “thin place”, a place where we draw near to the many dimensions of the divine and the divine draws near to us
I have several times been back to my childhood paradise as an adult and, on one occasion, I took a Russian friend and his family with me. A few years later, he returned the compliment by taking me to the beautiful lakeside village in Novgorod Province where his grandparents had lived. The church there was desecrated in Stalin’s time and has remained a ruin. My friend explained how, as a small boy, he played in the ruins and, looking up at the damaged fresco of Christ in majesty on the inside of what had been the main dome, had a sense of something mysterious and very important – a glimpse of those other dimensions. What he didn’t know then, because he was deemed too young to keep the secret, was that his parents had, like Gagarin’s parents, arranged for him to be baptized in a clandestine service. Clandestine because his father’s job depended on his being a member of the Communist Party.
One of the prayers that the Russian Orthodox Church uses on Ascension Day includes these profound words:
“In your Ascension, you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”
Those words pick up on the theme of glorification in today’s Gospel. What Jesus means by glorification isn’t obvious. He certainly didn’t mean the kind of self-aggrandisement that human beings sometimes indulge in – lots of gilded decoration in your office, a vast ballroom next to your house, a plan to build the world’s biggest triumphal arch – you know the kind of thing. We simply cannot glorify ourselves in the Biblical sense of the word. For glorification in the New Testament isn’t about bigging-up. When we say “Glory to God” we are not bigging God up – as if we could. The theologian Karl Barth helpfully defined that Biblical understanding of glorification as
"…to make either oneself or someone else appear such as he is; to show forth something in its essence…"
When Jesus in today’s Gospel prays:
“I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”
He means that his whole life, death and resurrection have been a showing forth of God’s nature. The Russian Orthodox prayer I quoted a moment ago needs to be understood in the light of that.
“In your Ascension you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”
The Ascension glorifies us in the sense that it reveals our full human potential. We too can be drawn into close relationship with God. We too can be glorified in the sense of having our full human potential realized.
That possibility of closeness to God is one of the reasons why we are not celebrating “vertical take off” today – the Ascension is not about Jesus’ disappearance into a remote location. Rather it’s about three things:
Firstly His glorification – the making fully clear of who he is. In that sense it affirms and completes the good news of Easter, the good news of the Resurrection.
Secondly His closeness, God’s closeness to us. Closeness in the sense of availability, if we are receptive, and closeness in the sense of shared experience. The Ascension is about the taking of our humanity, including our sufferings and the death which awaits all of us, into the very heart of God. Because of the Ascension, God is, of God’s very essence, suffering, dying humanity glorified and brought to completion. Not in some remote place but in dimensions very close to us and sometimes glimpsed, as that small Russian lad caught a sense of mystery and wonder while playing in a church desecrated and half demolished by a dictator.
Thirdly about the possibility of our glorification, of the realisation of our full human potential for loving relationship, a process in the here and now, in the four dimensional world, a process which by opening our awareness of the dimensions of the Divine moves us towards the complete fulfilment of our potential. That’s what Charles Wesley was on to when he wrote:
“Changed from glory into glory
Till in heaven we take our place.
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love and praise.”