ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon at High Mass Sunday after Ascension 2008
Matthew Duckett

Acts 1:6-14
1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17 1-11

"Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" So the disciples question Jesus in our reading from Acts. What they are asking about, in the Greek, is not just any kingdom but the parousia, the final fulfilment of God's rule on earth. There were different ideas around of what this kingdom would be like. One of them was that the Messiah would conquer the oppressive Roman powers and throw them out of Israel, establishing a safe boundary within which God's pure kingdom will flourish whilst all the unclean nations of the gentiles are finally and forever shut outside. This idea had probably been foremost in the minds of the disciples on Palm Sunday, only a short while before this scene in Acts, when Jesus had entered Jerusalem in triumph as a king.

But the resurrection reveals something different about the kingdom of God. The one who stands before the disciples is the risen victim, who forgave the Roman oppressors who put him to death and the disciples who abandoned him. He has not returned from the dead to exact revenge. Rather, the resurrection vindicates the victim, the one who ended up on the outside of the boundaries created by human violence, and also vindicates the forgiveness he brings. This shows that the violence Jesus suffered is an entirely human affair that God will have nothing to do with.

So instead of sounding the war cry, Jesus tells the disciples to wait until the Holy Spirit has come upon them, and then they will be his witnesses, "in Jerusalem and in all Judea", well, that's fine, much as expected, but then he continues: "and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Samaria? That's where those foreigners live, who don't even know how to worship God properly. The ends of the earth?! The Holy Spirit will send them to all the unclean, foreign, outside places, to be witnesses of the Kingdom there. That is not what they expect at all. And the story told in the rest of Acts is that of disciples who are undergoing the new reality of the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, and so unlearning their notion of God's kingdom and discovering a new unbounded kingdom which is not established by violence and not constructed on the basis of insiders and outsiders.

An essential idea of God's kingdom in Jewish theology is that of the renewal of creation. Think of those wonderful visions in the prophets of the messianic banquet, where creation is just gloriously and transparently good, everything is right with the world, at last. These are visions of creation as it was meant to be, the Cosmos redeemed.

The resurrection shows what this means. Jesus, raised from the dead, has taken our human nature into God, and with it, all of created being. And this enables the sending of the Holy Spirit, the creator spirit who hovered over the deep at the beginning, who is now sent into the world once more to renew the creation through the Church. And because this takes place within the economy of creation and not by some imposition from outside, it takes time: the disciples have to wait nine days before the Holy Spirit comes, and then have to wrestle for decades afterwards with their slowly changing and expanding idea of the Kingdom.

The theme of salvation in creation appears in a profound way in today's passage from John's Gospel, which is the beginning of what is called the Priestly Prayer of Christ. Jesus identifies his work of salvation with the work of the Father in creation, "I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed". And, of course, we are meant to read this in the light of the prologue of John's Gospel which tells us that all things came into being through the Word who was with God and was God.

But there is more to it than this. This passage is not called the Priestly Prayer simply because it is long and rather solemn. The words that Jesus uses, as reported by John, are based on the prayer that the High Priest prayed during the Rite of Atonement that took place once a year in the temple in Jerusalem.

We can read about the Rite of Atonement in Leviticus, chapter 16. I'm sure you'll recall aspects of it: the high priest sacrificing various animals, sprinkling blood, driving out the scapegoat, burning incense, entering the Holy of Holies which could only be entered once a year, and so on. But Leviticus doesn't really tell us the underlying purpose and meaning of all this. Its main concern is that rituals should be performed correctly; it is a "how to" book, not a "why" book. Looking in Leviticus for the meaning of the Rite of Atonement is a bit like trying to understand the doctrine of the Eucharist by reading Fortescue.

Modern scholarship has however aided our understanding of the Rite of Atonement. By piecing together imagery from the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms, and from other Jewish sources, scholars have reconstructed the Rite and uncovered a fundamental link between atonement and creation in Jewish thought. It turns out the most important part of the Rite of Atonement was not the sacrificing and sprinkling of blood. The central act of the Rite was when the high priest dressed up as Yahweh. He put on a white robe, representing himself as an angelic emanation from God, and a turban on which the holy Name of Yahweh was written in letters of gold. Dressed like that, he came out of the Holy of Holies. He was liturgically enacting Yahweh emerging from his eternal dwelling place and entering the creation. Atonement is represented as God coming into the world to put right what has gone wrong; it is as much about the healing of creation as about the forgiveness of sins, a vision of cosmic redemption.

With that understanding, it becomes hugely significant that Jesus at the last supper should use the words of the prayer of atonement. For, from this point onwards in John's Gospel, Jesus enacts in his own person the Rite of Atonement. He himself becomes priest, sacrifice for sin, scapegoat and temple; he is Yahweh entering the creation to put right what is wrong. The real Rite of Atonement takes place not in the temple in Jerusalem, but on a rocky piece of waste ground just outside the city walls. And the resurrection and ascension show that it is complete. Because creation in Jesus has entered God, then it is also true that God has entered the creation, definitively, once and for all, and by undergoing our violence and death has revealed that violence and death are not intrinsic to the creation and need not be. In the words of the Catholic theologian James Alison, the resurrection "opens us up to be able to enjoy the fullness of creation as if death were not".

What does this mean for us here and now? There are two things, I think, that we can take from this.

The first is that God's creation is good, and that we are part of it. Therefore, we do not give up. There will be times of waiting and wrestling with things we can't yet understand, as there were for the disciples in Acts. There may be times of bodily or spiritual suffering, as there were in the reading from 1 Peter. But God has acted within the economy of creation by raising Jesus from the dead and enabling us to start living in the new reality that has revealed, even if it is in fits and starts and half-caught glimpses. We have reason to be faithful, to remain steadfast in prayer, to believe with Mary and the disciples that the promises made by the Lord will be fulfilled.

Secondly, Jesus calls us to participate with him in the work of atonement because we are part of the creation that is being restored. This means that our relationship with and in the created order matters. Of course, our witness to the truth of the Gospel is part of this, but it affects what we do about everything from issues of justice for the poor and the oppressed to how we care for the environment. And it means that we must constantly be unlearning our human ideas of boundaries and definitions of who is an insider and who is an outsider, because the new creation that the resurrection reveals knows nothing of these categories. We need to live in the resurrection truth that all of creation is caught up in the atoning work of God.

And it is the resurrection which shows the link between atonement and creation, which shows that our atonement is accomplished so that we can start living now as if death were not.

A final vision from John's Gospel. Remember how John describes the scene of the resurrection: the stone has been removed, the tomb lies open, Mary Magdalene peers through the doorway into the enclosure, and there she sees the shelf where the body of Jesus had been, a rectangular structure, with two angels on it, one at each end, and empty space between them. Does that sound familiar? It is a description of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. And the door is open; God has gone out into the garden, into the new creation which the resurrection reveals and completes. And he is not going back.