The Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 12, 2002
Christ Church, Covington

“God has gone up with a shout, * the Lord with the sound of the ram’s horn” (Ps. 47:5). 

Our psalm this morning provides a wonderful counterpoint to Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, the mystery that we commemorate today. The psalm is one of enthronement; and though scholars debate its precise origin and its actual use, it seems to celebrate the triumph and crowning of God himself as king of Israel. It’s possible that the psalm was even used as part of an enthronement ceremony in Jerusalem, in which the kingship of YHWH was simultaneously recalled from the past, reaffirmed in the present, and looked for in the future.

The psalm gives us some flavor of the enthronement ceremony, and of the God our forebears worshipped. This God is relentlessly particular; he is a God who dwells in a particular place (Jerusalem), and even in a particular house (the Temple). He is the God of Israel, the One who makes covenant with one People. True, he is “king of all the earth” (Ps. 47:7), but not in the sense that he lives everywhere, but simply because he “sits upon his holy throne” (Ps. 47:8). In fact, YHWH is a God who is not above some “rough and tumble” with his enemies, for “He subdues the peoples under us, * and the nations under our feet” (Ps. 47:3). YHWH is a God who loves the beat of the drum and the blast of the horn, the sound of voices raised in acclamation and praise. “Clap your hands, all you peoples… Sing praises to our God, sing praises; * sing praises to our King, sing praises” (Ps. 47:6) We ought to have in mind a great festal procession, attended by priests and people, as the Ark of the Covenant moves down the narrow and dusty streets of Jerusalem to its resting place in the Temple. “God has gone up with a shout.” This God “is highly exalted”, in oriental splendor, but he also lives in what is literally the house down the road.

Now, before you consign the God of this psalm to the category of the hopelessly outmoded and naïve construction of primitive consciousness, a kind of religion superseded by a more abstract and universal Gospel, consider the way in which Jesus Christ echoes and fulfills the promise of this psalm. I’ll grant you that YHWH seems a bit gritty and unpolished in this psalm, the sort of God who might enjoy (for instance) professional wrestling. After all, he seems to like plenty of noise, and isn’t above slapping around his opponents.

Yet, if YHWH is relentlessly particular and “local” in our psalm, we must remember that the Gospel we have received, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is also particular in its origin and in its promise. We believe in a God who takes flesh in Jesus Christ, in a particular time and particular place; a man who has dust on his feet, and who lives and dies as one of us. He’s not above the fray. It is this man, who is at the same time fully God, in whom we put our trust; not an abstraction or an idea, but this man whom God raised from the dead. We enter into relationship with him, through the miracle of his resurrection and his new life.

The message of the Gospel is universal, but it is rooted in an incarnation in history and in a particular story of faith. Far from being religious primitives, our religious forebears were on to something when they pictured God is this way, in these quaint human terms, for in Jesus Christ God has become human. He no longer lives down the road in “God’s house” the Temple, but has made his dwelling among human beings, in human beings, through the humanity of his Son.

This is the awesome truth that the counterpoint of this psalm recalls to us; yet there is also something more here which bears on our celebration of Christ’s Ascension. We are meant to understand the Ascension as Jesus’ enthronement; as YHWH was once enthroned and worshipped, so now the Messiah is enthroned and worshipped. Jesus has entered into his inheritance, but this is not without implications for us.

This humanity which Christ took, which is foreshadowed in the solemn ritual of YHWH’s enthronement in the Temple, is a humanity which is now enthroned in heaven. “God has gone up with a shout, * the Lord with the sound of the ram’s horn”. The Ascension of Christ points the way for the future of the human race. In Jesus Christ, we have learned to think of God in terms of our human reality, through the Incarnation; now, also in Jesus Christ, we must come to think of our humanity in terms of God’s reality, as Christ’s Ascension shows. As we will pray in our Eucharistic Prayer this morning, “that where he is, there we might also be, and reign with him in glory”. To speak of humanity in terms of the divine life is finally much harder than to do the reverse, because here we speak in terms which are hard to grasp of the life of the world to come. Yet that is our future in Jesus Christ, to be with him where he is.


The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.

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