Lord of All

Propers: The Ascension of Our Lord, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

As a younger man, I was fastidious about the differences between and within religions. This group believes this, that group believes that, and so on. I enjoyed cataloging the diversity. Yet as I’ve aged, and my own faith has deepened, I find myself struck by similarity: how so many of us have been saying very nearly the same thing, just in different languages, different vocabularies.

On the surface, everything’s different. Yet the further down we go, the more it seems to come together. I’m not saying that all religions are the same; they’re not. But we do share a lot in common, as one might expect if indeed we’re all encountering something real, something true.

One of the things we share is cosmology. We imagine Creation in similar terms. There’s always some sort of heaven above us; some sort of underworld beneath. There are always angels and devils and saints and ghosts, with fairies thrown in for some flavor. We have differing names for such critters, but the parallels are clear. There’s always some sort of sin, some sort of judgment, some sort of grace. There’s always the sense that the world has been broken, or left somehow incomplete.

And there’s always the One: this notion, this intuition, of a God beyond all gods, a Being beyond all beings; utterly infinite, utterly indescribable, save through analogy, using words like love and light and life; the Good, the True, the Beautiful; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss. The One is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere, both personal and impersonal, pure emptiness and yet the fulness of Him who fills all in all. “And this all men call God”—or so we like to say.

Jewish or Buddhist, Christian or pagan, Hindu or Muslim, our worldviews prove more alike than we tend or care to admit. We see the unseen in similar terms. And this could be due to the basic structure of the human mind, something we all have in common; or it could be because we keep running into the same things. We inhabit this one reality together, and so find that we have similar spiritual experiences.

The New Testament is no exception. The earliest Christians, like everyone else, believed in a tiered universe. The heavens above, the stars themselves, were populated by higher, stronger, purer spirits, whom pagans called gods and Jews called angels. Below us dwelt the souls of the dead, while yet further down stirred darker, baser, chthonic entities: titans and devils and far-fallen angels.

And then around us, in the waters and the trees and the air, dwelt daemons: not demons in the modern sense, but nymphs and dryads and little godlings of nature: elemental spirits, as St Paul puts it; fairies, we might say today. The Taoists tell tales of a time when humanity walked in harmony with angels and spirits of nature, before the Fall and the breaking of our world. It’s surprisingly similar to the first chapters of Genesis. It seems we all recall some long-lost golden age.

But when we talk about the world being broken, fallen, corrupted, we don’t just mean this earthly plane. The heavens themselves were imperfect; angels also missed their mark. This should be obvious in any recounting of Greco-Roman mythology. Their gods and goddesses, for all their glory, had very human foibles, immortal imperfections. Heaven wasn’t higher than us morally, or at least not by much. The beings in charge of cosmic order seemed to be drunk at the helm.

St Paul says this too. He implies that even the Law of Moses, the sacred Torah of his people, is flawed, is incomplete, because something was lost in translation. The Law passed from God to an angel to a man to a book. And at every step in that chain, it lost something. Angels, simply by dint of being creatures, simply be dint of having limits, cannot be perfect, cannot be God. But Christ can: Christ, who is both fully God and fully human. To say that Jesus is our mediator is really to say that there is no mediator. God Himself has come down. God Himself has come to set things right.

See, in the Jewish understanding at the time of Jesus Christ, our world is broken through and through. There are degrees of corruption, degrees of rot. Yet as we see in the Book of Job, for example, Satan himself walks about in the heavens, accusing us before the Throne of God. Down here on earth, the angels of the nations fight one another: Daniel speaks of Michael and the princes of Persia.

And so our real hope for salvation is the reign and Kingdom of God: not simply that the Messiah would reinstate a geopolitical Kingdom of Israel, but that God Himself would take command, God Himself would rule this world, perfectly, directly. Then at last would things be as they ought to be. Then at last would all wrongs be set right, and the heavens and the earth finally be remade, finally be redeemed. That’s what Jesus came to do: to inaugurate for us all the promised Kingdom of God.

In Jesus Christ, God became Man, became one of us, in order to dwell with us, to bring us all home in Him. And the spirits of nature obeyed His commands, did they not? And the darker things cowered in fear, for they knew who He really was. And when we murdered Him—murdered Him for forgiving us, for going around as though He were God—not only did He take that Cross and use it to draw all humankind unto Him—“Father, forgive them! They know not what they do!”—He then descended down to the depths of hell, and there He conquered death.

But He’s not done yet, is He? Oh, no. He is King of this land up above; He is Lord of the dead down in hell. Yet now must Jesus rise—now must Jesus ascend—up to the heavens, up to the highest levels of reality. And there He will take those angels, those spirits whom men call gods, and He will put them in their place. He will subject them to the rule and reign and love of God. And thereby shall even they be healed. Thereby shall even they be set free.

Yes, Jesus’ conquest of sin, death, and hell we rightly remember at the Great Sabbath, at the Easter Vigil. But today we recall the counterpoint to His Harrowing of Hell: His Hallowing of Heaven! What, can Heaven be hallowed? Need angels be made holy? Yes, by God! For no matter their glory, their beauty, their strength, they are themselves but creatures, but limited beings, children of our same Heavenly Father. The gods of men are the infants of God.

Just as we have all gone astray and all been forgiven, so are the angels of Heaven brought lovingly home again, home in Jesus Christ. No longer does Satan accuse us before the Throne of God; now there is only the Advocate, only Jesus Christ, who is our Judge and our Defender, our God and our High Priest. Jesus has opened up Heaven to all, to human and spirit and beast and bird and all that He has made. He rose up from hell with the ransomed dead resplendent in His train: the worst of us, from the time of Noah; the first of us, in Adam and in Eve.

Thus there is now nowhere, no when, no how, to which any of us can escape, no refuge from the inexorable, inextinguishable, love of God in Jesus Christ. If we fly up to Heaven, He’s there; if we fall down into hell, He is there. He is Lord of All. We call this Christus Victor: our understanding that in Jesus Christ God has reëstablished direct control of the cosmos, perfect reconciliation between Creator and Creation.

It doesn’t seem like it, does it? We look around, and the world is still broken. We look around, and children still die. And Christ is with us in it; Christ is here for it. “But when, O Lord,” we ask as Apostles, “when will You restore the Kingdom? When will we see the Reign of God inaugurated in Your Blood?” Lo, I tell you a mystery: all of this has already been accomplished. In eternity, it’s already done! Only here below, in space and time, does it seem to have yet to unfold.

We are like ants walking across a massive mural, a beautiful painting already completed. We cannot see the whole picture, yet we know we are within it. We know the artist, His love, His skill. We know the beauty we inhabit even if we cannot see. You and I, dear Christians, we are heralds, forerunners, messengers. We are foretastes of the feast to come. In due time, in the fullness of time, all will be revealed. All will be brought home. Yet for now, by our Baptism, we are time-travelers, of a sort, ambassadors of eternity. We bring the Good News, the Gospel of our King.

Christ has ascended to the heavens. He sits at the right hand of the Father. From there He reigns. From there He rules. From there He saves us all. Your Kingdom come, O Lord. And let it come through us.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.