SPEAKER_00: May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
SPEAKER_00: I suspect that most people, given the surname Wordsworth, and asked who came immediately to mind, would give the answer William.
SPEAKER_00: But being a collector of nineteenth century bishops, my answer would be different.
SPEAKER_00: My mind would turn first and foremost to the famous poet's nephew, Christopher.
SPEAKER_00: Christopher Wordsworth was Bishop of Lincoln in England in the 1870s, a robust high churchman, and the author of many fine hymns, and as is the way of things, a lot more fairly ropey ones, which now fall into the category of justly neglected.
SPEAKER_00: But several of Wordsworth's hymns are still sung regularly.
SPEAKER_00: Among them our offatory hymn today, See the Conqueror Mounts in Triumph.
SPEAKER_00: You can find it on page five of the bulletin.
SPEAKER_00: In its original version, this hymn ran to a full ten verses.
SPEAKER_00: But as we at the Advent aspire to brevity and modesty in all things, we're singing a mere five of them this evening.
SPEAKER_00: To my mind, See the Conqueror Mounts in Triumph meets the criteria for the ideal hymn.
SPEAKER_00: It tells a story, it teaches sound theology, and it rhymes.
SPEAKER_00: And so, in what follows this evening, I want to offer some thoughts on the ascension of the Lord as explicated by Christopher Wordsworth.
SPEAKER_00: For our purposes, there are three parts to the hymn as we will sing it tonight.
SPEAKER_00: It begins with narrative, continues with typology, and concludes with theology.
SPEAKER_00: And so let me examine each in turn.
SPEAKER_00: And as I say, you can find the words on page five if you want to follow along.
SPEAKER_00: The first two and a half verses narrate the events of the ascension, drawing especially on the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of Luke that we've just heard, and on other scriptural imagery, such as Psalm 47, verses 5 and 6.
SPEAKER_00: God is gone up with the merry noise, and the Lord with the sound of the trump.
SPEAKER_00: O sing praises, sing praises unto our God.
SPEAKER_00: Sing ye praises unto our King.
SPEAKER_00: In these verses Jesus, the King and Conqueror, reaches the gates of heaven, and the doors are thrown open for him to take his rightful place as the angelic choirs sing Alleluia.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus won the victory over sin and death on Good Friday and Easter Day.
SPEAKER_00: The ascension is both the celebration of that victory and the logical outcome of it.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, the victory one, now reigns in glory forever.
SPEAKER_00: It is in and by the ascension that Jesus of Nazareth claims his title as Christ the King, since it is here that the triumphal consequences of the saving events of Calvary, events which happened in a particular time and a particular place, are made available to humanity in every time and every place.
SPEAKER_00: He who on the cross did suffer, he whom from the grave arose, he has vanquished sin and Satan, he by death has spoiled his foes.
SPEAKER_00: The second and in some ways most sophisticated part of the hymn seeks to draw out the typological precedence for Christ's ascension.
SPEAKER_00: It is, in other words, a catena of the Old Testament characters who prefigured Christ and his ascension: Enoch, Aaron, Joshua, and Elijah.
SPEAKER_00: This section includes the second half of the third verse and all of the fourth.
SPEAKER_00: Enoch was a patriarch about whom we know virtually nothing, except that he was the father of Methuselah, and that he walked with God and pleased him, and he was not, for God took him.
SPEAKER_00: That passing reference in Genesis to Enoch's ascension is taken up in the letter to the Hebrews as one of the examples of the patriarchs who lived before Christ and yet walked in faith.
SPEAKER_00: By faith, the letter says, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron was the brother and assistant of Moses, subsequently appointed with his descendants as priests of God, to offer intercession and acceptable sacrifice, to mediate between God and his people.
SPEAKER_00: In Exodus 29, Aaron is both anointed and crowned like a king.
SPEAKER_00: Aaron thus foreshadows Christ and is replaced by him, since in Christ the repetition of earthly sacrifices are made redundant by the one perfect sacrifice which Christ made with his own blood.
SPEAKER_00: And now, in the ascension, our eternal high priest enters not into an earthly tent erected for transitory and repeated sacrifice, but through the veil and into the heavenly sanctuary by the power of his own blood, offered in the once-for-all sacrifice upon the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Joshua succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites and led them into the promised land, once known as Canaan, defeating numerous earthly kings along the way.
SPEAKER_00: And now in his ascension, our eternal Joshua leads the new tribes of Israel, which is the church, into the promised land and eternal resting place of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: And finally, the great prophet Elijah, like Enoch, did not see death but ascended into heaven, as described in chapter two of the second book of Kings.
SPEAKER_00: His disciple Elisha asks that a double portion of Elijah's spirit might rest upon him after he is gone, and this request is granted by God.
SPEAKER_00: Now in his ascension, our eternal Elijah is taken from us physically, but promises to his disciples the overflowing abundance of his grace, in the power of the Holy Ghost, whose coming we will celebrate at Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: And so all in all, these six lines are designed to show that in his ascension, as in all aspects of his incarnation, Christ brings the old covenant to fulfilment, and so as we sing at benediction, types and shadows have their ending, for the newer right is here.
SPEAKER_00: Having worked through both narrative and typology, our hymn concludes with the theology of it all.
SPEAKER_00: In verse 5, Wordsworth explains the significance of what he has just described.
SPEAKER_00: In the original version of the hymn, this verse comes right in the middle, and I'm sure that that's intentional.
SPEAKER_00: The theology of it is central to a right understanding of the ascension.
SPEAKER_00: And tonight, as we will sing it, it serves as a triumphant conclusion.
SPEAKER_00: Let me say just a little about it.
SPEAKER_00: We know in our sophisticated twenty first century way that heaven isn't physically up there, and yet the upward movement of Christ in the ascension is nonetheless significant because he carries humanity, both his own and ours, with him, and places it at God's right hand in the glory of the heavenly places.
SPEAKER_00: This is what the early fathers of the Church, in language which was later rediscovered by the Tractarians of the Oxford movement in the nineteenth century, called deification, the understanding that we are called to become partakers of the divine nature.
SPEAKER_00: It is, on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, the idea that we should come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
SPEAKER_00: And yet it is precisely the truth which we celebrate today.
SPEAKER_00: In dying Christ destroyed death, in rising he restored life, and in returning to the glories of heaven he takes us with him, so that we too may one day reign with him in glory, and so that Wordsworth can write those astounding, wonderful words which lie at the theological centre of today's feast.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus reigns adored by angels, man with God is on the throne.
SPEAKER_00: Mighty Lord in thine ascension, we by faith behold our own.
SPEAKER_00: Saint Irenaeus, one of the greatest of the early church fathers, spoke of God as the light and life of all things.
SPEAKER_00: He said, As they who behold the light are within the light and partake of its brightness, so they who behold God are within God, partaking of his brightness.
SPEAKER_00: For the brightness gives them life.
SPEAKER_00: They shall partake of life, beholding God.
SPEAKER_00: The beginning of life comes from the partaking of God, and to partake of God is to know God and enjoy His goodness.
SPEAKER_00: Men then shall see God that they may live, by that sight made immortal and reaching unto God.
SPEAKER_00: It is a wonderful vision.
SPEAKER_00: On Christmas Day we celebrated the beginning of the incarnation, the downward movement in which Christ humbles himself to share in our humanity.
SPEAKER_00: Today we celebrate the end in earthly time of the incarnation, the upward movement in which Christ lifts us up with him, that we might share in his divinity, and so become immortal and partake for ever in the light and life of God.
SPEAKER_00: As the original ending to Christopher Wordsworth's hymn puts it.
SPEAKER_00: Glory be to God the Father, glory be to God the Son, dying, risen, ascending for us, who the heavenly realm has won.
SPEAKER_00: Glory to the Holy Spirit, to one God in persons free.
SPEAKER_00: Glory both in earth and heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Glory, endless glory be.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.