Red-letter Days

The writing is on the wall. A couple of years ago we installed our new projector into the Abbey; a projector so immense that astronauts have complained about its glare from their orbit, so powerful that it is slowly burning a hole in the East Wall, on to which it directly projects. When the engineers had finished their installation the text we picked to try it out for the first time was MENE MENE TEKEL PARSIN. You can read more about what the Aramaic means in Daniel 5:25-28, but the point was that these words appeared to King Belshazzar as a mysterious human hand wrote on the wall (Daniel 5:5-6) and that is where we get the ominous phrase ‘the writing is on the wall’ from. So our first writing on the wall was the writing on the wall. Boys and their toys, eh?

It’s a Red-letter Day. Another gift to the English language from the church; any guesses? If I open my book of Anglican liturgy, right at the front is the calendar of the Christian year. Some minor observations are in light black font, like our own St Aldhelm (May 25^th), but the biggies like Christmas and Good Friday are in bold red type – Red-letter days. It’s a practice that dates back to the 16^th century or earlier. Your point vicar? I think that we have lost the significance of one of our Red-letter days – the Ascension.

Christmas is relatively easy (I hope.) The Word was God, yet the Word became flesh. The Spirit overshadowed the human being and Christ was born, fully God and fully human. In Wesley’s great hymn, Hark the herald angels sing, he is clear that God and sinners being reconciled begins in Bethlehem.

Good Friday is a moveable feast (ah, that’s where we get that phrase from) but nevertheless it’s a red-letter day. Christ’s obedience and suffering, our death becoming His that His life might become ours. We explore this moment in solemnity and silence each year, and each year the death is shocking and the gratitude overwhelming.

Easter Day and Pentecost (two more moveable feasts) are easier to grasp, but, let’s be honest, the moment we say we totally understand something of God is the beginning of delusion. However, his/our death being defeated at the first and the Spirit being poured out upon the latter are graspable truths.

But what of the Ascension, what is its significance? Is it just that it locates Jesus in the right place to send the Holy Spirit from, or to return from at the Second Coming? Think back to Eden, humanity cast from God’s presence. Think back to Christ’s birth, Jesus, fully God, fully human. So when Christ ascends, humanity also ascends. Paul doesn’t write in Ephesians 2:6 that ‘God raised Christ and seated him in the heavenly realms.’ What Paul does write is this: ‘God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms.’ You can’t work your way to heaven, you’re already there. Understand that.