How Christ’s Ascension Bears upon Ordinary Practice

“Of Whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” —Ephesians iii. 15.

The Ascension of our Lord is little thought of by many who seem to derive much comfort from dwelling on His death and His resurrection. “These facts,” they say, “connect themselves with all that we are suffering ourselves and see our friends suffer. They meet the anguish of our individual consciences; they are suggested to us by the open grave, and the mourners who go about our streets; they come within the region of ordinary experience. The Ascension may be a fit subject for those who dream dreams and see visions to meditate upon. Often we long for a few hours of cloister life; then perhaps our spirits would sometimes find wings and mount up as eagles towards the sun. But we are in the midst of bustle and distraction, of ignominious occupations, of daily duties. We must perforce dwell amongst these. Should not we reconcile ourselves to our lot? Should not we keep our souls low, not exercising ourselves in great matters which are too high for us? Is not this a part of the humility which is enjoined upon us, and which it is difficult enough to preserve, even with all our caution?”

It is indeed most difficult to preserve humility with this caution. I should be rather inclined to say it is impossible. I find that David, who desired a humble and a contrite heart, as much as any man, took precisely the opposite way of seeking for that inestimable gift. “Lord,” he says, “who shall dwell in Thy tabernacle? who shall rest upon Thy holy hill? He that sitteth not by himself, but is lowly in his own eyes.” Instead of putting the two thoughts in direct contrast with each other, he brings them together. Instead of instructing us that the habit of mind which leads us to climb the hill of the Lord, and the habit of cherishing high thoughts of ourselves, are of the same kind, He assumes that one must destroy the other: he who aspires to that height must think meanly of himself. If we had only the Psalmist’s authority to lead us to this conclusion, we might be satisfied; but I suspect we shall find all our own experience confirming it. Did you ever meet a man without any lofty aspirations who was lowly in his own eyes? What is there to make him so? He measures himself by the standard of people around him. If any rise above his own level, he can discover some flaw in them which restores his self-complacency: he does all that he thinks it necessary to do: he is all that he wants to be. This is not what we commonly understand by humility. But at least we may suppose that commonplace earthly morality will look very contemptible in the eyes of these aspiring men. I sought on a former occasion to ascertain if this is so, from the Psalm which I have just quoted. What did it tell us? The qualities which it attributes to the man who ascends into the hill of the Lord are precisely those which we demand of the ordinary English gentleman—of the ordinary English tradesman. There is no deceit in his heart. He speaks the truth. He does not slander his neighbour. He does not injure his neighbour. The Psalm which tells most of entering into communion with the Lord, and of seeing His face, dwells on such habits as these, and only on such.

Perhaps this language belongs to the Old Testament. Perhaps when we pass into the region of the better Covenant, of the fuller realities, we shall find an entire change. The commonplace morality will be cast aside. We shall have the true saintly ideal. Let us turn to the Epistle from which my text is taken. It is, as I have described it to you before, peculiarly and emphatically the Epistle concerning our Lord’s Ascension. All the most powerful passages which were adopted into our Services last Thursday were drawn from it: those respecting Christ’s leading captivity captive, and receiving gifts for men, are the fairest possible samples of the whole letter, revealing its purpose and its inmost spirit. It opens with a marvellous thanksgiving to God for having blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. It speaks of the purpose of God to gather up all things in the heavens and in the earth in Christ. It unites the prayer that the Ephesians may have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation granted them, with the power which God wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him upon His own right hand in heavenly places, far above all principalities, and powers, and might, and dominion, and lordship, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in the world to come. These examples may illustrate the kind of inspiration which there was in the heart of the Apostle when he was writing this letter. You will say at once it is a strain of unusual elevation. He is in a rarefied atmosphere; on mountain-tops, where breathing is difficult; clouds at his feet; the common plain of earth very far below indeed. Well, now then we may inquire what is that new and celestial morality which is to displace all that has to do with the common dwellings and affairs of men. “Therefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour.” “Be ye angry and sin not.” “Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” “Let bitterness, and wrath, and clamour, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice.” “Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands.” “Husbands, love your wives.” “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for that is right.” “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.” “Servants, obey your masters according to the flesh, not with eye-service as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ.” “Masters, do the same thing unto them, forbearing threatening.” These sentences are taken from the Epistle, just as the others were, almost at hazard. They lie on the surface of it. They express the very spirit of it. And the more you read it, the more you feel that St. Paul never thought of the precepts, which belong to the ordinary business of earth, as standing aloof from the revelations of the divine world, or as merely added on to them. He supposed that the Ephesians ought to know that they were sitting with Christ in heavenly places, in order that they might not lie, or allow filthy communications to proceed out of their mouths. He did not suppose that it was unnecessary to tell those for whom he asked that they might know the greatness of their calling, and the unsearchable riches of Christ, that they should not deceive, nor slander their neighbour, nor be thieves, nor adulterers. If the saints in Ephesus considered it an insult to hear those plain broad exhortations,—if they supposed they had no occasion for them, and craved for something more suitable to their safe and elevated condition—they must go to some other teacher than St. Paul. That was what he considered good and healthful for them. From him they would get no more palatable food.

I think, then, we need not discuss further the question which was asked, whether we require the seclusion of a convent, that we may be fit to enter into the mystery of Christ’s Ascension. If St. Paul’s way of considering the subject is the true one,—if we have not discovered some other that is wiser and better,—it is in the midst of moral corruption and evil,—of such a merchant city as Ephesus was, as London is, with every temptation assailing us which assails other men,—that we may expect to find the necessity for this faith, and that we may, if we will, enter into the full possession and blessing of it. The streets and alleys of a great town, with their swarming population—the crimes, neglects, pettinesses, heartlessness, in high places and in low—the evils whence all these are derived, which are laid bare in our own hearts,—these, even these may be the schoolmasters to bring us to Christ; not to Him only who has descended that He might be a fellow-heir of human miseries, that He might bear human sins, but to Him who has ascended far above all heavens, that He might fill all things. If it is asked how this can be, I answer, “Because it is all but impossible for me not to be crushed under that awful and intolerable load of life and death,—under the appalling sense of the physical wretchedness and the moral debasement of one or two of the creatures I might single out of that mass, even if it was not multiplied by tens of millions, even if each evil, instead of standing solitary and self-concentrated, did not add its infection to every other, and deepen it and propagate it; it would be nearly impossible to sustain the recollection that the cancer of Society is not to be found only where it is visible to every eye, but is dwelling there where it is carefully covered over, and where the outward appearance is most comely; it would be quite impossible to bear the most partial discovery of that which is always naked and open to the Father of Lights; if we were not permitted, encouraged, commanded to believe that the very nature which we see, which we feel, to be capable of such infinite degradation, has been taken, redeemed, justified, glorified by the Son of Man; and that in it, in that very nature, divested of not one of its essential properties, wanting in no spiritual or intellectual or bodily attribute, full, perfect, human, does He stand at the right hand of God, our representative and High Priest.”

Brethren, we ask what evidence there is for this great and amazing assertion, which no experience can vouch for, which seems to set sense and all the arguments from sense at defiance. And I am sure we get no answer to the question till those facts which are passing before us and within us become the evidence. They are not in themselves luminous: they form a dark thunder-cloud; and the flashes that come out of it blind oftener than they enlighten. But you cannot and dare not believe that this is all, that nothing is behind it. And if anything, what? If there is any order and beauty and harmony beneath these horrible discords, where would you look for it? In a thing or in a Person? In light which you have created, or in a light of which all your brightest creations are but some streaks and scattered rays? In a hero that you have glorified, or in the Son of God Who was before all worlds, Who humbled Himself and became of no reputation, and Whom His Father has glorified?

A faith which boasts that it rests upon the Death and Resurrection of Christ, without taking any account of His Ascension, may serve very well as long as our thoughts are occupied chiefly with the condition of our own souls and with the question how they may be saved here and hereafter. The death of Christ presents itself to the awakened conscience of a man as an assurance of divinest peace. Afterwards, when the conflict is stilled and the mind has relapsed into its ordinary condition, reasons are offered him why he has a right to this peace; we try to explain how Christ’s death has procured it. With these he would not have been satisfied before, when he wanted a message from God, not arguments of men. Now they serve to content his understanding, and to keep up in him relics of a religious feeling. The news of the Resurrection of Christ is to the actual mourner as a voice from behind the veil, saying, “O Grave, where is thy victory?” The keen grief is over; the business of this world is resumed; then he learns how the Resurrection of Christ proves that he and his friends are sometime or other to rise. He accepts the arguments which in his hour of misery would have been of no worth at all; declares that they convince him; and forgets them. But when we are brought to feel, by one discipline or another, that we are bound up for good and for evil with our race; that we are not, and cannot be exempt from any of its transgressions; that with it we must sink or swim; there comes a demand for something more than the gift of pardon, than the promise of a better world if we should be worthy of it. We can make out no special case for ourselves; there are no circumstances in our lives which entitle us to ask for exemptions and mitigations when our evil deeds are brought into judgment, far less which can make us dream of rewards. If man is doomed, you and I are doomed; if there is anywhere a salvation for man, that is for us. When we are brought to this pass, to this border-land between absolute despair and a hope that is beyond all we can ask or think, the Ascension-day breaks in upon us as with the light of seven suns. He has gone up on high. He is there where our eyes cannot follow Him, with the God Who is and was and is to come, His Father and our Father. He is there, not separated by space from the creatures whose nature He bears; not separated from them in any sympathy; in all things what He was, when He bore their infirmities, was made sin for them, died their death. And that which constitutes His perfect Humanity, His Truth, His Justice, His Purity, His Sympathy—this is our inheritance, this is the new and glorious clothing which He has provided for us if we will put it on; which we do put on when we remember that it is His for us; which we do put on when we give up high conceits of ourselves, and have no wish to be unlike our brethren, but are certain that all things are theirs, whether Life or Death, or things present or things to come, because they are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.

And thus we understand how St. Paul drops so easily from the heaven of heavens into that vulgar morality about lying, thieving, corrupt communications, the obedience of children, the reverence of parents, the mutual fidelity of masters and servants. Very vulgar indeed it is to talk against lying. And yet, in all these thousands of years, what have legislators, philosophers, religious men done by decrees, calculations, terrors of the future, to extinguish lying, even to abate it? Have they not, each in their own ways, indorsed and sanctioned different lies and systems of lies, the inward lies of self-flattery, the deep and devilish lies which put on the form of piety, which are circulated and enforced for the sake of the soul, which are the most complicated, and which propagate most rapidly of all? A deliverance from lies—lies in their simplest, most natural shape—lies in their inward essence,—surely this would be the great deliverance for us all. And I do not think we shall obtain that deliverance, Brethren, that Society will be brave, truthful,—that we, the members of Society, shall be so, till we take St. Paul’s words in their full, broad sense; “Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour, for we are members one of another.” There is the secret. We do not believe that we are members one of another. We do not believe that there is one living and true Head of us all. We do not think that He feels for us all, and cares for us, and knows our secrets, and wishes us to be true in our inward parts, and is Himself the Truth. We do not believe this in our hearts, however we may cant about it with our lips. And therefore, under one pretext or another,—sometimes because a man wishes to deceive us and so we may deceive him; sometimes because men must be cheated for their own interest; sometimes because faith is not to be kept with heretics and enemies of God;—we claim a right to hug our darling falsehoods, to circulate them; to live in them, till all communion with the God of Heaven, and therefore with men upon earth, becomes impossible.

If this, the greatest and most radical of all vices, the vice of the beggar and of the possessor of millions, of him who sells votes and of him who buys them, of the Statesman and the Churchman,—may be extirpated by faith in One Who ascended on high, and united us all to God and to each other, why should we doubt that this also is the most effectual remedy for these crimes which are the temptations of one class and not of another, and which Society agrees to punish? It is not a question any longer whether this is so or not. We have condemned the thief, as we were bound to do, whatever may be his motives to the act, whatever may be the apologies for him in the ignorance and debasement in which we have suffered him to grow up. The awe which these punishments awaken—if they are evenly administered, if they are not excessive, or aimed at one description of wrongdoers more than another, or measured out to meet a popular opinion—is good for us all; it strengthens us in the belief of an infallible Judge, of a Righteousness which must expose evil and expel it. But you will not impress even that conviction upon the thief—you certainly will not make him a good citizen—unless you appeal to something else in him than the dread of vengeance. He will not perceive that he was wrong unless you show him a standard of right, unless you tell him that the standard is his, and that he may attain it. If you promise that Society will forgive and forget his offences, you deceive him; he finds out continually that it is not so. If you assure him that there is a pleasure in right acts which does not accompany wrong acts, you may speak your own experience. There are moments when it will be his experience. But there are other moments when he will feel a keen delight in defying the principles which his conscience recognizes, when not to defy them will cost him intense effort and agony. Remembering these, he will suspect that you have been practising a pious fraud upon him. The Spirit that he has obeyed will whisper to him that there are charms in his service, of which these monitors with their wise saws and modern instances know nothing. Too often he will return to the house that is swept and garnished, with other spirits worse than himself. But if you can tell the man that he may recover his rights as a member of Society, even though Society should never recognize his rights—if you can tell him that he may have a pure, clear conscience, though he feels ever so much hankering after evil; that he may resist the evil Spirit, though he brings ever so many arguments, fresh or old, to tempt him down, arguments which bystanders do not know the force of,—then indeed you have helped to make him a new creature in the sight of his fellows, a new creature in all his dealings with them and purposes towards them. And this you do, when you tell him that there is a divine righteousness which dwells in Christ for him and for us, a Righteousness which He declared to be meant for all, when He ascended to the right hand of God.

The same principle applies to the relations of husband and wife, father and child, master and servant. You cannot make these relations right by penalties. Penal Law takes no notice of them till they become disorganized and intolerable. How are you to preserve them from sinking into that condition? All the health of Society depends upon their health. What diet have you to ward off sickliness from them, what medicines to cure it? When you have tried other methods, you will be driven to this. You will have to own that these relations are constituted in Christ the Head of mankind; that He maintains their cause; that our selfishness is fighting a deadly battle against them; that they must perish utterly, if selfishness is omnipotent; that they can be quickened into a new life, if we believe that One has ascended on high, Who has led captive our captivity to selfishness and to every other tyrant.

When we thus think of the Ascension, we do not lose for an instant our interest in the Death and Resurrection of our Lord. We recover that meaning which they had for us when we received them first as children, or when they brought to us in our guilty manhood tidings of a Father who had blotted out our sins and justified us. The speculations in which we have been occupied since, about the mode in which Christ’s death has operated for our salvation, about the limits beyond which the blessings of His Resurrection cannot extend, have become wearisome and hopeless to us. We leave them for leisurely people who are engaged in no conflict for life. We are content to receive the message of Redemption by the Cross, of Christ’s victory over the grave, as He and His Apostles delivered it. The Cross becomes far more than ever the sign in which, and in which alone, we hope to conquer, when we have acknowledged the Lamb in the midst of the Throne, the object of all love and worship to the powers in heaven as well as in earth. The Resurrection becomes far more than ever the strength to the dying man, the strength as we commit each brother to the ground, when the voice rings through all creation, “I am He that liveth and was dead; and behold, I live for evermore, and have the keys of death and of hell.” The individual sufferers in the family on earth never know what has been done for them, till they count themselves part of the family in heaven.

This last remark brings me to the words of my text. I have not spoken of it yet, because the force of it, I think, is only appreciated when we have considered the purpose of the Epistle in which it occurs. The very essence of that Epistle is concentrated in the prayer which these words introduce. About the words themselves, “Of Whom the whole family in Heaven and Earth is named,” there is some doubt. According to the reading which we have adopted, “Jesus Christ our Lord” is the antecedent. These words are omitted in several MSS. which recent editors pronounce to be most trustworthy. There is some internal evidence in favour of the omission; for the word πατριὰ, which St. Paul uses only on this occasion, will then at once be connected with Πατὴρ, and a new emphasis will be given to the name. And since ἐξ οὗ, and not ἐν ᾧ, is used at the beginning of the sentence, it has a more direct application to the Father than to Christ. There is no need to struggle for the common reading, because it contains a witness for Christ as the Elder Brother of the Family. The whole Epistle witnesses for that. The name of Father, your Father and my Father, implies it. But the belief of a Universal Patriarchate in heaven and earth is the very one which vindicates all earthly relations as divine, and the one which destroys the notion of a Universal Patriarch on earth claiming the power of Heaven as his. Against that notion our ancestors testified, on behalf of their own consciences and of their national freedom. Neither protest can be prized too dearly. But upon us has descended the duty of bearing it in a still larger interest, for a wider circle. When we understand what our controversy is, all paltry special pleading, all arguments by which rival religionists establish their own wisdom and their opponents’ folly will be cast aside with contempt. Our cause is the cause of Romanists as much as of Protestants. We shall be declaring that there is a Society broad enough for every kindred and tongue; a Society which excludes none, who do not exclude themselves because they deny that there is a pure and redeemed and glorious Humanity with which all may be invested, who cast away the filthy garments of their own vanity and selfishness; a Society in which those that have fought the good fight and washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, who are ever before God, who go no more out of His Temple, are united with those that are fighting hard here with the world and the flesh and the Devil; a Society in which the worst and the best, the sinner that has most ado to keep himself from utter shipwreck, and the saint in glory, require and receive the same food, the food of His flesh Who was given for the life of the world—of His flesh Who is ever living for us at the right hand of His Father.