Revd Helen Writes …

 

  In Holy Week we thought again of all the events of the first Good Friday when Jesus was crucified and the disciples suffered a sudden, devastating, and traumatic bereavement. Jesus – their friend, their teacher, the one who had called them to follow him into something new and good, had been brutally murdered. He was gone.

 

  Two days later, on Easter Day the disciples experienced something even more shocking and bewildering – their joy at finding that Jesus was alive. He was there. He was with them. It must have been tempting to assume that perhaps they could all go back to what life had been like before. With the same Jesus teaching and leading and healing. Perhaps, above all, healing his shocked and traumatized disciples.

 

  Since the 1990s, psychologists have identified a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth. Not always, but sometimes, people who have had deeply traumatic experiences can find themselves changed – not broken, or not only broken, but reshaped. It takes time and support – all of which, perhaps, we can see in the forty days of Easter, when Jesus is with his disciples to guide them from trauma into growth.

 

  So, forty days later, the disciples who accompanied Jesus to the mountain top and who stood there looking up to heaven, wondering where he had gone and what to do next, are rather different people from the disciples who had fled rather than accompany Jesus to the cross. They have been broken, and they have been healed, and in the breaking and the healing they have also been reshaped. They have become ready for the Holy Spirit which Jesus had told them would come to them, and they can now cope with the presence of God in a more abstract way. They can do God’s will without Jesus being physically there with them.

 

  Ascension Day is generally celebrated with joy – but I wonder if the Disciples really felt very joyful. They have grown, they have changed, they have been healed and reshaped … but they don’t actually want to be sent out to do God’s will without Jesus physically there with them. They’d rather it went back to how it had always been. They want Jesus back. They are called to be in a new place, but they miss the old place – the old way of being.

 

  Perhaps the disciples had some way to go – more healing to do, more changing and developing to do, more growing in understanding of who Jesus was and what he called them to do. And perhaps they do it despite the real loss they are experiencing with courage and strength, and yet with a wistful hope for things to go back to the way they had been. Perhaps they haven’t finished their post-traumatic growth – or perhaps we expect too much of them. It’s legitimate for them to mourn what they have lost, and to be anxious and less than enthusiastic when faced with a new and challenging future.

 

  And perhaps if that is true for the disciples, it may be true for us too. Perhaps we also are allowed to feel grief and anxiety and to remember that he will not leave his people comfortless, that we can enter into the growth which reshapes us.

 

  So let us rejoice on Ascension Day as we remember the trans– forming journey that the disciples undertook in the days after the resurrection. Let us commit ourselves afresh to live as people not limited by their fears but a people transformed by our Lord who is risen, ascended and glorified.

 

With love and prayers.

Helen Kempster