A SERMON FOR THE SUNDAY BEFORE ASCENSION DAY

FATHER JAMES MURRAY SSC
Eucharistic Travellers on the Look-out for Jesus

"Watch, for you do not know when the time will come." Mark xiii.33.

"Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray." Mark xiv.38.

I received a startling missive the other day, which informed me that, in the year 2000, the dear Jesus was definitely coming. At the top of the letter, in bold letters, stood the words, 'The third secret of Fatima", and at the bottom, after a spirited attack on Freemasons in particular and most Christians in general, the writer announced that she was presently carrying a three foot statue of Our Lady of Fatima around the streets of our capital cities to remind people of the imminent millennium.

I'm a little embarrassed to say that I wrote a note back, respectfully pointing out that the millennium is almost certainly past, as Pope Gregory got the calendar wrong and was at least four years out; and, if what the Wise Men actually saw was Halley's comet, anno domini began in 6 or 7 BC. Of course, we are going one better and will be celebrating the Olympic games in the year 2000, and the pagan festival has already begun: we are all to stoop under a facsimile of the Olympic flag which is now being treated rather as a religious symbol in a latter-day form of Mithraism.

Of course, Christians have our own symbols. Next Thursday is Ascension Day, a symbolic day, but for some now a very difficult feast indeed, given our contemporary knowledge of the cosmos and the problems of religious language; and thinking of our dear Lord ascending may well create some confusion in our minds if we happen to be literalists about the sacred texts and try to imagine an upward movement into the stratosphere, knowing that we can now send manned rockets into this once sacrosanct space. Our world view has changed dramatically, and there may seem to be more than a cloud receiving the Lord out of our sight. But, whatever else Ascension Day does for us, it forcefully reminds us that we believe the dear Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead. He intends to return to wind up human history, to bring in the eschaton, to proclaim that St Francis of Assisi and Adolf Hitler are not the same.

But we have to be careful when we read the apocalyptic literature, especially the Revelation of St John the Divine, that we do not turn to a rather peculiar form of watching which predicates a judgment when we are sure to be sheep and just about everybody else goats.

The latest form of that doctrine of the elect, of course, is the fundamentalist concept of "rapture", which might more properly be termed "rupture", especially if you were unlucky enough to be in a car at the time of the second coming and the driver was suddenly lifted out of his seat and sent to heaven in rapture, while you were left in the invidious position of facing a nasty accident at least, and perdition as a bonus.

The corrective, of course, is to be found in what Our Lord tells us, "Watch, for you know neither the day nor the hour when the son of man comes."

"Watch". It is a key word in the Gospel. To watch is both to trust and to observe. In his life on earth, the dear Jesus showed implicit trust in what his Father asked of him. It was a trust even learnt as a child from his Holy Mother, for it is that world-shattering fiat of hers that would make her the gateway to our salvation.

Surprised by the angelic messenger, she is told that she is to be the Mother of the Son of God. Dismayed, as well she must have been, she simply said, "Let it be done to me as you have said." It is creative resignation, not a mindless stoicism, nor a fruitless abandonment, but a joyful acceptance of the will of God.

In a sense, she watched, not then knowing the day nor the hour when the son of man would be born of her, nor how the Holy Spirit would achieve the divine purpose.

And St Luke tells us of her holy habit, that when she heard anything, "She pondered these sayings in her heart". She was ready to watch.

Of course, the classical "watching" is to be found in our dear Lord's passion. Here are Peter and James and John, both physically and emotionally exhausted, and the young rabbi from Nazareth takes them with him into the darkened garden. It is the garden of Gethsemane, a place made holy in the womb of time, and he says to them, "Watch." But they go to sleep, and when he comes back to them, he wakes them up, and says those searing words, "Could you not watch with me one hour?" Of course they have watched him throughout the public ministry with growing admiration as well as growing fear. They have seen the opposition of the most eminent Jews and they are ordinary men and women unimportant in the scheme of things and easily intimidated and put down.

Yet they have watched in wonderment at the superb mastery of Jesus Christ in the face of rejection of his claim to be Messiah, undergoing the most gruelling of interrogations, whipped and mocked, spat upon and reviled. No reading of the accounts drawn from these ordinary men and women leave us in any doubt that the dear Jesus, bound and led to crucifixion, was always in charge; and, from this distance in time, we still watch in astonishment.

But our religion is not just sanctified memory or sentimental recollection. Our religion is ultimate vindication.

And it is the vindication of the initiated that, having remained faithful, we will not be held up to ridicule and contempt in the end, but found to have been proclaiming the truth, the truth as it is found and uttered and realised in Jesus Christ himself.

Jesus Christ himself, vindicated by resurrection and glorified by ascension, for he made it the test of his whole integrity that he would face the passion, undergo the death and really die, and then be raised from death the pioneer of our salvation, the explorer of a new world, and the guarantee of the life of the world to come.

Of course, Resurrection and Ascension may seem to merge. Yet the sight of Jesus in those six weeks between Crucifixion and Ascension is of a man, recognisable and familiar even if unexpected. Certainly there are some strange phenomena. The dear Jesus seems to appear and disappear at will. He tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him, and Thomas even to put his fingers into the very nail wounds.

Yet the Ascension, while freeing him of all this proximity, all this physicality, makes him our perfect intimate. He is no longer the prisoner of time and space.

But, in the Second Coming, we are promised something like a second incarnation.

In that most memorable of cities, Jerusalem, expectations are always high, and sometimes terrifying. On one occasion, I was met by a man blowing a shofar, a ram's horn trumpet, who told me to expect the Second Coming as soon as the temple had been rebuilt, when all the Jews would go to perdition for not having accepted Jesus as the Messiah.

And on another day, in the Jewish quarter, an American Jewish girl in a shop informed me that when the temple was rebuilt and the Messiah came, all the Christians who had blasphemed him would be put to shame; or worse, there would be a Christian holocaust. And, in the gold-domed temple of the rock, a Muslim guide showed me the place where Ibrahim&emdash;Abraham&emdash;prepared to offer his son Ishmael as a human sacrifice; for Jews and us it was not Ishmael but Isaac. But the great, undressed rock was also the place of Muhammad's ascension.

Yet, across the Kidron valley, past the garden of Gethsemane with its ancient, gnarled olive trees, your feet stand on the traditional site of our Lord's Ascension, and you can almost hear the gentle angelic rebuke, 'You men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

But when we turn to the dear Jesus himself, his word to us is, "Watch". His word to us is, "Watch and pray". His word to us is to be forever ready, vigilant, expectant, for we do not know the time of his coming.

Yet he has hidden a secret among us about his constant coming, for he is the Lord of a thousand disguises. He wears the habiliments of the prisoner, the distractions of the mentally sick, the rags of the poor, and the anxiety of the stranger. He thirsts among us. He is hungry in our midst. He has nowhere to stay. He is unemployed. He is hated for looking Semitic or being black. He is overshadowed by death and seeks the warmth of our hands. Jesus the Son of Man, the suffering servant, has escaped into the world at large, and calls to us to watch for we do not know the exact time of his coming. But, lest we should ever forget that he is always coming he comes as he promised, disguised in bread and wine, touching us with his Body and his Blood.

For, if we are authentic Christians, we are Eucharistic travellers, always on the lookout for Jesus Christ, and strengthened by his very being.

Well do we call the shining bread the host, for hostia is victim, hostia or hostage to our needs, and when we "watch and pray" in this worldly Gethsemane, exhausted perhaps, both emotionally and physically, he who has made heaven his eternal home also makes his home is us.

Victim Divine, thy grace we claim
While thus thy precious Death we show;
Once offered up, a spotless Lamb,
In thy great temple here below,
Thou didst for all mankind atone,
And standest now before the throne.

Thou standest in the holiest place,
As now for guilty sinners slain;
Thy Blood of sprinkling speaks and prays
All-prevalent for helpless man;
Thy Blood is still our ransom found,
And spreads salvation all around.

We need not now go up to heaven
To bring the long-sought Saviour down;
Thou art to all already given,
Thou dost e'en now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear,
And show thy real Presence here.

(English Hymnal 333)