Ascension, Intercession, and Reconciliation
Sermon at Christ the King
Fr. Bill Danaher


In his recent biography of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, subtitled Turbulent Priest, Piers McGrandle relates the following story: In 1994, towards the end of his life, Archbishop Huddleston returned to South Africa after nearly forty years in exile to witness the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela. When he reached his hotel, an armed Afrikaner soldier approached him. “I would like to touch the Archbishop,” he said. The soldier then said the following: “ I am an Afrikaner and I represent my people. I also attend the Dutch Reformed Church. I want to say on their behalf how deeply sorry I am for all the terrible things we have done to the black people of this country.” The Archbishop responded that they now lived in a new Africa in which it was possible to be forgiven so that the past was forgotten and a different future would be possible. The soldier, however, was unconvinced – he believed that some penance was necessary. Laying aside his gun and removing his cap, he asked the Archbishop for a blessing, and, becoming very moved, the Archbishop granted his request (McGrandle, Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, 2004: 194).

As I reflected on what I would say today as I preach at the parish that Archbishop Huddleston led and loved from 1943-1956, my thoughts kept on returning to this story, and I must confess that I find it moving, troubling, and unfinished. The story moves me, not only because I admire Trevor Huddleston, but because I can identify with the two figures that are depicted. As a priest, I have been ordained to pronounce God’s forgiveness over those seek it, over those who acknowledge their guilt and seek to make things right with themselves, their neighbors, and their God. While there are many more functions that I do as priest that are more prominent, I feel my own vocation most deeply when I sit with someone at the sacramental rite of reconciliation. And as a volunteer facilitator for victim-offender reconciliation for nonviolent, juvenile offenders in the Tennessee justice system, I have witnessed some powerful confessions on the part of young people who have the courage to acknowledge their crimes in order to make things right with their victims. I have also found graciousness on the part of the victims that brings to mind the generosity of God. These experiences have taught me that the holy moments in life are not when we present ourselves as whole and blameless, but when we are willing to acknowledge the ways we have failed our God and our neighbor. In these experiences, I feel the presence and peace of God, which passes all understanding. In these experiences, I begin to see newness of the Kingdom of God breaking into human history, and I am grateful to be one of those witnesses chosen to welcome people into it.
At the same time, I am troubled by this story because I can also identify with the armed Afrikaner soldier. Like him, I am a representative figure. Where he represented a violent, repressive, and racist regime, I represent a violent, repressive, and racist nation, a nation that, to my eyes, startlingly resembles the Apartheid government that once ruled in this country. My nation has perpetrated great abuses of human rights, even perpetrating acts of torture in Baghdad, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These actions are only the most recent in a long tradition of injustice and my nation has perpetrated these injustices because our leaders are convinced of the justice of their cause, the rightness of their intentions, and of their favor in the eyes of God.


Moreover, on a personal level, I feel linked to that soldier. I did very little in the years preceding 1994 to alleviate the suffering caused by Apartheid. During the 1980’s, I attended Brown University, a university known for its progressive ideals and student activism, an activism that successfully convinced the university to sell off the stock it held in companies that refused to divest from South Africa. At different points during my time there, I had opportunities to participate in protests, and from time to time, I did. I once stood with a group of students who threatened to take over the main administrative building on campus, I once wrote my local congressman, and I once attended a prayer vigil to dedicate the construction of a small replica of what are now called informal dwellings on the main yard of the university in order to raise awareness about Apartheid. But there were many more opportunities that I missed, in part because I believed I was too busy, and in part because I did not believe that my actions mattered, that they could contribute to the struggle. And now, as I stand before you today, I am ashamed of how little I did. Unlike many Americans who simply had no idea of what was happening here during the 1980’s, I knew everything I needed to know to do something. And while I did not actively support the Apartheid regime, I did much too little to stop it. Like Afrikaner soldier, then, I am looking for forgiveness, and, like him, I know that it is not going to come easily, but only with the kind of awakening that is both painful and joyous.

Finally, I am struck by the incompleteness of the story, for as it stands it has an unfinished quality. The author, Pier McCrandle, places this story towards the end of his biography, in part because he believed that the story signified a fitting end to Archbishop’s Huddleston’s life. But my own appraisal of the encounter with the soldier is different from the author’s. Although I can accept that the soldier felt remorse for his actions in support of Apartheid, I wonder whether Archbishop Huddleston should have accepted his apology, directed as it was to the black people of South Africa. In truth, the persons who should extend forgiveness to the soldier should be the victims of his crimes, the black people themselves. And so I am left with some questions: Did the soldier ever apologize to the specific people he oppressed? Did he participate in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Did he receive amnesty in exchange for his acknowledgements of wrongdoing, and was this amnesty rightly extended? Has he engaged in the actions of repentance and restitution that should accompany forgiveness? Was Archbishop Huddleston right to link forgiveness with forgetfulness, or does forgiveness in South Africa require exactly the opposite – the determination to remember so that we never forget, the determination to heal our memories rather than scrub them clean?

These feelings and questions have persisted in my mind over the past two weeks as I have visited with bishops, priests, ordinands, ministers, activists, and academics. I do not want to detract from the miraculous achievements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other actions that took place during the peaceful transmission of power that inaugurated the new Africa, but on so many occasions during our visit we have also witnessed the troubling persistence of the old South Africa. Indeed, in many places the old South Africa and the new South Africa appear to coexist uneasily. Moreover, in relating these troubling feelings and questions, I do not want to take anything away from the radiant life and ministry of Archbishop Huddleston. Unlike so many others, when he came to South Africa, his moral vision was crystal clear – he saw injustice clearly and acted against it, no doubt because he approached things with a clarity and intelligence born of prayer. By comparison, my own moral vision – like many others – has healed in stages. My moral vision has been healed much in the way that Jesus heals a blind man in the Gospel of Mark, who at first sees blurry figures that look like trees and then, finally, real people after Jesus places his hands on him again.

Nonetheless, these feeling and questions provide us with a good perspective from which to view our place in the liturgical calendar. Last Thursday, we celebrated the feast of the Ascension of our Lord, which occurred forty days after the resurrection. Next Sunday, we celebrate feast of Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit descended and rested on the church and the disciples in Jerusalem. We therefore find ourselves reliving the time in which the church waited and prayed and longed for our Lord’s presence. The collect appointed for today speaks to this longing, which we experience through the indwelling of the Spirit: “do not leave us desolate,” we pray, “but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our savior Christ has gone before. . .”

Theologians and preachers struggle to define the meaning of and reason for this waiting. Why do ten days separate Ascension and Pentecost? In addition, the feast of the Ascension itself is often greeted with puzzlement. What does the Ascension add to the good news concerning Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection? To be sure, one reason why the Christian feast of Pentecost takes place fifty days after Easter is that the Jewish festival of Pentecost traditionally occurred fifty days after Passover. But this does not explain the ten days between Jesus’ ascension and the Spirit’s descent. What is the meaning of this waiting?

The best answer I have found is that the ascension describes in a unique way Christ’s intercession for his church and the church’s longing for the Spirit of Christ. For one facet of the ascension – one reason why Christ ascends to the Father – is to intercede for us before the Father, to hold before the Father his church in prayer. And in doing so, Jesus takes on the posture not only of himself as Mediator, but of the church as his body. That is to say, the Ascension reminds us that Jesus is interceding for us, and that we live most fully as the Body of Christ when we are prayerfully interceding for ourselves and our world. This we can only do if Christ is present in us, for left to our own devices we are powerless live into the reality of the new life that Christ brings to us through the power of the resurrection.

In the context of the moving, troubling, and incomplete work of reconciliation that I mentioned earlier, the ascension therefore invites us to seek continually after conversion and transformation so that we might be made complete through the reconciliation he accomplished with his cross and resurrection. We seek this conversion in the body of Christ that is his church as well as in the body politic – the nation and world around us.  In the midst of this conversion, we feel no rest, but only restlessness. In the midst of this reconciliation, we experience no peace but the peace of God that puts to shame the false peace that the powers and principalities of the world achieve through fraud, graft, and violence. We pray that God would open our eyes to injustice so that we may continually hold a mirror to ourselves and to our world. And in all of this, Jesus is the mirror we hold. By this I mean that when God the Father looks upon humanity, he sees himself in Jesus Christ, and thereby considers us perfect. Likewise, we only see ourselves truly and perfectly when we look at others and ourselves as reflections of the face of Jesus, the merciful one. In this way, we are to be Christ to our neighbors as they are Christ to us. In this way, the love of Christ is perfected in us.

Of our assigned readings, today’s Gospel offers the most important elaboration on these themes of ascension, intercession, and reconciliation.  In our reading from John, Jesus is in the midst of what is often called his high-priestly prayer. Traditionally, many voices in the Christian tradition teach that in today’s reading Jesus consecrates his own body before his death on the cross so that it may be a perfect sacrifice to God for the sake of humanity. And yet, when we consider what is actually written, the consecration of Jesus’ body not only refers to his literal, historical, and human body – the body that suffered, died, and was resurrected – but also his mystical body, the church. Therefore in the passage we read for today, Jesus prays that his disciples, who will remain in the world after he has ascended, will be unified, preserved, and perfected in the truth. Jesus prays to the Father that his disciples would be unified – he prays that “they may be one as we are one.” Unity, in the Gospel of John, is not achieved by doctrinal purity, by force of law, or by appeals to the collective self-interest, but only when the love of Christ lies at the center of our lives and our witness. We read later in the Gospel of John, that the unity we have in Christ emanates from the love between the persons of the Trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Praying for all his disciples, Jesus asks that as “you Father are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” so that “the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”  In other words, the unity among the disciples must approach the mutuality and self-giving that exists between the persons of the Trinity. The love and compassion between the members of Christ’s body must be a reflection of God’s love revealed to us by Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  This love transforms our lives and our communities. It is the source of Christ’s joy and perfection.

Jesus also prays that the disciples would be preserved when faced with evil. He does not ask the Father “to take” the disciples “out of the world,” and therefore this preservation does not mean that the disciples will be safe or secure in any conventional sense of those terms. Indeed, what the Scriptures testify to most often is that to be Jesus’ disciple means that our lives are gradually conformed to the shape of his cross and resurrection. But Jesus will not leave his disciples defenseless, and he asks his Father that they would be protected from the “evil one,” from the forces of betrayal, sin, and death, which threaten to overwhelm them and to destroy their spirits and the spiritual life of their community. Just as Jesus has defeated the powers of sin and death through his resurrection, so shall his disciples be victorious – today’s Gospel promises – by the power of Christ who abides in them.

Thirdly, Jesus has asks the Father to sanctify his disciples in the “truth.” Truth in the Gospel of John is never neutral or objective, but committed, convicting, and concrete, even partisan. For in the Gospel of John, truth is a gift and grace of the Spirit. This is why Jesus also describes the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John as the “Spirit of truth,” which will lead the disciples into “all truth.” This truth can be received only as it works to bring us to repentance and transformation. To receive this truth is to accept the invitation to step into the light of Christ.

Finally, all that we read today in the Gospel of John pivots around the fact that Jesus realizes that he will ascend to the Father and that his disciples must remain in the world as witnesses to his power, healing and love. Just as Jesus was sent into the world, so he sends us into the world, to be witnesses to his reconciling love. Indeed, now that Jesus has ascended, we must look for him in those who are members of his body, in all those he loves and redeems.

And so, from our reading today from the Gospel of John we must ask ourselves a final question: Do we dare accept and claim the unity, the preserving power, and the truth manifested in Jesus? Few would dare to claim that they possess in full any of these gifts, and those that do claim to possess them in full are not to be trusted. For the grace of God is not a scarce commodity that can be horded and traded like a possession, but only becomes ours when we receive it by sharing it with others. Moreover, we often crave the unity, protection, and truth of Christ most when we sense their scarcity in our individual and corporate lives, for reconciliation is impossible without them.  

Perhaps, in the end, this is why Archbishop Huddleston accepted the Afrikaner’s confession and blessed him, for even in small gestures, none of these gifts are present without the grace of God. And yet, to receive even a little of these gifts does not satisfy us, but only increases our hunger and our thirst for to participate more fully in the body of Christ. We long for reconciliation to be completed, to be perfected in our lives, but the task is beyond us. But even this longing is a blessing, for it is the longing of the church for the Spirit and the presence of Jesus. Today, therefore, we ask that God grant us the grace to accept the restlessness and troubling feelings that comes to those who seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness; may God grant us the peace which passes all understanding, which transforms our minds and hearts by the love of Christ Jesus; and may God grant us the unity that can heal our wounds and divisions, the preservation of our souls and bodies as we continue to contend with injustice and evil, and the truth that sets us free. Amen.