30th May 2025

In an old Russian village (real Fiddler on the Roof country) the villagers were puzzled by the disappearance of their rabbi on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It happened every year. ‘Where does he go?’ they asked. Some of them joked, ‘Perhaps he goes up to heaven!’ Eventually one year their curiosity got the better of them and one man was appointed to spy on the rabbi and find out where he went. Later that day he reported back to them. ‘So,’ they asked, did he go up to heaven?’ His reply astonished them: ‘Yes, if not higher!’ He’d found that the rabbi spent much of the day on the edge of the village, in the ramshackle cottage of a poor aged widow, bringing her some food and sweeping clean her home. Message: you can’t get higher than that.

Yesterday was Ascension Day, when we Christians celebrate the risen Christ’s disappearance from human eyes into the glory of God, sovereign over heaven and earth for all eternity. How to celebrate such a dazzlingly stupendous item? Before we get carried away by the sheer wonder of it, however, and start feeling sorry for Jews and other ‘non-Christians’ who have nothing to compare with it in their traditions, let’s just pause and reflect on what Paul (the Christian Jew) has to say about ‘seeking the things that are above, where  Christ is, seated at the right hand of God’ (Colossians 3:1): compassion, kindness, humility and patience, forgiveness and above all love (vv 12-14). To follow Jesus heavenwards requires that we journey earthwards in loving service. There’s nothing higher.

Keith Clements