Sermon preached at Evensong on the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2026

All sorts of people are talking at the moment about unity, and our need of it. Our communities, our political parties, indeed our world are all encountering polarisation and divisions which are dangerous, indeed potentially devastating. Diversity is not the problem; we can and should celebrate diverse opinions and experiences. But serious problems arise when division sets people apart from one another, when it separates us into channels which cannot hear each other, and which would (frankly) be happier if the other wasn’t there. These divisions harden and become brittle. Principles which settle into ideology frequently do not serve community. We perhaps talk about unity most frequently when we notice its absence. One feature of human togetherness is that it oftens feel at its most secure when it feeds itself by excluding others.

Ascension Day, which we celebrated last Thursday, helps us find a way through this potentially fatal problem. The Risen Christ stands among his disciples not simply as corpse brought back to life, but as the truly historical Jesus—Son of God and Son of Mary—living a new kind of life which is indestructible, perfected, eternal. Interestingly, there are two words used in the Greek language—the language of the New Testament writers—for ‘man’. One is anēr, which should be translated in quite a masculine way (think ‘bloke’ or ‘guy’), the other is anthrōpos, which also means ‘man’ but is perhaps more fully rendered as ‘human.’ Jesus is always an anthrōpos; he is the human being. Male, of course, but incarnate in human flesh, bearing in himself all humanity, body, soul, spirit, mind. This principle was expressed by the fourth century church father, St Gregory of Nazianzus when he wrote ‘that which is not assumed, is not healed.’ St Gregory was engaging in polemic against Christian heretics who refused to accept that Jesus had a fully human spirit and mind, but the rationale of his writing, where he insists that Christ takes on ‘the whole Adam’ rather than what he calls ‘half Adam’ is also essential in our context today. When Christ ascends to the Father, he takes our whole humanity to the heart of Godhead, a humanity which is somehow not limited by maleness, or culture, or race, or geographic origin. ‘That which is not assumed’ not taken on, ‘is not healed.’ Ascension here intimately linked to Incarnation; the descent of the Eternal Word in human flesh—true God and true man—consummated in the ascension, when the crucified and risen one bears that full humanity to the right hand of the Father. ‘My Word shall not return to me fruitless’ prophesied Isaiah, ‘but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the task that I gave it.’ The whole of our humanity is borne in Christ’s body, crucified and risen, into the abundance of the Father’s eternally creative life and love.

It is this mystery and our sharing in this mystery that St Paul meditates on in the prayer we heard read from the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians in today’s second reading. Paul is talking to the Christians of Ephesus, a church founded by him on one of his missionary journeys, which prompts the most rhapsodic outpouring of praise and petition. He prays in this letter that a ‘spirit of wisdom and revelation’ might be given to the Ephesians in order that they might know the full hope of their calling; that is, the gift of faith through grace which results in lives of goodness and holiness, discovering a unity in Christ which transcends all other identity markers. The power which makes such a life possible, even plausible, is the same power which is in Christ raised from the dead, at the Father’s right hand. This is an image endlessly creative. When we say Christ is ‘seated at the right hand of the Father’ we mean that all God’s action occurs through Christ. That is how God acts. Christ is the full agent of God’s life and will, the one who has made the Father known perfectly. This is the power—the energy- which allows us to discover a new kind of existence as Christians in the world. The Ascension, if you like, makes the connection between Easter and ethics. The risen Christ does not hoard even his own fullness of life to himself, he shares this with his followers, offering his vision and his mission as their identity, too, an identity which can only be apprehended through faith. And he bears frail human flesh in all its diversity into the realm of heaven. That is a promise for the future, but it also has consequences for how we are to live. We are to live in the light of our hope. A hope which looks the world’s violence and selfishness straight in the eye, and which becomes visible in how we make our choices.

We humans frequently decide to establish our own togetherness, our own unity, in rather narrow ways. Often, we are threatened by people who don’t think like us, look like us, behave like us. We can even begin to shore ourselves up by thinking that somehow God is really on our side, like a divine trump card, winning arguments, delivering knock-down blows. But the truth is that vision is just too narrow, and it simply leads Christians once again down the most tempting cul-de-sac of all, the cul-de sac of idolatry. The idolatry of self. The idolatry of might. The idolatry of the market. The idolatry of the state. The idolatry of our own little creations.

The Ascended and glorified Christ reminds us that our vision is frequently too narrow, our hearts too afraid, and our hope simply not radical enough.

Towards the end of today’s second reading is a line which simply overflows with its imagery. ‘He has put all things under his feet, and his made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.’ Or something near that. That last bit is hard to translate. The ‘fullness of him who does all the filling for all’, perhaps. The point is that the body of Christ is the place for all to find their identity. In this body, a diverse humanity finds itself and knows itself to be full in Christ. This ‘fullness’ of Christ serves, loves, embraces, confirms, saves.  This is the Ascended Christ for us.

We should not settle for lesser categories of unity and togetherness. We should not assume that our settled patterns of community, culture, nationality, are ‘given’ realities in quite the same way. All these have the potential to work for the common good, for our flourishing. But we must not mistake them for transcendent realities. Our fundamental unity as Christians is in Christ, and our vocation as Christians in society is to point to the Christ whose fullness fills all in all, as the inexhaustible wellspring of the world’s life. Only in Christ, ascended and glorified, will we find the unity of all creation, a unity which in which our diversity dwells, and which summons us beyond the graveyards of our fear, because this Christ has put all things under his feet. That is our identity, and that is our hope. Audacious, communal, generous, eternal.