Sermon: Unity in the Ascended Christ

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:01]All sorts of people are currently talking about unity at the moment and our need of unity.

[00:00:11]Our communities, our political parties, indeed our world are all encountering polarization and divisions which are dangerous, indeed potentially devastating.

[00:00:23]Diversity, of course, is not the problem. We can and should celebrate diverse opinions and experiences.

[00:00:32]But serious problems arise when division sets people apart from one another. When it separates us into channels which cannot hear each other and which would frankly be happier if the other wasn't there.

[00:00:48]These divisions quickly harden, become brittle.

[00:00:54]Principles which settle into ideology frequently do not serve community.

[00:01:00]We perhaps talk about unity most frequently when we notice its absence.

[00:01:08]One feature of human togetherness in the time of the world is that it often feels at its most secure when it feeds itself by excluding others.

[00:01:22]Ascension Day, which we celebrated last Thursday, helps us find a way through this potentially fatal problem.

[00:01:31]The risen Christ stands among his disciples not simply as a corpse brought back to life, but as the truly historical Jesus, son of God and son of Mary, living a new kind of life which is indestructible, perfect, eternal.

[00:01:50]Interestingly, there are two words used in the language of the New Testament writers in Greek for man.

[00:01:58]One is anair which should be translated in quite a masculine way. Think bloke or guy.

[00:02:06]The other is anthropos which also means man but perhaps is more fully rendered as human.

[00:02:15]Jesus is always an anthropos.

[00:02:19]He is the human being.

[00:02:22]male of course but incarnate in human flesh bearing in himself all humanity body soul spirit mind this principle was expressed by the 4th century church father St. Gregory of Nazanzis when he wrote that which is not assumed is not healed.

[00:02:49]That which is not assumed by God is not healed.

[00:02:55]Now St. Gregory was engaging PMIC against Christian heretics who refused to accept that Jesus had a fully human spirit and mind.

[00:03:04]But the rationale of his writing where he insists that Christ takes on the whole Adam rather than what he calls half Adam.

[00:03:17]This is also essential in our context today. When Christ ascends to the father, he takes our whole humanity to the heart of godhead. A humanity which is somehow not limited by maleness or culture or race or geographic origin.

[00:03:37]That which is not assumed, not taken on is not healed.

[00:03:45]Ascension here intimately linked to incarnation.

[00:03:50]The descent of the eternal word in human flesh. true God and true man consummated in the ascension when the crucified and risen one bears that full humanity to the right hand of the father.

[00:04:05]My word shall not return to me fruitless prophesied Isaiah, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the task that I gave it.

[00:04:19]The whole of our humanity is born in Christ's body, crucified and risen into the abundance of the father's eternally creative life and love.

[00:04:35]It is this mystery and our sharing in that mystery that St. Paul meditates on in the prayer we heard read from the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians. In today's second reading, Paul is talking to the Christians of Ephesus, a church founded by him on one of his missionary journeys, which prompts the most rapsodic outpouring of praise and petition.

[00:04:57]He prays in this letter that a spirit of wisdom and revelation might be given to the Ephesians in order that they might know the full hope of their calling.

[00:05:09]That is the gift of faith through grace which results in lives of goodness and holiness. Discovering a unity, a togetherness in Christ which transcends all other identity markers.

[00:05:27]The power which makes such a life possible, even plausible, is the same power which is in Christ raised from the dead at the Father's right hand.

[00:05:39]This is an image endlessly creative.

[00:05:42]When we say Christ is seated at the right hand of the father, what we mean is that all Christ's all God's action occurs through Christ. All God's action occurs through Christ. That is how God acts.

[00:06:02]Christ is the full agent of God's life and will. The one who has made known and who makes known the father perfectly.

[00:06:12]This is the power, the energy which allows us to discover a new kind of existence as Christians in the life of the world. Christ at the right hand of the father.

[00:06:26]The ascension if you like makes the connection between Easter and ethics.

[00:06:34]The risen Christ doesn't hoard even his own fullness of life to himself. He shares this with his followers, offering his vision and his mission as their identity, too. An identity which can only be apprehended through faith.

[00:06:51]And he bears frail human flesh in all its diversity into the realm of heaven.

[00:07:00]That is a promise for the future, for God's future.

[00:07:04]But it has consequences for how we are to live. We are to live in the light of our hope.

[00:07:13]A hope which looks the world's violence and selfishness straight in the eye and a hope which becomes visible in how we make our choices.

[00:07:27]We humans frequently decide to establish our own togetherness, our own unity in rather narrow ways.

[00:07:36]We're frequently threatened by people who don't think like us, look like us, behave like us.

[00:07:44]We can even begin to shore ourselves up by thinking that somehow God is really on our side like some kind of divine trump card winning arguments, delivering knockdown blows.

[00:07:58]But the truth is that vision is simply too narrow and it leads Christians and others once again into the most tempting culdeac of all. The culde-sac of idolatry.

[00:08:16]The idolatry of self, the idolatry of might. the idolatry of the market, the idolatry of the state, the idolatry of our own little creations.

[00:08:32]The ascended and glorified Christ reminds us that our vision is frequently too narrow, our hearts too afraid, and our hope simply not radical enough.

[00:08:50]Toward the end of today's second reading is a line which simply overflows with its own imagery.

[00:08:58]St. Paul writes, "Christ has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all or something near that. That last bit is very hard to translate.

[00:09:22]The fullness of him who does all the filling for all. Perhaps the point is that the body of Christ is the place for all to find their identity.

[00:09:36]In this body, the risen and ascended body of Christ, humanity finds itself and knows itself to be full in Christ, fulfilled in Christ.

[00:09:53]This fullness of Christ serves, loves, embraces, confirms, saves.

[00:10:03]This is the ascended Christ for us.

[00:10:08]We should not settle for lesser categories of unity and togetherness.

[00:10:15]We should not assume that our settled patterns of community, culture, nationality are given realities.

[00:10:25]All these have the potential to work for our common good, for our flourishing.

[00:10:32]But we must not mistake them for transcendent or settled realities.

[00:10:40]Our fundamental unity as Christians is in Christ.

[00:10:46]And our vocation as Christians in society is to point to the Christ whose fullness fills all in all as the inexhaustible wellspring of the world's life.

[00:11:02]Only in Christ ascended and glorified will we find the unity of all creation.

[00:11:09]A unity which summons us beyond the graveyards of our fear.

[00:11:15]Because this Christ has put all things under his feet.

[00:11:23]That is our identity.

[00:11:26]That is our hope.

[00:11:28]Audacious, communal, generous, eternal.

[00:11:38]In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.