When the Heavens Fall
Propers: The Ascension of Our Lord, AD 2024 B
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.
The ancient world held, nigh-universally, that great men—Pharaohs, heroes, Caesars—could ascend into the heavens after death, there to live as immortals amongst the gods. This earthly sphere was but one tier of a many-layered cosmos, with levels of reality both above and below our own. The higher one got, the more real one became.
Philosophers believed in a heavenly realm of forms, of spiritual, timeless truths, the eternal models of which all objects in the physical realm remain mere imitations. Our world, in other words, is shaped, directed, and guided by the realms above us, by bodiless spirits, the powers that be. Pagans called them gods. Jews would call them angels.
Today we celebrate the Ascension of Our Lord, the 40th day of Easter; technically last Thursday. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that the Risen Christ continued to appear to small groups and even to large crowds, for a full 40 days following His Resurrection. That number, 40, always has significance in the Bible. The ancients well knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to reach full term. Thus 40 represents a period of pain and growth resulting in new life, new birth, busy calling forth a new Creation.
On that 40th day, Jesus offers parting instruction to His Apostles, promising them that the power of the Holy Spirit would pour out upon them at Pentecost, just 10 days hence. He is then lifted up and taken from their sight by a cloud, carried off to the highest of heavens. Such imagery, mind you, would have been most familiar to the hearers of these Scriptures. Great and holy men—Enoch, Moses, Elijah—were held to have been assumed bodily into Heaven following their deaths, or their notable lack thereof.
There they dwelt with the angels, with the so-called sons of God, and became something rather angelic themselves: what we today would term our saints, those gods within our God. The cloud which calls Him home recalls the cloud of divine presence, which descended upon both Moses’ Tabernacle in the wilderness and Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, the very point of those sacred structures was to bring Heaven down to earth, and humans up to Heaven. The High Priest would pass beyond the veil into the presence of God.
Nor would this be lost upon the Romans and the Greeks. The historian Livy, whose life overlapped with Jesus’ own, reports the legend that Romulus, the founding King of Rome, was taken to the heavens in a storm cloud whilst reviewing his Roman army. Livy notes that he doesn’t believe this tall tale, mind you. He opines that Romulus was likely torn apart by angry senators, who then spread the whirlwind as their rather wild alibi. Nevertheless, a king, taken to heaven, as a god, by a cloud, would have rung familiar to the Senate and People of Rome.
Special guy on a cloud gets to go to Heaven. Seems a fair enough story, a blessed reward. But that’s not how Christians read it. That’s now how Christians have ever read it. The Ascension is not the retirement of Jesus. It isn’t His pension and gold watch in appreciation for His service. No, Jesus goes to Heaven for the same reason that He went to hell: to conquer it! His Hallowing of Heaven is the counterpart to His Harrowing of Hell.
Here’s what I mean. We all know that hell is messed up, right? Whether we’re talking about Hades, the land of the dead, or Tartarus, the pit of the damned, it’s not a place—or more accurately a state—where we really want to go. Christ descends into hell on Good Friday in order to shatter its gates, to crumble its walls, and to rise with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train; even those lost and wayward souls from the time of Noah, whose “every thought was only evil all the time”; even back unto Adam and Eve, who are all of humanity rolled into one dysfunctional couple.
Christ is King of Hell! He has conquered the dead and the damned. And He has done so not with armies, not with weapons, not with legions of fiery angels, but with His own precious sacrifice, the infinite lifeblood of God. Hell is no more, once we know the Christ. Alleluia! But it isn’t just the lower realms in need of Resurrection. No, the rot has run all throughout Creation, all the way from top to bottom. The rebellion of the Satan had begun in highest Heaven, and everything below it followed suit from those ideas.
Remember what I said about the layers of the cosmos, the celestial spheres. Our ancient understanding of the world, with its many-tiered realities, was governed by the spiritual realms, the angels and godlings above us. And they’re nearly as messed-up as hell. When St Paul speaks of archons, of dominions and powers and thrones, he doesn’t mean the devils below; he speaks of the angels above. The architecture of reality is broken. Even the good angels, the holy angels, are affected by the Fall, by rebellion and sin and pride.
Maybe they didn’t revolt against God. Maybe they took up the war on His side. But no matter how we parse our mythology, they are still a part of Creation; thus they suffer with the whole. Christ ascends into Heaven not to take a seat at the table, not to recline on the comfiest cloud, but to fix the whole damn bloody universe. It’s a broken world, as well we know: a world where bad things happen to good people; where innocent children suffer; where war is claimed as greatness instead of hell on earth.
That’s what He’s gone up to fix. Christ has ascended into the realm of forms, of ideas, and of angels, the realest layer there is, far more substantive than we here down below. No longer shall archons rule the cosmos, and men rule the planet, and devils rule in hell. No, for every knee shall bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. Then He shall hand over His Kingdom to the Father, that God at the last shall be All in All.
This is then the victory we celebrate today: that in Jesus Christ, God has gone all the way down, to the deepest pits of nothingness, the outer fringes of hell, and then risen all the way back up, splitting the tomb asunder in His wake and conquering reality itself. From our perspective here on earth, the job seems yet undone. Our world is still broken. We live yet in our sin. But in eternity, all is accomplished. Salvation is fully complete. And we have foretastes of this here on earth, glimpses of eternity in the shattered mirror of time.
In Word and in Sacrament, in the Body of the Church, we have a preview of our destiny, an outpost of the Kingdom here upon a hostile earth. We are taken out of time, by our Baptism, selected and set apart to be a priestly people of God, the hands and feet of Jesus Christ at work within this world. We could not earn this blessing, we the worst sinners of all, yet by His grace has Jesus claimed us, and ransomed us from death. We are children of higher reality, the sons of God Most High.
When we arise from baptismal waters, when we share in Holy Communion, when we proclaim the forgiveness of sins, there is the rule of Jesus Christ entering our world. The higher reality stoops to raise the lower. The God made Man makes humans into gods! We are liberated from sin, from death, from hell, not in that they don’t affect us, but in that they have no ultimate power over us. We have seen their end, their defeat at His hands. And so we can weather our hardships knowing that we are but pilgrims on earth as it is.
Our true selves live beyond time and sin and death, for we have died, and our life is now hidden with Christ in God. The heavens have bent to His will. The angels have cast their crowns. And all the powers which afflict us—storms and sicknesses, tyrants and twits, devils and devourers—have already lost their war. They shall pass and we shall rise and no-one can kill us again. For Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father. And Love shall now rule all the worlds.
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.
RDG Stout
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