Today is Ascension Day, the day forty days after Easter when we remember Jesus going up into Heaven to return to God his heavenly Father, for him to sit in authority at God’s right hand on the throne from which everything that we know is initiated and governed and directed. 

Jesus had given his disciples the ‘our Father’, the Lord’s Prayer. He taught them to say it as the core of their prayer. ‘When you pray, say ‘our Father…’ he says. We can imagine that the disciples did as they were told; and that, taught patiently by Jesus, they learned the Lord’s Prayer, and they learned to use it. But the Lord’s Prayer must have changed for them forever on the first Ascension Day. Suddenly they understood what the prayer was really about, as God’s kingdom opened up in front of them to receive Jesus the Lord.

That day the disciples who were with Jesus before he was taken up asked Jesus ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ They knew a lot about God’s Kingdom - Jesus had taught about it, and told stories about it constantly ’This is what the Kingdom of God is like’ he would say ’it’s like a mustard seed, or it’s like a sower sowing corn in the fields, it’s like a merchant on the look-out for fine pearls’. All of these stories, parables, make a point - precisely that the Kingdom of God needs to be understood differently from the kingdoms of this world. The disciples don’t quite get the point. They are still thinking about Kingdom in terms of their heritage and their fatherland, hankering for a Kingdom with power and influence like the kingdom over which King David used to reign, many centuries before, when the Jews would stop being bottom of the heap in everyone’s eyes, and would return to being respected, and even feared. Or maybe they thought in terms of two levels of reality, of Heaven ‘up there’ and earth ‘down here’, two places that would never come together despite Jesus asking them to pray ‘May your kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ On Ascension Day that changed. Jesus was taken up in royal glory to heaven, but only so that in the future he can come again and bring the Kingdom of God, with all its joys and its judgment, to our life and to this earth. We forget that about Ascension. It isn’t just about Jesus going up; it is about Jesus going up so that he can come again to be our ultimate King.

The Ascension of Jesus is a reward to him for doing what others have always struggled and failed to do. He has truly made holy and glorified God’s name in every word of his teaching, and even more in his prayer. There isn’t a moment when he steps outside his relationship with God his Father, when he has a bad day, when he doesn’t want to pray and deepen the relationship between them. Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the writing is on the wall for Jesus, and his accusers are coming to meet him with flaming torches and clubs and swords, Jesus is still going deeper into that relationship by his prayer. Prayer may have become frightening, even painful for him, as it can for all of us, but Jesus single-mindedly goes on doing it, goes on calling his Father’s name, and glorifying it. 

And in Jesus God’s will is done. For human beings there are always excuses why we won’t do God’s will, but there weren’t any excuses for Jesus. Obedient to God the Father, he humbled himself and came among us as just a man. Not a hero, not a general, not a king, but simply as a man. And obedience took him the only way that it could, to death, the death of the cross.  Jesus who was truly obedient to the will of his Father is rewarded for his obedience on the day of the Ascension with glory and authority of his own. He is given the Kingdom of God he has so often spoken of.

But the Ascension isn’t all a about Jesus being rewarded. It has to do with us, and how God answers our most basic needs. Back to the Lord’s Prayer. We pray that God will give us our daily bread and forgive us our sins. These are the most basic needs, one a physical need and one a spiritual one. Without food and without forgiveness we will never thrive. God knows our needs before we ask, and one way that is so is that Jesus is there, in heaven with God, and he is still human, though he is God. He shows and gives to God what it is to be human, where we are strong, and where we are weak and vulnerable. Jesus is a sort of living prayer for the needs of the world, right at the heart of God’s love, where all the answers to true prayer will come from.

The Lord’s Prayer is not all about glad things, there are also shadows. Jesus taught us to ask not to be led into temptation, and for us to be kept from evil. These shadows look so different from the perspective of the first believers after the Ascension. They knew then that the kingdom, and the power, and the glory didn’t just belong to God. They had been given to the Lord, their Lord, Jesus. He had conquered death and the grave, and the glorious power by which he had won that victory was also the power by which his followers, you and me, could face their own demons, and resist temptation and overcome evil wherever they encountered it.  

In the light of the Ascension of Jesus even the end of our prayers means more. ‘For ever and ever’ means more than ‘on and on and on’, it means that we are being let into a great secret, we are being shown what it is that God wants for his creation. He wants his kingdom to come too, and for it to be a lasting reign of justice and goodness, in the hands of Jesus, his Son, our Lord.  Amen