3, WTiat is the practical hearing of the Ascension on our lives'!
Our Lord's Ascension leads us to think of Him and to follow Him in mind and heart. By His rising from the dead and ascending into heaven He gave us a model to follow no less than by His suffering and death. By His ascension our Lord would show us that although we are in the world we should not be of the world, that our minds and thoughts should be directed heavenward. There lie the vast possibilities, the unthinkable future, for human nature. " To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne." Union and communion with God. This is the beginning, the middle, the end of our religion. For this is the purpose of God for each soul in the day when He creates it.
^ Let us meditate how Christ has gone before us into the glory of His heavenly Father. Therefore, if we desire to follow Him, we must mark the way which He has shown us, and trodden for three and thirty years, in misery, in poverty, in shame, and in bitterness, even unto death. So likewise, to this day, must we follow in the same path, if we would fain enter with Him into the Kingdom of Heaven. For though all our masters were dead, and all our books burned, yet we should ever find instruction enough in His holy life. For He Himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and by no other way can we truly and undeviatingly advance towards the same consummation, than in that which He hath walked while He was yet upon earth. Now, as the loadstone draws the iron after itself, so doth Christ draw all hearts after Himself which have once been touched by Him ; and as when the iron is impregnated with the energy of the loadstone that has touched it, it follows the stone uphill although that is contrary to its nature, and cannot rest in its own proper place, but strives to rise above itself on high ; so all the souls which have been
* F. W, H. Myers, Saint Paul.
5o8 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
touched by this loadstone, Christ, can be cliaiued down neither by joy nor by grief, but are ever rising up to God out of themselves. They forget their own nature, and follow after the touch of God, and follow it the more easily and directly, the more noble is their nature than that of other men, and the more they are touched by God's image.^
Since Eden, it keeps the secret! Not a flower beside it knows
To distil from the day the fragrance And beauty that flood the Rose.
Silently speeds the secret
From the loving eye of the sun
To the willing heart of the flower: The life of the twain is one.
Folded within my being,
A wonder to me is taught, Too deep for curious seeing
Or fathom of sounding thought,
Of all sweet mysteries holiest!
Faded are rose and sun ! The Highest hides in the lowliest;
My Father and I are one.^
III.
His Session at God's Eight Hand.
1. In that solemn and wondrous fact of Christ's sitting at the right hand of God we see the exalted Man. We are taught to believe, according to His own words, that in His ascension Christ was but returning whence He came, and entering into the "glory which he had with the Father before the world was." And that impression of a return to His native and proper abode is strongly conveyed to us by the narrative of His ascension. Contrast it, for instance, with the narrative of Elijah's rapture, or with the brief reference to Enoch's translation. The one was
* Tauler's Life and Sermons, 335.
* Charles Gordon Ames.
ST. MARK 509
taken by God up into a region and a state which he had not formerly traversed ; the other was borne by a fiery chariot to the heavens ; out Christ slowly sailed upwards, as it were, by His own inherent power, returning to His abode, and ascending up where He was before.
But whilst this is one side of the profound fact, there is another side. What was new in Christ's return to His Father's bosom ? This, that he took His manhood with Him. It was " the Everlasting Son of the Father," the Eternal Word, which from the beginning " was with God and was God," that came down from heaven to earth, to declare the Father ; but it was the Incarnate Word, the Man Christ Jesus, that went back again. This most blessed and wonderful truth is taught with emphasis in His own words before the Council, " Ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power." Christ, then, to-day, bears a human body, not indeed the " body of his humilia- tion," but the body of His glory, which id none the less a true corporeal frame, and necessarily requires a locality. His ascemsion, whithersoever He may have gone, was the true carrying of a real humanity, complete in all its parts, Body, Soul, and Spirit, up to the very throne of God. Where that locality is it is useless to speculate. St. Paul says that He ascended up " far above all heavens " ; or, as the Epistle to the Hebrews has it, in the proper translation, the High Priest " is passed through the heavens," as if all this visible material creation was rent asunder in order that He might soar yet higher beyond its limits wherein reign mutation and decay. But wheresoever that place may be, there is a place in which now, with a human body as well as a human spirit, Jesus is sitting " at the right hand of God." In the profound language of Scripture, " The Forerunner is for us entered." In some mysterious manner, of which we can but dimly conceive, that entrance of Jesus in His complete humanity into the highest heavens is the preparation of a place for us. It seems as if, without His presence there, there were no entrance for human nature within that vState, and no power in a human foot to tread upon the crystal pavements of the Celestial City. But where He is, there the path is permeable, and the place native, to ^11 who love and trust Him.