ASCENSION
Once again, I shall be setting off to Walsingham today, leading a party on pilgrimage. The new Catholic Church of the Annunciation won’t be open tonight, so it has been arranged that I take our party on a visit to the Anglican shrine. The altars there are arranged on the plan of the Rosary: one altar for each of the fifteen mysteries. Each altar has a statue, or a painting, or a window, identifying it with its mystery. When you come to the altar of the Ascension, it is not at first obvious what connects it with the Ascension. Behind the altar is a painting of the virgin and child, more obviously appropriate to an altar of the Nativity. But when you look up, you see a pair of feet sticking out of the ceiling: a rather droll representation of the Ascension, Christ’s feet about to disappear into the cloud.
What I find striking about those feet is that they still bear the marks of the wounds made by the nails. Christ is carrying his wounds back to heaven. That is to say, he is carrying our wounds back to heaven. Why are they our wounds? Firstly, because we made them. Christ is carrying to heaven a reminder and a witness of how he was treated here. The human race will not be able to stand at the last judgement and boast of large reserves of mercy, or goodness, or tolerance, or pity, or kindness. There is evidence to the contrary in heaven.
But secondly, and more hopefully for us, they are our wounds because he has borne our wounds and accepted our sorrows. As Isaiah says, ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.’ More than that: for God, simply to become a man was to accept the bruises and wounds which come inevitably to every human being. Every one of us is bruised and wounded: we carry, all of us, wounds of disappointment, wounds of grief, wounds of shame, wounds of guilt, wounds of sorrow, wounds of despair. All those wounds, all those bruises, have been carried up by Christ to heaven.
We don’t usually like to display our wounds. We keep our secret sorrows and shames to ourselves, we are embarrassed or ashamed to speak about them. A wound cannot be healed unless it is shown to the doctor, but we don’t want to show our wounds to anybody. The shocking thing about Christ’s wounds is they are not hidden, they gape open. Christ exposes them almost indecently: he invites Thomas to stick his fingers into them, to poke his hand into his opened side. Those wounds are open to the gaze of pilgrims to Walsingham, they are open to the gaze of the angels in heaven, they are open to the pitying gaze of our heavenly Father. What we are afraid to show to God, Christ shows on our behalf. Our secret sorrows, our secret guilt, our secret shame, our secret agonies, are known about in heaven, and understood there, and find mercy and compassion. One of our Catholic hymnwriters has expressed it well: ‘There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven; there is no place where earth’s failings have such kindly judgment given.’