Sermon by the Revd Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 17, 2026

In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Ye men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

Which way is heaven?

That might seem an obvious sort of question to ask in the light of the ascension.

After all, the imagery of the ascension seems relatively clear, since Christ, we are told, ascended skyward, which seems to imply more or less vertically, straight up from the Garden of Olives, according to Acts and from Bethany, according to St.

Luke.

From which point one might suppose it logical to deduce he was travelling in a direction very different from that which would have occurred if he had ascended, say, from America.

The one man-made object that has travelled furthest, and indeed upward into space from Earth, is the Voyager 1 space probe.

And that was indeed launched from America by NASA in September 1977.

It has now travelled, I believe, 15.5 billion miles into space, and by all accounts seems still to be going strong.

Not it has to be said in a straight trajectory.

But as soon as we start to think in such terms, it seems quite odd to think that any kind of analogy with an object progressing up into space could be appropriate to the ascension of Christ.

This suggests in turn that perhaps a less naively literal interpretation would make more sense.

Though in saying this, I do not suggest that the ascension was not a factual occurrence, merely that the dimensions in which it occurred must clearly have transcended our ordinary understanding, which is simply to say it was indeed miraculous.

Unless that is we want to suppose that heaven is indeed in an actual location within the universe as we know it.

And I have to say that this was pretty much the view of many historic divines through the course of church history until relatively modern times.

But then again, if we were to try and be looking in what we might call the right direction, as it were, rather than simply looking skyward, we could of course look east towards the place where the ascension happened.

That is, after all, the way most Christian churches are oriented, as they say, including this one, which is why, incidentally, it is so clearly not aligned with the street pattern around us, and why the architect was so ingenious in contriving to use the space around the church in such a way as yielded the library.

In looking east, we would of course be orienting, same word, ourselves toward the rising sun.

That brings to mind that the word orient itself, as used in English now, means east.

Though the word originally derives from a form of the Latin verb meaning to rise, or rere, I should say, which connects with the concept of the rising sun.

And by tradition, the altar in a church is oriented to the east, just as the celebrant of the altar is said to face ad orientum, towards the east.

And thus, incidentally, towards the rising sun, with perhaps a degree of mystical expectation of the second coming.

There is also an echo of this in C.

S.

Lewis's novel, in the Narnia sequence, entitled The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which the voyagers sail east until they get to the end of the world and can tread the dawn in Aslan's country.

By contrast to that, in the works of C.

S.

Lewis's great friend, Tolkien, at the end of the Lord of the Rings, there's a very grand departure by ship, in which Frodo and the elves sail from the Greyhavens, but this time not east, but instead they travel quite expressly that is stated west.

And that ending was inspired by the legendary voyage of the fifth century Celtic saint Brendan, sometimes called Brendan the Navigator, who sailed west from Iceland into unknown waters on a quest for the Isle of the Blessed, a paradise in the midst of the ocean in which the sun never sets and where it is always day.

And very curious to say, it does seem as though something of that vision was actually behind Christopher Columbus's coming here, for part of his purpose was to seek the original earthly paradise, which he had come to suppose might be found in the virgin territory of the New World.

And behind that line of thought is a thread that takes us all the way back to the Cappadocian fathers and Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazaranzos, to whom I shall return in a moment, because we should notice that along the way in these remarks, we've actually made rather a switch between the concept of heaven, where we began, and the concept, which is quite different, of paradise, as associated really with the Garden of Eden.

So with all that directional travelling about sorted out, we need to get back to the core issue here, which is the actual theology of the ascension, and just why it is so important, the feast and how it came to be.

There is a perhaps too familiar phrase used in the history of liturgy, lex orandi, lex pretendi, that the rule of prayer is the rule of belief.

Going back all the way to Cyprian of Carthage in the mid-33rd century, summarized by Pope Gregory the Great three centuries later, it reminds us that what the church prays, the church believes, and what the church believes comes to expression in prayer with yet greater and more personal precision.

The history of the Feast of the Ascension is a particularly instructive illustration of the many in the calendar of the Christian year.

For the Feast of the Ascension did not emerge from devotional sentiment, still less from antiquarian tidiness about the Church calendar.

It emerged quite clearly as the fruit of theological insight, which is to say, from the Church's growing recognition that what it confessed about the person of Christ demanded explicit, public, and liturgically differentiated enactment.

Thus, indeed, was what was always implicit made explicit to our spiritual advantage, illustrating along the way that second thoughts and even third thoughts can in this domain be even better than first thoughts.

Not by virtue of novelty, but by virtue of better expressing the central truths we seek to understand.

To understand the feast is to understand something essential about the relationship between the cut and thrust of doctrinal controversy and formation, together with its ultimate liturgical expression.

To celebrate this feast is therefore intelligently to inhabit, as we might say, the fruits of the relationship and that spirit-filled labor.

The earliest stratum of Christian practice offered no independent ascension feast.

The entire 50-day period from Easter to Pentecost appears in the pre-Nicene sources to have been treated as a single undivine fest or home.

What scholars of early liturgy have called the state of paschal undifferentiation, in which resurrection, ascension, and the spirit bestowal at Pentecost were commemorated together as facets of one mystery of glorification.

Doxology.

This liturgical undifferentiation was, must be emphasized, theologically coherent, if theologically deficient of the fullness we now see.

It corresponded to what is on close exegetical reading of St.

John chapter 17, a single hour, so to speak, encompassing the whole movement from the Passion to the Exaltation of Christ.

John 17 · chapter mention

The prayer of chapter 17 in John speaks proliptically, anticipating the and the ascension as the tell-off, the end, of the canotic, the self-emptying economy of the incarnation before the Passion has even begun.

And it was the rather obscure synod of Elvira, which convened approximately in 300, and is thus rather a precious testimony to pre-Constantinian liturgical practice, that preserves the germ of an emerging, but still at that point contested observance of the ascension.

This confirms thus that the feast was not at that point fixed.

What was fixed was the theological conviction which it would eventually be made to serve.

In other words, the Lex Tridendi preceded the lex orandi.

But the consolidation came rapidly in the latter half of the fourth century.

Eusebius of Nicmedia is our earliest witness to the ascension as an established, separate feast, and by the close of the century it was fast becoming a universal observance on the 40th day, a chronology derived directly from Acts 1-3, something that is attested both across the East and the West.

Gregory of Nissan, of whom I spoke earlier, gives us homilies on Ascension Day that provide Eastern evidence that the occasion had already acquired the character of high doctrinal preaching.

But it's impossible to understand this fourth century development apart from an extraneous factor that impelled the greater exactitude the feast expresses.

And that was the Arian controversy.

The Council of Nicaea, whose anniversary was celebrated last year of 325, together with its long and turbulent aftermath, was sharpened the church's need for liturgical occasions that confessed the full exaltatio sequence of passion, resurrection, and ascension.

Which now is so powerfully captured in the words of the Rite One Eucharistic Prayer, we shall hear shortly in the sequence.

Remember the words, having in remembrance his blessed passion, precious death, his mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension.

And perhaps rather more prosaically in the Right II liturgy, where it simply says, recalling his death, resurrection, and ascension.

But what counts here is that the ascension, as the Gospel of John makes clear, means for the Son to be at the right hand of the Father, a vivid rejection of the Aryan heresy, and its tendency to minimize or altogether spiritualize the divine dignity of the Son, a temptation we still see today.

The doctrinal stakes were precise.

If Christ was merely the highest of creatures, his ascension would constitute simply an exaltation from below, a promotion within the creaturely order.

If he were, as Nicaea insisted, homousios with the father of one substance, the ascension was the return of the eternal Son to co-equal and co-eternal glory, now bearing human nature as the permanent trophy of his redeeming love, brought with him to his glorified estate.

Gregory of Nyssa, thus once again, was exemplary in being so deeply invested in the pro-Nicene cause against the Aryan heresy, and understood the ascension feast as a confessional occasion of the first order.

His ascension homilies pressed the whole notion of theosis to which I have referred, or divinization, the bringing up to the divine of human nature in Christ.

The entry of glorified humanity into the divine life through Christ as the crowning expression of and argument for the full divinity of the ascended Christ.

The logic was as rigorous as it was doxological, which is to say, about glorification.

What the Son assumed, he redeemed, what he redeemed, he carried into the eternal presence of the Father.

No subordinationist Christology could sustain this logic without collapsing the soteriological, salvational, structure that depended upon it.

The feast was not, therefore, a decorative piety, it was from the first a doctrinal proclamation in the form of liturgical observance.

And here let us recall the three fundamental scriptural strands.

John 17 discloses the inner Trinitarian dimension of the ascension without narrating the event itself.

In his priestly prayer, spoken proliptically in the shadow of the Passion, Christ anticipates the ascension as the moment of his return to glory I had with you before the world existed.

This is not simply a petition for vindication.

It is the Son's articulation of the self-emptying economy reaching its end or telos.

The God, man, carrying glorified humanity into the divine presence, asking that those who belong to him may share that same glory, which is to say, each of us.

The forty-day period between resurrection and ascension then acquires, as read through John 17, its own theological legibility.

Christ prays for those who will be left in the world, while he returns to the Father.

And the disciples' prayerful waiting in Acts 1, 12, 26 enacts precisely the posture that prayer anticipates.

Luke 24 provides the liturgical and doxological register, the departure from Bethany, with hands raised in priestly blessing, and the disciples' response, not lamentation, but great joy, and the immediate resumption of worship in the temple.

The effective note here of the ascension is theologically diagnostic.

The disciples are joyful because they recognize what has occurred not as loss, but as coronation.

Luke narrates thus an enthronement.

Acts 1 then unfolds the myssiological and pneumatological dimensions, the asception of the necessary precondition of the Spirit's outpouring and the apostolic mission, concluded by the angelic redirection.

Why do you stand looking into heaven?

Which converts contemplation into apostolate.

The angel does not rebuke eschatological expectation, the angel redirects eschatological energy towards its proper ecclesial expression.

The feast, understood thus in its fullness, requires all three registers simultaneously.

No single account contains the whole mystery.

No single homiletic register is adequate to it.

The history of the feast's theology is in large part the history of successive attempts to hold all these three elements in productive relation.

Ascension thus discloses both profound truths about the identity of Christ and the destiny of human nature, and the doxological gaze into heaven to the apostolic vocation of the church militant, which is a community that celebrates this feast with theological seriousness, that allows its prayer to be formed by the full convergence of these three biblical witnesses I have cited.

So, indeed, in answer to the angelic question, why do you stand looking into heaven?

We say that we do so because we have apprehended, we have understood, that in the ascension there is something that determines everything about what we are called to do here and now, in the words and the work of God's church.

Thus, indeed, should we say, as we shall hear in the offery verse, God is gone up with a merry noise, and the Lord with sound of the trumpet.

Hallelujah.

Amen.