There was a popular comedian in the 1960s and ’70s who began one of his routines with a simple declaration: “I started out as a child.” We all did, of course. We all started out as children. But we can take this notion one level deeper and say, “I started out as a baby.” Each one of us had the experience of developing in utero, and receiving necessary oxygen from our mother’s blood supply by means of an umbilical cord, and we’ve all got belly buttons to prove it.
All the bodily systems necessary for life in the outside world are developing during the time a baby spends growing in the mother’s womb. Some of these systems are functional before birth: muscles, circulation, autonomic reactions, hearing. The respiratory system also develops, but it remains dormant, unused. Then, when the child is born, the umbilical cord is cut. There’s a very anxiety-laden period—very brief, one hopes—between cutting the cord and the respiratory system kicking into action as the baby draws first breaths. It’s a moment of great anticipation, and often some fear, for those in the room.
In liturgical time, that moment—that anxiety-filled moment—is precisely where we find ourselves on this feast of the Ascension. The very Jewish disciples of a very Jewish Jesus had been taken on a violent, emotional roller-coaster ride. In the space of three dozen months, give or take, they had encountered Jesus, most of them while going about their ordinary work.
They had answered his call to follow him, to become disciples—an act of obedience that brought with it huge risk and great danger. They had been formed by his teaching and his example. They had come to expect, because of that teaching and example, the fulfillment of Israelites’ hopes for a messiah who would deliver them from the yoke of Roman oppression and restore their lost national glory.
Then they had experienced, rather suddenly, one of their fellow apostles betraying Jesus into the hands of hostile authorities, after which Jesus suffered horribly (and they all abandoned him), followed by his death, the empty tomb, and the post-Resurrection appearances of their crucified and risen Master. He was clearly the same person whom they had followed around Galilee and Judea, but at the same time clearly not the same, clearly different. Now he’s suddenly taken from them—permanently this time, it appears—yet, in a way that has them returning to Jerusalem “with great joy,” St. Luke tells us, and with a tantalizing promise of “power from on high.”
When a child emerges from the womb, his or her respiratory system, which previously was both unnecessary and unavailable, suddenly becomes both vitally important and available for use. The necessary condition—that is, birth—for the operation of the respiratory system has been met. It’s a critical moment in anyone’s life; indeed, life depends on it.
In the economy of God’s plan of redeeming a fallen universe, the Ascension of Jesus fulfills a similarly necessary condition. It’s a critical moment in the revelation and manifestation of that plan. In the Ascension of Jesus, human nature comes to reside in the very heart of God. There’s a wonderful 19th-century hymn text that speaks to this critical moment (“At the Name of Jesus,” 435 in Hymnal 1982). The One who was “from the beginning the mighty Word,” a reference to the majestic prologue to John’s gospel—“in the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God.” This Word, as it becomes flesh, is “humbled for a season to receive a name”—that is, the “name” Son of Man, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, of one nature with us as human creatures.
He bore that Name faithfully, “spotless to the last”; indeed, he “bore it up triumphant to the central height.” In the Ascension, Jesus, the eternal Word of the Father, also became Son of Man, and having lived the first fully human life in the history of creation, brings that human nature into the very heart of God. Is that not a stunningly beautiful declaration, that human nature—your human nature and mine—now lives in the heart of God? Herein lies our hope: as God assumed human nature in the Incarnation, sealing that act of love as the Father receives the Son back to his right hand, so now the way is prepared for us, sinful sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, to become partakers of the divine nature, as St. Peter tells us in his second epistle.
That’s pretty good news, but there’s yet more. We await the outworking of our salvation through participation in God’s very life. We participate in the life of God by hearing the Word of God proclaimed and broken open, coming together for the eucharistic banquet, and remaining together as the people of God, the re-membered body of Christ—taken and blessed and broken and given for the life of the world.
Along that journey, there are gifts to sustain us and encourage us and empower us. As the respiratory system of a newborn child comes online in response to the fulfillment of the necessary condition of birth, and the umbilical cord being cut, so the power and the gifts of the Holy Spirit become active once the necessary condition of human nature residing in the heart of God has been fulfilled, thus bringing full circle the saving action that God initiated in the Incarnation.
Indeed, we could do worse than to think of the Holy Spirit as the Church’s “respiratory system” that has become active in response to the Ascension of Jesus. The availability and accessibility of “power from on high,” as promised by Jesus, enables and energizes the mission of the Church. Two millennia later, we have that same energy and power available to us.
It was planted in us as we came under the sacramental waters of the baptismal font. It is cultivated and developed in us through the practices of prayer and discernment. And then the Holy Spirit’s power, operating in each of the cells of the body as they make themselves available, becomes the animating force behind the Church’s missionary work of proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, and of leading others to the risen and ascended Christ so they may become his disciples, for the life of the world.
Each of us draws breath because we were born. We emerged from our mother’s womb and the umbilical cord was cut, fulfilling the necessary condition for our respiratory system to activate itself. Together, as the body of Christ, we draw breath —none other than the breath of God’s Holy Spirit—because, in the Ascension of Christ, human nature now lives in the heart of God, fulfilling the necessary condition for the manifestation of the gift and power of that Holy Spirit.
The Rt. Rev. Daniel Martins is retired Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield in the Episcopal Church.
