The Absent Presence

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

The Ascension of Jesus is primarily an item of the theology of St Luke. He alone narrates how the disciples saw Jesus ascend into heaven on a cloud after commissioning them to take his Gospel to the world (Luke 24:50-53, Acts 1:6-11). John, on the other hand, does not narrate, rather he asserts, and he does so in the most authoritative way: he presents a conversation between two persons of the Holy Trinity, a prayer of Jesus to His Father. How he could have overheard such a thing is unimaginable, so we must assume that John himself composed the prayer, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Jesus prays to His Father on behalf of his disciples; He prays that the Father will keep them in intimate fellowship with Himself, safe from a hostile world, and united with one another in a bond like the bond that binds Jesus and the Father.  “Holy Father, preserve in your name every one whom you have given me, that they all may be one as you and I are one (17:11).” I invite you today to dwell with me on the prayer of Jesus.

Some interpreters believe, quite plausibly, that Luke narrated the removal of Jesus to heaven after 40 days to make the church safe for the Holy Spirit. There were many versions of the Christian faith at the beginning, as there are today, and rival leaders appealed to visions of Jesus to warrant their positions. What’s an incipient bishop to say when members of the congregation keep jumping up to correct him claiming the authority of Jesus himself, (who appeared to them last night and told them the real truth)? “ No more visions of Jesus,” says Luke, “from now on listen to the apostles to whom the Holy Spirit has been given in special measure! Jesus has gone to heaven.” According to Luke the Ascension closes one epoch in the history of revelation and opens another, closes the epoch of the historical Jesus and opens the age of the Holy Spirit and the church. Luke characterizes the new age as the age of the mission to make disciples of all the nations and thus makes the Ascension the sign of the potential presence of Jesus in all  the world.

The lifting up of Jesus broadens our horizons. The higher you go the more you see, and the astronauts made us aware long ago of the beauty of the earth seen from outer space. The symbolism of the Ascension invites us to look up and look out and see the vast horizon against which we must live our faith in Jesus Christ, and also tells us that Jesus is no longer in this vast world. How shall we interpret that? It clearly does not mean that he has left the world to its own devices, so then what does it mean? In John’s gospel “world” (kosmos) means the world of humans organized apart from and hostile to God. It is the place where people prefer darkness to light and those who kill Jesus’ people think they are serving God. The world is what the Apostle Paul calls the domain of the principalities and powers. Jesus was in this world once and it crucified and threw him out. Now he is finally gone, too bad for the world. It is left alone again to sink back into its miserable and lonely existence in the dark. Or is it? Would God who loved this world so much that he gave his only son to die for its redemption allow that?

Apparently not, because Jesus has left behind in the darkness a few sparks of light and his last prayer to His Father is that the Father will guard these precious sparks, bring them all together, and fan them into a fire that will burn brightly and bear witness to him. We are those sparks, and we must be one fire if we are to be a light in the darkness of the world to guide people to the saving truth of God. “I have made your name known to those people whom you have given me out of the world. They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word (17:6).” We are those people, or are we?

On a day like this when at a congregational meeting we pass the gavel of governance from one group to another I am awed by the miracle of the church. When we set aside the trivial and the selfish reasons why people join a group like this we arrive at the real source of the church’s life, the call of God by the Word of Christ as it sounds in the preaching and is applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The church is the place where the Word is properly preached and the sacrament duly celebrated, and those whom Jesus in John calls “the ones you have given me” hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and come to him. You are one of his little ones, one of his chosen and precious ones one of his friends, and for you he gave his life!

We are slowly but surely becoming a real church, I believe, in the sense I have just described. We are putting away childish things and accepting seriously the joy of what Jesus has done for us, the privilege of being his friend, and the responsibility that that entails. We are putting Christ first in our church life and in our personal lives, and we are growing strong in the supernatural joy. Listen to Jesus’ prayer once again: “Now I am coming to you, and I pray this prayer while still in the world so that they might have my joy overflowing in them (17:13).”   Jesus prays to His Father for us, and what does he ask for? He asks that we might be filled to overflowing with his own joy. Why? Because the world will hate us as it hated him, and constantly try to make us miserable. “I have given them your word and the world has hated them (17:14).” And what is this joy of Jesus? It is the joy of fulfilling the will of the Father. Clearly there is no joy like that in the world, the joy of the assurance that I am living the life God created me to live, doing what God intended me to do! Hearing His Word and praising His Name! What Joy! And integral to that joy is hearing week by week the voice of our beloved friend and good shepherd, calling, comforting, reassuring, guiding.

And also commissioning and empowering.  Jesus says to his Father, “As you sent me into the world, so have I sent them into the world (17:18),” and so we must bear witness, as our passage from 1 John also says, “This is the witness, that God gave us eternal Life, and that this Life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has Life. (1 John 5:11-12).” This is why God called us, this little group, this church, to bear witness to the Life that God gives to those who accept and believe the Word  who is Christ proclaimed.

Let me summarize: Jesus is no longer in the world, and yet Jesus is present in the world. Jesus is absent and Jesus is present; he is the Absent Presence.  As the church we are those whom God gives to Jesus as his own, and when he is absent in the flesh he is present in the Spirit in our midst. We live as disciples in a hostile environment; the world is very hard on us Christians these days, and often for good reason, not least because there are so many fraudulent Christians around, who make Jesus seem wicked and foolish. God loves that world so much that he gave His only Son for its redemption, and if we really are in this congregation because the Word has called us here, then we are part of the holy remnant and the real church in the God-beloved world where the historical Jesus is no more. His Word calls us into being as the church and as we learn the Word more and more, and internalize it more and more, so we become more and more, living instances of, and witnesses to, the Life with a capital “L“ that God gives to those who dwell in Him by faith in the Son. Don’t lose sight of the fact that in the end all we do and say here is part of our need and our quest for Life. His Word can truly give us that Life, and as it does so we shall really become the church in this place.

We pray with Jesus that we may all be one in his joy and thus that ours may be a real church, founded on Christ and the Apostles. If we are, then this marvelous prayer of the Son to the Father will prevail for us. Think of it! The second person of the Holy Trinity bears us always on His heart and in His prayer. That’s why we have here, Life!

Amen.