Ascension Day 2012

Contemporary English idiom suffers no lack of expressions employing metaphors of altitude. The psychedelic effect of taking illegal drugs, for example, is, even in this post-hippy era, still known as a 'high'. The surgical procedure that stretches the skin and removes its wrinkles is known as a 'face-lift'. The soles and heels of shoes and boots that raise their wearers several inches above the ground are known as 'platforms'. A high; a face-lift; a platform - each of these expressions employs a metaphor of altitude, of distance above the ground. Each of these metaphors implies a process of change, of altered experience.

The drug-user believes that his perceptive powers are sharpened, and senses a powerful disjunction from reality. The face-lift patient looks in the mirror and sees a younger self. The fashion victim, tottering around in her  platforms, gains height and loses the appearance of weight, or hopes to. Each goes through a process of change, of altered experience.

But for none of them is the change permanent. The high doesn't last. The effects wear off; the user crashes back to earth, sometimes with devastating consequences; and next time he has to use an even higher dosage to achieve the same effect. The face-lift doesn't last. Despite the surgeon's intervention the patient's skin continues to age; the wrinkles return; the taut flesh gives; and the operation has to be repeated if the effect is to be maintained. The platforms don't last. It's not just that no one could possibly sleep comfortably in a pair of Christian Louboutins: it's that they aren't that easy to be awake in either, as Naomi Campbell discovered when she collapsed on the catwalk while modelling a pair of Vivienne Westwood's creations.

A 'high'; a 'face-lift'; a 'platform': three metaphors of altitude, three metaphors of distance above the ground. Three metaphors which imply a process of change, of altered experience - or, rather more brutally, a process of temporary disfigurement. The heights to which drugs, cosmetic surgery and designer shoes take those who indulge in them are not heights at all. They change nothing for those who pay through the nose for them, and not infrequently lead to ill health, debt, misery, or any combination thereof. Drug abuse; body fascism; naked consumerism: three contemporary plagues.

Of course, 'Ascension' is another metaphor of altitude, of distance above the ground. It must be a metaphor because in our post-scientific era we cannot plausibly maintain that Jesus went up, that he rose through the clouds and reached a place called heaven which is just beyond our vertical horizon. 'Above us only sky' John Lennon once sang, and in a purely literal sense he was right. Above us are the great expanses of space which we are still discovering. 'Ascension' is a metaphor of altitude like the other metaphors I've mentioned, a metaphor which implies a process of change, of altered experience. At the Ascension Jesus is changed, and his disciples' experience of him is altered. And there is nothing metaphorical about that.

The change is to his physical body, the body of a carpenter from a small Galilean town, the body that has been nailed to a cross, the body that has been raised wonderfully from the tomb. After the Ascension that body can no longer be seen in the way that it has been seen for thirty-something years. The disciples cannot look him in the eye, or receive their breakfast from his wounded hands, or place their feet where his have left marks in the dust. They know that he lives; they will spend their lives proclaiming that he lives; and many of them will give their lives for their proclamation that he lives. Yet their experience of him has altered. Jesus is not confined by his wounded body, by the boundaries of space and time that confine the disciples and all of us. We can see only as far as our eyes permit; we can be heard only as far as our voices will carry; we can touch only what is within our reach. What we call the Ascension is the change in Jesus that means that there is no limit to what he can see, no place where his voice cannot be heard, and no person that is beyond his reach. Saint Paul expresses it by writing to the Ephesians that after the Ascension all things have been put under the feet of Jesus, who now 'fills all in all'. There's nowhere you can be that isn't where he is. This time I'm misquoting John Lennon.

The dubious achievement of those other metaphors of altitude, the chemical high, the reclaimed youth, the borrowed stature, is a temporary distortion. The triumphant achievement of the Ascension is everlasting glory. Everything that is, is in the presence of Jesus, crucified, risen, and ascended. That same Jesus calls us to follow him, and offers us - in place of the addiction, self-hate and inner shame that the contemporary plagues feed on - complete healing, perfect security, and unfeigned recognition. So much for the plagues. Ascension. There's a metaphor of altitude that's worth believing in. Amen.