I
often advise people in the wake of death that the primary focus of
their life for the next little while will be learning how to live
with the presence of someone who is now absent. It really is like
that. Everywhere you look are reminders. You feel like they are
there. They show up in dreams, glimpses out of the corner of your
eye, and sometimes it’s more real than that like standing at the
foot of the bed smiling a smile of assurance. I read once that 80%
of people who have lost somebody say they have had an experience of
encountering the deceased, an experience that was oddly communicative
and reassuring. You feel like they are around. Yet, they are gone.
Present, yet absent. At first it is really difficult, gut-wrenching
actually, to come to grips with but, after awhile and it may take
years, this present absence that used to make you cry your eyes out
can actually be comforting.
Well,
I said all that because I think it is a good analogy for what many
would say is the task of the church. We are called to learn how to
live with the very real presence of this man Jesus even though it is
obvious he is not physically here. Let me say it again because this
is important. We must learn to live with the real and personal
presence of Jesus though he is not here. This is a difficult thing
to do. It would be so easy if we could just say, “Jesus is dead.
Gone. He was a good man, indeed God. But, he ain’t here no more.”
If it were the case that he was dead and gone and no longer present,
then being the church is simply living according to a memory. Jesus
came and showed us what God required of us and all we have to do is
imitate him. Be the community that lives like Jesus. We do what
they think God wants us to do. We’re good people, actually some of
the best people you’ll ever meet, but just going through the
motions of what we think God wants us to do. Doing our duty for God,
faithful because God wants us to be faithful. It really becomes
evident on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper is shared. The meal is
simply a re-enactment of the last supper where we remember what Jesus
did for us and maybe be thankful, maybe feel guilty, maybe recommit
to do better. If this is the case, then Jesus might as well be dead.
Permit
me a bit more time to rant further on this imitative way of being
Christian. If all Jesus did was come and show us how to live and die
a sacrificial death to appease an angry God and pay our death penalty
for our sin and then in turn our response is to live in imitation of
him, then all we really are doing is continuing to keep ourselves in
the God-seat pretending to be gods ourselves. We do things that we
have determined to be something that Jesus would and hope he blesses
it. Seeking simply to imitate Jesus is in the end just a backdoor
attempt of our trying to be God ourselves. The last time I checked
that's one of the consequences of sin, just one more way of living
out alienation from the Trinity when in fact what Jesus did was make
it so we can participate in the life of the Trinity. There is an
eternity's worth of difference between participating in the life of
the Trinity and simply trying to imitate its image, noble though that
effort be.
I
mention these things not to step on anybody’s toes. For really, I
have probably just described 60% of the churches in North America and
85% of the churches of Western Europe. Our common problem, we just
haven’t figured out how to live with the presence of the one who is
absent, so we just do what we think he expects of us as if he was
dead and gone. Paul writes here in Ephesians that we are Christ's
body and that Jesus is our head. Our problem is that we, the church,
decapitate ourselves. We run around with sudden bursts of energy
like a chicken that’s just had its head cut off until the body
falls over giving up the ghost with a few good twitches.
Well,
I’ve good news. This problem is fixable, but you have to answer
three questions and answer them correctly. The first question:
Where’s Jesus? The answer Paul gives us is that God has “seated
him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).” This
blatantly entails that Jesus is not dead and gone but rather that he
is alive. He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of
being the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does
the Father’s wishes. It is helpful to think of heaven as
relationship, a relational dimension where the relationship of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit permeates and is unveiled and where our
relationship to, with, and in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is
unhindered. To die and go to heaven (or Paradise as Jesus called it
at Luke 23:43) to await resurrection (life after life after death as
N. T. Wright says) is to go to this relational dimension. The
Kingdom of Heaven come to earth is an opening up of this relational
dimension into our broken one. Indeed, Einstein has shone us that
all of reality as we know it is a relational dimension. Would it be
too much of a stretch to throw heaven, the relational dimension of
relationship in as part of a Theory of Everything as well as what
makes for life and consciousness?
Question
number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly places (the relational
dimension of relationship), then what’s his body like? Is he
ghost? is another way of putting it. The answer is that he is still
fully physically human yet resurrected, resurrected yet scarred.
Today, which is Ascension Sunday we celebrate Christ’s ascension
into heaven. Today is every bit as important as Christmas when we
celebrate the Son, the Word of God becoming human. We call that the
Incarnation or the infleshment of God the Son. The Son came from the
heavenly places here to earth and became human taking to himself
physical reality and our broken nature. With the Ascension, the
reverse happens. Jesus the Christ, Son of God and son of Mary takes
humanity in the form of resurrected human flesh back into heaven and
back into the inner life of the Trinity.
The
end result is that we now participate in the life of Trinity by means
of Jesus, our union with him in his humanity. We are participators
in Christ’s life in the Triune life of God not simply imitators
of him. The Father and the Son make this real in us by sending the
Holy Spirit to live in us now as a “pledge of our inheritance
towards redemption as God’s own people (Eph. 1:14).”
Now
I know this sounds crazy, just as crazy as God the Son becoming
human. We are not accustomed to think that Jesus with a resurrected
yet scared human body is seated in the heavenly places with the
Father. We like to think he was somehow changed into a spiritual
Jesus because everybody knows that the human body doesn’t go into
the heavens. But, believing that Jesus has somehow changed from
human flesh to ascend into heaven is one of the key theological
misbeliefs that is killing the church in North America. Jesus having
a human body is crucial to our faith for just as Jesus is God the Son
in a real human body in heaven giving humanity place in the life of
God so are we real human bodies here on earth indwelt by the Holy
Spirit participating in the life of Christ our head doing here as he
does in heaven.
That
leads us to our third question: if we participate in Christ’s life,
doing what he is doing, then what is he doing? For part of the
answer to this question we have to go to the book of Hebrews where we
find that Jesus is our great High Priest who in continual worship of
the Father intercedes on our behalf. He by his death has made us
holy and he takes us before the Father and says, speaking
summuratively, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve
given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18).” He constantly
pleads the case of our needs before the Father who in his love for
his Son and his children is more than willing to grant (Heb.
4:14-5:10).
The
other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the
blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy
Spirit. He sends the Holy Spirit to make us participants in the life
of God and to make real in us the saving work he accomplished in
being faithful and obedient unto death. His faith, not our own, is
the only faith we can count on. His obedience, not our own, is the
only obedience we can hope in. Doesn’t that take the pressure off?
The power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised
Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side
is the same power at work in us by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit
opens the eyes of our hearts so that we can know the hope to which he
has called us, the hope of eternal life in communion with God (Jn.
17:3). The Holy Spirit makes known to us now Jesus' own glorious
inheritance, which is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Being made by the Spirit into his Body we share in the
communion of love that the Father and the Son share.
As
I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is
what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit. In the Ascended
Christ we find our true worship, which is rooted in the Son’s love
of the Father coupled with gratitude and praise of the Father for
what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us
into the Trinity’s very being through the Holy Spirit. We don’t
just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn
how to be better Christians. We attend worship to adore the Father
through Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus'
worship we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own
and the Father pours his love out on us.
In
Christ we pray interceding for the needs of the world as Jesus
ceaselessly does. As Jesus is ever praying for us so are we to
strive to pray without ceasing. To pray in the name of Jesus is to
pray to the Father empowered by the Spirit because we are in Christ.
We pray in him and when we don’t know what to pray Romans 8:26
tells us that the Holy Spirit still is praying in us always. It
should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of the
Trinity even the Trinity is praying for us. Ponder on that. Ever
wonder if anyone is praying for you? Well, the Trinity in his very
self is praying for you.
So,
we worship and we pray. One more thing; as the Father sent the Son
into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son send us
into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission.
He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the
suffering Servant who came to restore us to eternal life now in the
loving communion of the Trinity, the loving communion of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. This means that in the relational network of
our lives the Trinity is molding us by the loving communion of his
very self into a fellowship that images that loving communion and
thereby proclaims and invites all people to it. No one is excluded.
Everyone is included. Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and has
sent the Holy Spirit into us we are unioned into the life of the
Trinity in
him,
we worship in
him,
we pray in
him,
and in
him
we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving
communion of the Triune God of grace.
