8th May 2016 Evensong
Isaiah 44. 1-8, Ephesians 4. 7-16
There is a sort of logic to the Ascension; it’s bit like a reverse incarnation. A mysterious heavenly and angelic agency sows the seed of the incarnation as Gabriel announces the surprising news to Mary, and nine months later, to the day, a little boy appears, in art naked and lying on straw in a wooden manger. About thirty years later an ideal beautifully formed (again in art) young man is nailed to a wooden cross (again naked, but that bit is historically accurate). But having died in literally excruciating pain, and been buried, he bounces, or rather seeps back, oddly, often unrecognisably, but really, tangibly and fish eating. And then forty days later, after making some promises that somehow he, or someone, or something comforting and inspiring would come back, he disappears ascending, or evaporating, into a cloud, the cloud that the Jews associated with the impenetrable and ineffable presence of God himself.
The point, or one point, of this this pattern is to assure us that God is always there, always interested in, and concerned for his creation, and that his brief, thirty odd year human appearance on earth is only an episode in the great story of his love for mankind, and the terrible mistakes that men make when encountering that love. The incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection do, of course, make a crucial difference; nowhere, at no other time, does God almost allow the force of sin and death to almost overcome him, and that he overcomes those forces is of the utmost significance for us; human beings can never see their lives in the same way again, but my point is that the story of Jesus belongs in and is the culmination of a longer story, and an unending story of which we are still part. This is, I think, what the Gospel writers, especially Luke mean by saying all that Jesus did was in fulfilment of the scriptures.
Of the Scriptures Isaiah is perhaps the prophet it’s most easy to associate with the Gospel story. In this evening’s reading we hear of the permanence of God’s interest in his creation; Israel whom he formed in the womb and to whom he now announces a New Thing; but it’s not really a new thing because it’s declarer has always intended it. “I am the first and the last and beside me there is no God”. God is seen in both cosmic terms, creating everything, and immanent in nature as he waters the grass and the willows, but equally, intimately as owning his people who are like his children. Perhaps not just his children, because the imagery is also that of service and slavery, or belonging. We shouldn’t, I think, see slavery in Biblical times as always the denial of human dignity that is usually is. Abraham was, after all, going to leave his fortune to his slave Eliezer of Damascus; the curious reference to writing the Lord’s name on one’s hand is surely the mark of slave belonging to an owner but treating the name as a surname, identifying him as belonging to the owner’s, or perhaps former owner’s, family. We, like Israel, belong to God, we are his family, but also his servants, and in truth his slaves, as we owe everything to Him, and can only be our true selves by submitting totally to his will. And this is as it has always been; God’s relationship with man has not changed: “Fear not, nor be afraid, for have I not told you from old and declared it?”
Paul, in the letter to the Ephesians, is saying something similar from a spatial or social perspective; Isaiah tells us of God’s permanence through time; Paul shows how God manifests himself, through the influence of the Spirit, in different people, the components of the church, but equally of any society which may become a church (because we shouldn’t think that this congregation, or the Anglican Church, or any church is the only community in which God’s purposes can be made real). Any such church, or any such society, will however need to become like the body of Christ to fulfil its potential.
I suggested at the start the idealised body of the perfect young man on the cross was an invention of Renaissance artists. But those artists owed a lot to the perfect classical male sculptures with which Paul would have been familiar in the Hellenistic cities which he was born in and visited. I can’t help thinking it’s those beautiful examples of masculinity that Paul perhaps subconsciously, perhaps with deliberate provocation (because nudity was anathema to the Jews), has in his mind when he sees the church as the perfection of manhood, and the body of Christ on earth. Whatever Paul had in mind when he used this imagery it was something which unified the church’s disparate parts in the way the body joins and harnesses the different limbs and organs of our bodies. Society’s different components are incorporated into one whole. This is the corporal and corporate counterpart of Isaiah’s temporal conception; Paul’s aim is us unifying ourselves to be Christ’s perfect body on earth; Isaiah’s vision is the unifying permanence of God through history.
There is a risk of overdoing parallels between our present position as a Parish entering an interregnum and the very early church apparently abandoned by its leader as he floated away into the sky. I don’t imagine Stephen chose this season to retire for its seasonal and liturgical significance, and we shouldn’t overplay that significance- but there are some obvious parallels. Stephen isn’t floating in the ether; he’s not far away listening to an opera on CD I hope, or stuck into a novel; but he’s not here leading us, and we are properly and excitingly, left to our own devices a little as the early church was. Isaiah and Paul have something to tell us. First, we are part of a big story; that is daunting but encouraging but we must remember God is with us and always has been and always will be; our challenge is discerning what he wants of us; what is the New Thing that he is announcing to us?
Second, however fragmented and tangential we may seem to ourselves, we can recognise the goal of growing into a church that represents the perfection of human form, itself the image of God; we are the hands and feet, the hearts and minds that can be Christ’s body here and now, mature and responsible enough to be ready, willing and able to do God’s will on earth as in Heaven. Amen.