Readings– Acts 1: 1 – 11; Ephesians 1: 15 – end; Luke 24: 44 – end
One of the things we did during my week off after Easter was to go for a long walk in the Chilterns taking in a number of rather well-manicured villages. Sometimes on such walks we drop into village churches as we’re passing. On this one we discovered the Church of the Holy Cross in Sarratt. It’s an ancient building and has some dimly visible fourteenth century wall paintings. The most memorable of these for me was an incomplete depiction of the Ascension. At the bottom of the picture there’s a group of carefully differentiated disciples looking up towards a pair of feet hanging in mid-air. The rest of the picture has been lost. The faces of the disciples are wonderful, but it’s not entirely clear what they are thinking. Are they joyful, sad, still thinking about Jesus’ parting words or simply too stunned to think anything at all?
It may not be any easier for us to know how to respond to the story of the Ascension. It is, after all, rather strange. However, our readings, our Collect and our music this evening suggest a range of possible responses – and I’d like to explore them.
Our first reading, from Acts, portrays the disciples very much as they’re shown in that ancient wall painting. After their final conversation with Jesus they are left gazing up into the sky and have to be brought back to their senses by a couple of angelic figures. It’s an almost comic scene. We too might respond to the Ascension with puzzlement. What does it mean, and where does it leave us? Whatever next?
The Gospel reading gives a more orderly, liturgical end to Jesus’ final conversation with his disciples. Jesus disappears in the act of blessing them; they worship him, then joyfully return to Jerusalem as He’s told them to and continue their worship in the Temple as they wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Our church year reflects this as we too wait between the Ascension and Pentecost.
Our Collect takes a different line. We have just prayed that “we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him, [that is Christ], continually dwell”. We’re not encouraged by the Collect then to watch and wait with the disciples, because of course the Spirit has already come. Instead we’re to allow our hearts and minds to ascend with Christ.
This is much nearer to the line taken by Victoria, who composed the motet and the mass setting which we hear this evening. The motet came first, in 1572, and the mass followed in 1592.
Tomas Luis de Victoria was the most significant composer of the counter-Reformation in Spain. He was roughly contemporary with Theresa of Avila, the great Spanish mystic and reformer of monastic life. His works reflect his own faith, for Victoria was not only a composer, an accomplished organist and a singer but also a priest. The motet and Mass give us an auditory take on the Ascension. We hear it without needing necessarily to visualize it.
Victoria decided to base his Ascension Day motet on Ephesians 4: 8, itself a quotation from Psalm 68. “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people”. Here, Christ is the conquering hero who has vanquished death; as He ascends he showers gifts on His disciples, or the church. Our Mass setting this evening is based on the musical ideas of the motet and reflects the same lightness, brightness and joy. The Mass was always a joyful or even jubilant occasion for Victoria, but he is also careful to ensure that the music serves the liturgical sense.
But there’s no stunned silence and no waiting for Victoria. We’re simply caught up in mystical worship. Invited in to joy. The voices ascend, and up we go with them, soaring and circling, into brightness and serenity.
So, Victoria takes us up, joyfully, with Christ into the heavenly places. But what might it mean, as our Collect invites us to pray, for our hearts and minds to dwell with Christ? The word “dwell” suggests something permanent. A fixed attitude or a habit of thinking perhaps? In our reading from Ephesians, the writer hopes and prays for something like this for his readers. He calls it “a spirit of wisdom and revelation”. He asks, rather charmingly, that the “eyes of their hearts” might be enlightened (Ephesians 1:18). He wants them somehow to grasp what it might mean for them that Christ has indeed conquered death and is now enthroned in the heavenly places. To catch the vision of Christ, the head of the church, enthroned in glory.
And why? To encourage them. Because the Ephesian Christians, just like Jesus’ first disciples and like us too, still have to work out their calling in the world with its daily challenges and pressures, its grief and suffering and disasters large and small.
Just occasionally we may glimpse the glory that is so close, only a breath away; some things – perhaps nature, music or art – or sometimes another human being – reflect this glory to us. How different our lives might be if we were able to live all the time in such a state of awareness. But with a kind of double vision, so that at the same time we don’t lose touch with reality. I think Theresa of Avila certainly achieved this, and perhaps Victoria did too.
So let us also take wing this evening, and rise up into the heavenly places and see with the eyes of our hearts the glory of Christ, our risen, ascended Lord.
Amen