How Christ’s Ascension Bears upon Ordinary Practice

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

The passage: The whole family in heaven and on earth takes its name from Him.

Many people who take comfort in Christ’s death and resurrection give little thought to His Ascension. They say: “Those facts touch what we suffer and what we see our friends suffer. They answer the anguish of individual conscience; the open grave and the mourners in our streets bring them to mind; they belong to ordinary experience. The Ascension may suit dreamers and visionaries. We sometimes long for a few hours of cloister life, when our spirits might mount up like eagles toward the sun. But we live amid bustle, distraction, humbling work and daily duties, and must dwell among them. Shouldn’t we accept our lot and keep our souls low, not busying ourselves with matters too high for us? Isn’t that part of the humility we are told to keep, which is hard enough to keep even with all our caution?”

It is indeed hard to keep humility with this caution; I am inclined to say it is impossible. David wanted a humble and contrite heart as much as any man, yet he sought it the opposite way. “Lord, 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.” He does not set the two thoughts against each other. He joins them, assuming that the habit of mind that climbs the Lord’s hill and the habit of thinking highly of oneself cannot live together: whoever aspires to that height must think meanly of himself. David’s authority might be enough, but I suspect our own experience confirms it. Did you ever meet a man with no lofty aspirations who was lowly in his own eyes? What would make him so? He measures himself by the people around him. If any rise above him, he finds some flaw in them that restores his self-complacency. He does all he thinks he needs to do and is all he wants to be. That is not what we usually call humility. But at least we might suppose that aspiring men would despise commonplace earthly morality. I tried on a former occasion to test this from the same Psalm. What did it say? The qualities it gives the man who ascends the Lord’s hill are those we ask of the ordinary English gentleman or tradesman. No deceit in his heart; he speaks the truth; he neither slanders nor injures his neighbour. The Psalm that speaks most of communion with the Lord and seeing His face dwells on such habits, and only on such.

Perhaps this belongs to the Old Testament, and in the better Covenant of fuller realities we shall find a complete change: commonplace morality cast aside, and the true saintly ideal in its place. Let us turn to the Epistle my text comes from. As I have told you before, it is peculiarly the Epistle of our Lord’s Ascension. The most powerful passages in our Services last Thursday were drawn from it; those about Christ leading captivity captive and receiving gifts for men are fair samples of its purpose and spirit. It opens with a marvellous thanksgiving to God for blessing us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. It speaks of God’s purpose to gather up all things, in heaven and on earth, in Christ. It joins the prayer that the Ephesians may receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to the power God showed in raising Christ from the dead and setting Him at His right hand, far above every principality, power, might, dominion and name, in this world and the next. You will say this is a strain of unusual elevation: the Apostle is on mountain-tops where breathing is hard, clouds at his feet, the common plain of earth far below. Then what is the new, celestial morality that is to displace everything to do with the common dwellings and affairs of men? “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.” “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands.” “Husbands, love your wives.” “Children, obey your parents in the Lord.” “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.” I took these almost at random. They lie on the surface and express the spirit of the letter. The more you read, the more you feel that St. Paul never thought of the precepts for ordinary business as standing aloof from the revelations of the divine world, or as merely added to them. He supposed the Ephesians needed to know they were sitting with Christ in heavenly places precisely so that they would not lie or let filthy talk come from their mouths. He did not think it needless to tell people for whom he prayed that they might know the greatness of their calling and the unsearchable riches of Christ that they must not deceive, slander, steal or commit adultery. If the saints at Ephesus took these plain, broad exhortations as an insult, thought they had no need of them, and wanted something suited to their safe and elevated condition, they must go to some other teacher. St. Paul thought these things good and healthful for them, and from him they would get no more palatable food.

So we need not debate further whether we need a convent’s seclusion to enter into the mystery of the Ascension. If St. Paul’s way of seeing it is the true one, and we have found no wiser, then it is in the midst of moral corruption, in a merchant city like Ephesus or London, with every temptation that besets other men, that we may expect to feel the need of this faith and, if we will, come to possess it fully. The streets and alleys of a great town with their swarming population, the crimes, neglects, pettiness and heartlessness in high places and low, and the evils from which all this comes, which lie bare in our own hearts: even these may be the schoolmasters that bring us to Christ. They bring us not only to Him who descended to be a fellow-heir of human misery and bear human sins, but to Him who ascended far above all heavens that He might fill all things. If it is asked how, I answer: because I could hardly bear the crushing load of life and death, the physical wretchedness and moral debasement of even one or two creatures singled out of that mass, even if it were not multiplied by tens of millions, and even if each evil did not spread its infection to every other. It would be nearly impossible to bear remembering that the cancer of Society lies not only where every eye sees it but where it is carefully covered and the outward appearance is most comely. It would be quite impossible to bear even a partial glimpse of what is always naked and open to the Father of Lights. We could not bear it unless we were permitted, encouraged and commanded to believe that the very nature we see and feel to be capable of such degradation has been taken, redeemed, justified and glorified by the Son of Man. In that very nature, losing none of its essential properties, lacking no spiritual, intellectual or bodily attribute, full, perfect and human, He stands at the right hand of God as our representative and High Priest.

Brethren, we ask what evidence there is for this amazing assertion, which no experience vouches for and which seems to defy the senses and every argument from them. I am sure we get no answer until the facts passing before us and within us become the evidence. In themselves they are not luminous. They form a dark thunder-cloud, and its flashes blind more often than they enlighten. But you cannot and dare not believe this is all, that nothing lies behind it. And if something does, what? If there is order, beauty and harmony beneath these horrible discords, where would you look for it? In a thing or in a Person? In a light you have created, or in a light of which your brightest creations are only streaks and scattered rays? In a hero you have glorified, or in the Son of God, who was before all worlds, who humbled Himself and made Himself of no reputation, and whom His Father has glorified?

A faith that boasts of resting on Christ’s Death and Resurrection, taking no account of the Ascension, may do while our thoughts are taken up with our own souls and how they may be saved here and hereafter. To an awakened conscience Christ’s death is an assurance of divine peace. Later, when the conflict is stilled and the mind has settled back into its ordinary state, he is given reasons why he has a right to this peace, and we try to explain how Christ’s death procured it. Earlier these would not have satisfied him, since he wanted a message from God, not arguments from men. Now they content his understanding and keep alive remnants of religious feeling. To the actual mourner, the news of the Resurrection is a voice from behind the veil saying, “O Grave, where is thy victory?” When the keen grief is over and the world’s business resumed, he learns how the Resurrection proves that he and his friends will someday rise. He accepts arguments that would have been worthless in his misery, says they convince him, and forgets them. But when some discipline or other brings us to feel that we are bound up with our race for good and ill, that we are not and cannot be exempt from any of its transgressions, and that we sink or swim with it, then we want something more than pardon, more than the promise of a better world if we prove worthy. We can make no special case for ourselves. No circumstances in our lives entitle us to ask exemptions or mitigations when our evil deeds are judged, still less to dream of rewards. If man is doomed, you and I are doomed; if salvation exists anywhere for man, it is for us. When we reach this border-land between absolute despair and a hope beyond all we can ask or think, Ascension-day breaks on us like the light of seven suns. He has gone up on high. He is where our eyes cannot follow, with the God who is and was and is to come, His Father and our Father. He is not separated by space from the creatures whose nature He bears, nor in any sympathy; in all things He is what He was when He bore their infirmities, was made sin for them and died their death. What makes up His perfect Humanity, His Truth, Justice, Purity and Sympathy, is our inheritance. It is the new and glorious clothing He has provided for us if we will put it on. We do put it on when we remember that it is His for us, and when we give up high conceits of ourselves, have no wish to be unlike our brethren, and are certain that all things are theirs, whether life or death, things present or things to come, because they are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.

So we see how St. Paul drops so easily from the heaven of heavens to that vulgar morality about lying, thieving, corrupt talk, obedient children, reverent parents, and faithful masters and servants. It is very vulgar to talk against lying. Yet in all these thousands of years, what have legislators, philosophers and religious men done, by decrees, calculations and terrors of the future, to extinguish lying, or even to abate it? Have they not each in their own way endorsed different lies and systems of lies: the inward lies of self-flattery, and the deep, devilish lies that wear the form of piety, are circulated for the soul’s sake, are the most complicated and spread the fastest? Deliverance from lies, in their simplest, most natural shape and in their inward essence, would surely be the great deliverance for us all. I do not think we shall obtain it, Brethren, or that Society or its members will become brave and truthful, until 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 we are members one of another. We do not believe there is one living and true Head of us all, who feels for us, cares for us, knows our secrets, wishes us true in our inward parts, and is Himself the Truth. We do not believe this in our hearts, however we cant about it with our lips. So, under one pretext or another, because a man wants to deceive us and so we may deceive him, or because men must be cheated for their own good, or because faith need not be kept with heretics and enemies of God, we claim the right to hug our darling falsehoods and circulate them, and live in them, until communion with the God of Heaven, and therefore with men on earth, becomes impossible.

This greatest and most radical of vices belongs to the beggar and the millionaire, to him who sells votes and him who buys them, to the Statesman and the Churchman. If faith in One who ascended on high and united us all to God and to each other can root it out, why should we doubt that this is also the most effective remedy for the crimes that tempt one class and not another, and that Society agrees to punish? There is no longer any question about this. We have condemned the thief, as we had to, whatever his motives and whatever excuses his ignorance and debasement offer, which we let him grow up in. The awe these punishments awaken is good for us all, if they are evenly administered, not excessive, not aimed at one kind of wrongdoer more than another, and not measured to suit popular opinion. It strengthens our belief in an infallible Judge and a Righteousness that must expose and expel evil. But you will not impress even that conviction on the thief, and certainly will not make him a good citizen, unless you appeal to something in him besides dread of vengeance. He will not see that he was wrong unless you show him a standard of right, tell him it is his, and tell him he can reach it. If you promise that Society will forgive and forget his offences, you deceive him, for he finds out constantly that it will not. If you assure him there is a pleasure in right acts that wrong acts lack, you may be speaking your own experience, and there are moments when it will be his. But at other moments he will feel keen delight in defying the principles his conscience recognizes, and not defying them will cost him intense effort and agony. Remembering those, he will suspect you of a pious fraud. The Spirit he has obeyed will whisper that there are charms in his service which these monitors, with their wise saws and modern instances, know nothing of. Too often he will return to the house swept and garnished, with other spirits worse than himself. But suppose you can tell him that he may recover his rights as a member of Society even if Society never recognizes them; that he may have a pure, clear conscience however much he hankers after evil; that he may resist the evil Spirit however many arguments, fresh or old, tempt him down, arguments bystanders do not feel the force of. Then you have helped make him a new creature in the sight of his fellows, in all his dealings with them and purposes toward them. You do this when you tell him that a divine righteousness dwells in Christ for him and for us, a Righteousness Christ declared to be meant for all when He ascended to the right hand of God.

The same principle applies to husband and wife, father and child, master and servant. You cannot make these relations right by penalties. Penal Law takes no notice of them until they become disorganized and intolerable. How are you to keep them from sinking that far? All the health of Society depends on theirs. What diet have you to ward off sickliness in them, what medicine 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; and that they can be quickened into new life if we believe that One has ascended on high who has led captive our captivity to selfishness and every other tyrant.

When we think of the Ascension in this way, we do not for an instant lose interest in the Death and Resurrection. We recover the meaning they had when we first received them as children, or when they brought us, in our guilty manhood, news of a Father who had blotted out our sins and justified us. The speculations that have occupied us since, about how Christ’s death works for our salvation and the limits beyond which His Resurrection’s blessings cannot reach, become wearisome and hopeless. We leave them to leisurely people engaged in no conflict for life. We are content to receive the message of Redemption by the Cross and 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 alone we hope to conquer, once we acknowledge the Lamb in the midst of the Throne, the object of all love and worship to the powers in heaven as well as on earth. The Resurrection becomes far more than ever the strength of the dying man, and our 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 brings me to my text. I have not spoken of it until now because I think its force is felt only after we have considered the purpose of the Epistle, whose very essence is concentrated in the prayer these words introduce. There is some doubt about the words themselves, “Of Whom the whole family in Heaven and Earth is named.” On the reading we have adopted, “Jesus Christ our Lord” is the antecedent. But those words are omitted in several manuscripts that recent editors judge most trustworthy. There is some internal evidence for omitting them: the word πατριὰ, which St. Paul uses only here, is then at once connected with Πατὴρ, and the name gains a new emphasis. And since ἐξ οὗ, not ἐν ᾧ, begins the sentence, it applies more directly to the Father than to Christ. We need not struggle for the common reading because it witnesses to Christ as the Elder Brother of the Family. The whole Epistle witnesses to that, and the name of Father, your Father and my Father, implies it. But belief in a Universal Patriarchate in heaven and on earth is the very belief that vindicates all earthly relations as divine, and that destroys the notion of a Universal Patriarch on earth claiming the power of Heaven. Our ancestors testified against that notion for their own consciences and national freedom. Neither protest can be prized too dearly. But on us has fallen the duty of bearing it for a still larger interest and 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, which excludes none who do not exclude themselves by denying that there is a pure, redeemed and glorious Humanity that all may put on by casting away the filthy garments of their own vanity and selfishness. In it, those who have fought the good fight and washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, who are ever before God and go no more out of His Temple, are united with those still fighting hard here against the world, the flesh and the Devil. In it, the worst and the best, the sinner who has most ado to keep from utter shipwreck and the saint in glory, need and receive the same food: the flesh of Him who was given for the life of the world, and who is ever living for us at the right hand of His Father.