Ascension Sunday 2021
Imagine for a little while a moment in your life which was full of possibility. Maybe it was when you first started school, or started work, or left home. Perhaps it was a moment of commitment such as when you got married, or at the birth of your children. A moment rich in possibility, full of promise! Can you remember how there was no certainty about the future at that time, but somehow there was a sense that this what life was about? All of life up to this point somehow seemed to come together and open out into the future. And the something new was full of promise.
Our celebration of the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus is also one characterized by possibility. We celebrate that what at first seems to be an absence – the absence of Jesus in our midst – has been transformed into a presence. The absence of Jesus is no longer what it seems. In his absence, we have discovered a new type of presence, a new way of him present to us, with us, for us, through us, in us.
For us as disciples of Jesus this is the source of our confidence and our hope. Because of this abiding presence of Jesus, we have the confidence that we always have a future. Our present horizon is never our final one. We can always go on from where we are. We are never locked into where we are. The Ascension assures us that there is always a wider horizon to explore. In no matter what we are experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how shameful, no matter how apparently hopeless it might seem, deep within there is a gentle possibility waiting to show itself and from which new life can spring for us. There is always the possibility of fresh beginnings.
What first appears as a dead end can become the place of a fresh direction; what first appears as a failure can become the window through which a new perspective on life begins to dawn; what first appears to be simply barren because it seems filled with sadness and fear can become a place pregnant with an unimagined gift to us.
I think this is what Jesus is really seeking to assure us of in the gospel today. He is certainly not suggesting to us that we can do things like pick up snakes or drink poison and not be harmed! Rather, by using such colorful illustrations he is proclaiming to us that the very things that at first seem to speak of our downfall, our destruction, our disillusionment our despair are no longer the final story. Because his love has triumphed over fear, because his energy has overcome the sources of our paralysis, because his openness has overcome the entombment of our own prejudices and despair, because his life has overcome those deathly forces within us and around us, we have a freedom now that we never thought possible.
This freedom given to us becomes the basis for the freedom with which we might enable others. As Jesus is present to us transforming limitation into possibility, can we present to one another in a similar way?
Let us then to look at our life again. Have we lost sight of its possibilities? Have they got lost in some kind of fog? Can we re-live some of those possibilities, and therefore give witness to our world that there is a future. A future we can give ourselves over to freely and confidently because in the story of Jesus, the ascended One, the One who is present in his absence, the future is always given to us as promise.
