Outrageous, Unimaginable Love

Beloved in Christ, 

Today is the Feast of the Ascension, a major celebration in the church year. If you find the story hard to believe, you’re doing it right. The idea that Jesus’ resurrected body ascended physically to be in the place where God dwells forever is impossible to imagine in any serious way, and for that reason, we can be quick to dismiss it. A common feature of modern Western Christianity is to set aside the parts of the faith that seem irrational and unimaginable, and keep the parts that are easier to sit with.

The point of a doctrine like the Ascension, however, is not to be a litmus test for understanding, a gateway to belonging, or a way for us to prove our worthiness. The point is to put us in a proper posture toward God. We can’t fully imagine, comprehend, or understand something so outrageous, and that’s because God is God, and we are not. Anything that human beings can fully understand is, by definition, smaller than human capacity. The whole point of our faith in Jesus is that God can, will, and has done the very thing that is too outrageous to imagine, and too good to believe. 

The Ascension makes the claim that the poor, itinerant rabbi from a small, unimportant backwater, who was executed as a criminal by the empire is, in fact, the Lord of all the cosmos. The Ascension makes the claim that all authority has not, in fact, been given to the powers and rulers that seek only to build themselves up at the expense of tearing others down, but to the humble, small, and poor Jesus, whose way of love threatened the foundation of worldly power. 

In a moment when our democracy is being actively and intentionally eroded, when black and brown immigrants are being targeted with a cruel delight, in the week we mark the five year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, all the evidence seems to suggest that the forces of oppression and injustice have the final word. The Ascension arrives today to remind us that they do not. God’s life and love, revealed perfectly to us in Jesus, does. Our imaginations, bound by time and space as they are, cannot quite grasp what it means to “believe” the Ascension. The point of the doctrines that frame our faith is not to perfectly wrap our minds around them, but to live our lives as if they are true. God has done the outrageous, unimaginable good thing of raising Jesus from the dead, entrusting all authority in heaven and earth to him, and sent each one of us out to be witness to that truth, by living in the power of outrageous, unimaginable love. 

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya