[img]http://www.catholica.com.au/sunday/images/Y-not_an_640x166.gif[/img]
Ascension/Seventh Sunday of Easter A
June 1, 2014
Reading I: Acts 1:1-11 (Ascension) or Acts 1:12-14 (7th Sunday)
Responsorial Psalm 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9 or Psalm 27:1, 4, 7-8
Reading II: Ephesians 1:17-23 or 1 Peter 4:13-16
Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20 or John 17:1-11A
Acts 1:12-14
After Jesus had been taken up to heaven the apostles
returned to Jerusalem
from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem,
a sabbath day’s journey away.
When they entered the city
they went to the upper room where they were staying,
Peter and John and James and Andrew,
Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew,
James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot,
and Judas son of James.
All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer,
together with some women,
and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
1 pt 4:13-16
Beloved:
Rejoice to the extent that you share in the sufferings of Christ,
so that when his glory is revealed
you may also rejoice exultantly.
If you are insulted for the name of Christ, blessed are you,
for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.
But let no one among you be made to suffer
as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as an intriguer.
But whoever is made to suffer as a Christian should not be ashamed
but glorify God because of the name.
Jn 17:1-11a
Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said,
“Father, the hour has come.
Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you,
just as you gave him authority over all people,
so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.
Now this is eternal life,
that they should know you, the only true God,
and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
I glorified you on earth
by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do.
Now glorify me, Father, with you,
with the glory that I had with you before the world began.
“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.
They belonged to you, and you gave them to me,
and they have kept your word.
Now they know that everything you gave me is from you,
because the words you gave to me I have given to them,
and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you,
and they have believed that you sent me.
I pray for them.
I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me,
because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours
and everything of yours is mine,
and I have been glorified in them.
And now I will no longer be in the world,
but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”
To avoid those out-of-date images of Jesus being lifted up through the clouds and seated at the right hand of the Father, images indelibly imprinted in our minds at a too-young age so that we find ourselves compelled to endlessly discuss how contrary they are to modern conceptions of the cosmos, I have decided to focus on John's idea of the glory of the risen Jesus. Ascension marked the culmination of his journey through life and death as he entered into the 'glory' of the Father in the very act of overcoming death.
But first, there's something about the writing-up of past events, and how we remember them. I wonder how many readers are familiar with this poem by Hilaire Belloc:
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
...
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in--
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/hilaire-belloc/tarantella/e
Do you remember?
When you're looking back through many decades, remembering is different from simply recording. And in old age you learn to tell your memories differently. I remember Belloc's Tarantella from the enthusiastic way Marist Brother, Roger Bede Reidy, taught it, but looking at it now I can see deeper into it. Belloc had memories behind and beyond his description of the inn and the young muleteers and the dancing, memories of his own hot-blooded involvement, his racing heart, his fascination with the tall, slim, dark-haired Miranda, the wonder girl of those nights at the inn in the high Pyrenees.
I can only read John's gospel now if I remember that it's written by an old man looking back through many decades, remembering..., and in remembering always sorting through to find meaning in it all. The undercurrent of his youthful excitement is felt at every turn of the story but is never heard or seen. He remembers the last evening meal, and on the lips of Jesus he puts some insights he has gained over time, while he continues to knead the dough still for other meanings to be rising.
The received account, the kerygma, the standard teaching about Jeshua had been compiled in three versions, each with its own agenda, all valid for their purpose. His own remembering is going to be different. He will struggle with the humanness of the one who, though he was the Word with God in the beginning, pitched his tent among us and was made human. In this man John has seen God join battle with the forces of darkness to again let light be there, and the darkness could not or would not take it in.
John will tell of the seven great signs-to-make-you-wonder, and between the accounts of those signs he will have Jesus persuading, persuading..., in endless confrontation with the opposition. All Jesus tried to do was reveal, unwrap, make plain the truth of God's word in the scriptures and in life. All he wanted was that people hear that word and live it truthfully. John describes a long campaign to convince men and women at every level of society that the truth will set you free, to live in the truth is to truly live, fully live. All you have to do is be true - or in our idiom, be honest, sincere, genuine - be fair dinkum. All the Father asks - or demands - or commands (whichever way you like it) is that people stop the bullshit and think and speak and do straight and true.
*****
It is hard to believe that John intended us to think that he remembered word for word this long discourse and this prayer from that last night before Jesus died. John Marsh says that history writing is both recording what took place and interpreting what was going on (Marsh, J, Saint John, Pelican 1968. p. 18). John's version is mostly the latter. With the advantage of being more distanced in time he was able to share with his people and with us what he understood had been going on in the short time they knew Jesus.
My impression is that he wrote an epic poem, similar to if not modeled on the great Greek epics. His language is formal, his expression poetic, his imagery monumental. The structure of the gospel ignores the actual comings and goings recorded in Mark and the others, and is instead set out as a panorama in which an event of cosmic dimensions is portrayed. If you have a couple of hours free and would read his gospel right through you'd see the grandeur of his setting extending from the very beginning with its echo of the bible's opening words, through great signs of God's powerful hand at work, to the climax of mock trials and cruel execution - ending with the silence of the empty tomb in the early morning light, the mysterious appearances, and then nothing.
John's gospel doesn't have an ascension; only an enigmatic remark to Mary of Magdala at the tomb: Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
He tells of two appearances to the disciples, and the additional chapter 21 has another by the lake in Galilee. It is as though 'ascension', going to the Father, was immediate as part of rising from the dead, the appearances therefore not cut short by some ritual performance. Do they still continue to this day? Or is that not a useful question?
*****
Looking back, John has his Jesus reviewing the years of the campaign:
“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you... ( Credit where credit is due.) I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began.”
I see John looking at that man and wondering what was going through his mind at the end. Always he sees Jeshua the man, clearly so human yet with a mysterious aura about him in which they glimpsed something more, something timeless and so spiritual as to be unworldly, something that you might call "divine" - if you ever dared say that of anything so human as this.
"I glorified you by accomplishing the work you gave me to do."
We've got to read this not as some kind of divine revelation, but as the remembering of an old man remembering the Jesus who was remembering on that last night how hard he had worked for three years to convince them of the need to live in simple truth, instead of playing all the power-games that keep the world entertained, enthralled, and bound in chains of lies.
He had accomplished the work, he had done the job. But John remembers how many times it was a close call. How often he nearly gave up, nearly lost it in anger, nearly chose comfort of the human kind. Again and again he has his Jesus return to the fray with resolve: My meat is to do my Father's will. At what cost? It was not all "glancing, dancing, backing and advancing, snapping of the clapper to the spin - out and in-- and the ting, tong, tang of the guitar." It was a continuous argument to win the minds and hearts of at least a few among his contemporaries. A hard relentless battle against the power of the darkness entrenched in the mental bias not only of the learned pharisees but of the common people just as much, for he found they all preferred the darkness to the light.
*****
And now to ask what does 'glory' mean:
“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you..."
“Glory” is a word found right through the bible, referring to the appearance of God among us. It is the cloud that went before the Israelites as they fled through the desert from Egypt, that became a pillar of fire by night. It is the shekinah, the cloud that filled the holy sanctuary in the temple so that no human could enter in. John says in Chapter 1 that "the Word became corporeal/human and pitched his tent among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten son." Perhaps we could say it is as if the godly shone through the human form; or could we say, he had a shine of godliness about him; an aura, not of actual glowing light, but something they experienced for John says we saw his glory.
Now it is time for the glory to be seen in its fulness so that the son may glorify the father, reflecting back the glory given from the beginning. How will this be? It will be done humanly, like everything Jesus did, but now taking his love to the nth degree, to the end. He will be arrested and mocked in show trials and flogged just for the torture of it, or to see if he will break. But he does not break. He stands up to it all in witness to the truth, so that Pilate was impressed and the tough Roman centurion was so awed that he declared, This was a son of god! That is how the son glorified the father in human terms, by being true to his word, true in his love for those the father had given him, true to the end so that they would not feel they had been led up the creek, betrayed, sold out and left holding false promises and empty hopes. So is God glorified in us.
There's a sentence just a little further down ch 17 that strikes me as one of the most powerful:
Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.
It seems to sum up the whole meaning of his life. Consecrate is also translated as sanctify, or make holy, or I suppose you could say 'make thoroughly good - like god is thoroughly good'. Jesus let his godliness shine enough for people to see and come to believe that God has now come to be an integral part of the human experience. There's no going back. No longer is God distant, up there, threatening, to be feared. The end phase of creation-
evolution is underway and God is in our hands - not as some holy icon we hold, but in our hands as we do the work in front of us, the work of bringing the evolving cosmos to be what it is destined to be in truth.
Our work is to be true.