Ascension Day (2000)
The future seems obvious: Jesus has been raised from the dead, God has shown that he is on the side of Jesus, not of the powers that killed him. God has taken a stand, you might say, against the corrupt priests and the tyrannical Romans. So surely, now, the way is clear: God will give victory and freedom to his people; the kingly power will be restored to Israel. Is this it? Jesus's friends want to know. Are you going to overturn the authorities of this world here and now?
Jesus's reply is - as usual - a bit enigmatic. Nobody knows God's timetable, and in that sense the future isn't at all obvious. But what the friends of Jesus have to do now is to go straight back to the city where Jesus suffered, and wait. Power will indeed come to them; but it will be power to bear witness, in the middle of the city where Jesus dies, witness to those who murdered him; and to bear witness to the ends of the earth, among people who have no idea what's been going on, whose language for understanding God and the world is utterly foreign. Certainly, freedom is given them - the rather frightening freedom to speak of Jesus in the most diverse and dangerous places. Probably not quite the sort of freedom the disciples had in mind. Would you really welcome the news that you were going to be given the power, not to organise the world according to your wisdom, but to tell the truth first to a violently corrupt national government and then to a globeful of people who had not the faintest idea what you were talking about?
Undoubtedly it needs a special sort of power (or a special sort of lunacy; or both) to undertake this. But just as undoubtedly it represents an extraordinary freedom, the freedom to speak about Jesus about the all-importance, the transfiguring significance of Jesus in just those places where there seems little or no point of contact - speaking of him to those who thought of him as a criminal madman, or to those who have no apparent framework for hearing his news. It's the freedom to find him again and again in earth's unlikeliest places, you can speak about him to the cynic, the oppressor, the sinner and the failure, to the complete stranger - and it's all right: there too he is alive and at work, there too he can make the difference that renews everything in the landscape.
You could see a lot of Christian history as a struggle between two ideas of power - between the desire for kingship and the call to witness. What most of us would really like is kingship; we'd like the assurance that God's people are now in charge, licensed to decide and define what the world is going to look like. The Church has in the past bought into kingship pretty heavily. It has allied itself with governments that have tortured and killed, it has tried to impose its moral vision by force; more subtly, in its own internal life, it has silenced large numbers of its members, threatened and manipulated people, created elites of one kind and another, authorised to define the lives and destinies of the majority. And while we may not today see so much of the traditional spectacle of churches trying to become dominant agents in the political world, there are new sorts of 'kingship' mentality that can still seduce and imprison us. Just as much as political parties, we long for a strong and unified group - that is, normally, a group that makes me feel strong because it agrees with me. The new technology of communication and presentation allows for new sorts of manipulation and new elites; in turn it generates new levels of anxiety, about image and market. And because the possibilities of controlled unanimity seem so much more vivid, the fear of honest disagreement can be more acute; it looks more than ever like failure. Lord, is this the time when you are to establish once again the sovereignty of Israel? In the royal robes of IT and pagers and bullet points and singing from the same hymn sheet?
What Jesus will not do is promise us a date when sovereignty, control, will be given into our hands - into the hands of the Church overall, or into the hands of this or that power bloe in the Church. The simple reason is that, now he is risen from the dead, sovereignty belongs to him, not to us; he has the freedom to travel where he wills, act where he wills, encounter whom he wills, because by his resurrection he has become a person without frontiers. Jesus now has God's own freedom to be alive and at work in the whole world, everywhere and anywhere can be home to him. So for us, what's promised isn't kingship, but power to witness - to say when and where we have seen him, and to say that, wherever you are, Jesus is to be met.
Witness of this kind is characterised by a basic lack of anxiety. Jesus really is risen and really is the centre of the new world. His risenness and his sovereignty don't for a moment depend on my success in controlling things. My first job is just to point to him in delight and thanksgiving and to invite whoever wants to share what I see. So too it doesn't vary according to whether others agree or make things easy for me; what predominates is just the simple thereness of what I'm trying to witness to. That of course is also why witness can be risky and costly. If you'd rather witness to the truth than be in control of the situation, you won't be comfortable. It's no accident that the word 'martyr' comes from the Greek word that means originally just 'witness'.
That's why Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit to enable us to bear witness; why we need the power of the Spirit for witness (more and truer power than we'd need for kingship). To be ourselves before God, without dread and defensiveness, without being distracted by the need to be successful, even intelligible, in the eyes of the world around - that needs something more than good intentions or human bravery. But when individuals or communities become obsessed with the longing for kingship, you see all the opposite tendencies at work. People insist very loudly that they're not really failing; that the problem lies with someone else. They then give the impression that there are things in themselves that they don't want to face, and that the disagreement or indifference of others is felt as a dangerous assault on them. It's an obsession that's visible in people of all raditions in the Church at various times - and it's none too hard to recognise it in the world around us (not least in this end of London). At best, the concern with sovereignty and being in control is rooted in a sincere worry that things will drift and that the weak will suffer if the right things don't get done; but it's always on the edge of assuming that my success is necessary to the world's welfare. The person who gives the priority to witness knows better, and is capable of a bit of wry detachment about themselves, their wisdom and their heroism.
That may give us a further clue about why the Holy Spirit is involved in witness. We think of sovereignty as not being bound by anyone else's decisions; but the Spirit is a gift of co-operation, communion. Life in the Spirit can never be a wholly individual project. In the fellowship of the Spirit, you could say, everyone's indispensable and no-one's indispensable. All are uniquely gifted, no-one has everything, all need each other. And that's a style of life that sits well with witness but not at all well with control.
One last thought. In the New Testament, Jesus is more then once described as the great example of witness. He is supremely himself before God, free from obsession and self-regard, not manipulating or forcing those around him into passive conformity. He is sovereign because he is first a witness: he shows his utter freedom and faithful love, his power to transfigure the world, in and through the riskiness of a life of witness. And he says to Pontius Pilate, his kingship isn't the kind the world takes for granted.
So as we celebrate his risen and ascended glory, his radiant authority, we need to be aware of what the authority is and isn't. It isn't simply a bigger and better version of human power, and it doesn't promise control or success. But it is the freedom to uncover the mystery of divine faithfulness in every corner of human experience, to hear God's word in all kinds of strange languages - and to speak that word and display that faithfulness in our own steady willingness to be ourselves before God. As the hymn we sang at the beginning of this service put it, we are 'partners of his endless reign, sharers in his joyful presence before the source of his being'.
We are to be as much at home in the world as he is; as much at home with God as he is.