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devotional
Risen and Ascended
Austin Farrer
Where, then, in all my
spreading world is Jesus
Christ, risen and glorified?
When the cloud received him out of our
sight, what distance did he go? However
far I take him, His risen being is no part
of our interlocked system of natural
forces, whether far or near. He is
nowhere in our world, but neither is he
outside it, for to place him outside it is
only to place him in the fringes of it.
Where then is he?
The only way to find Heaven is to
begin from Heaven. Jesus in his glorious
manhood is the heart of Heaven, as each
of us is the heart and centre of our visible
world. He is assured of his world as each
of us is assured of ours—by the vigour of
his existence; and as the acts of his life
are more intense and wakeful than ours,
he has less reason than the best
employed of us, ever to take it for a
dream. Even less than ours is his life
locked within his breast; radiating
through lines of heavenly interchange
his soul knows what is next to him,
blessed saints whose society is the place
of his existence; and on and on, without
failure or weakening of sight, his eyes
embrace a universe of spirits, as many as
the stars we see; without any thinning or
flattening of sound he may converse
with the distant as with the near, and
receive from everyone a voice, expressing
in unique and personal colour the glory
and the love of God.
At first it may seem that we have two
universes, spreading on independent
planes and nowhere touching at a single
point: Christ’s universe of spirit, ours of
natural forces. Yet, thinking further, we
may see that while it is impossible to
place Heaven in the world, it is
impossible not to place the world in
Heaven. If Christ’s knowledge is spiritual
as ours is physical, he knows us, for we
also are spirits, though in fleshly bodies.
He knows us, indeed, by that special
fellow-feeling of a creature for its kind,
which makes hearts tuned in the same
scale to sound in unison, for ‘he took not
on him the angelic kind, he took the seed
of Abraham.’ If, then, he hears our voices
and thinks our thoughts as fast as we can
form them, he feels also in our fingers
and looks through our eyes; he lives out
along the lines of our vision, and our sun,
moon and stars are his. By sympathy
Heaven grafts the world into itself, and
roots our universe in its own heart.
Jesus Christ, then, lives in the same
world with us, and we in the same
Heaven with him, and it is in what
passes between him and us that our
salvation lies. It is not merely that he
exists, and I exist. We coexist, and
coexistence implies mutual influence.
Even in the physical world it is
impossible for two things to coexist,
though at the extreme opposite limits of
the universe, without affecting each
other. Everything plays a part in the
environment of anything. What does
nothing to us is clean out of our world;
it provides us with no clue for suspecting
its existence. The world of persons, even
as common sense acknowledges it, offers
an analogy. That strange corporate force,
the Western European mind, is a
resultant of individuals in multitude,
and every one of us, in however minute
proportion, goes to colour or intensify or
dilute it. And when we come to smaller
personal worlds where each one counts
for more, who is to estimate what we do
to one another by coexisting? How, by
being what we are, and without the least
intention, we infect and heal, encourage
and depress, poison and purify the
people about us, and receive from them
a reciprocal influence?
Balaam, the old magician in the Book
of Numbers, was credited with such a
power that those whom he blessed were
blessed, and those whom he cursed were
cursed. Hemmed in and threatened by
the God of Israel, he got a wholesome
fear of uttering spells outside the direct
line of God’s revealed will. What
frightens me is not the magic which I
may be tempted, like Balaam, wilfully to
utter, but what flows from me unheeded
and is beyond my power to shut off. God
forbids me, as he forbade Balaam, to
curse whom he has not cursed, or to defy
whom he has not defied. But the
defiance and the cursing issue from me
without a word said, and darken the air.
If God is to be obeyed in this, he must
bestow what he demands, he must make
in me a pure and loving heart.
Heaven lives by its own laws; we have
to live by the laws of earth and by the
laws of Heaven too, and, in particular, so
to act within the prescriptions of earthly
law, that the laws of Heaven may take
effect. In Heaven mind touches mind
and love touches love, and by such
contact the blessed know one another.
On earth also these touches take place,
but largely unperceived by both parties.
When Jesus knew that the woman had
been healed by the border of his
garment, it was felt by those present as a
miracle, in which the laws of Heaven
rather than of earth had taken effect; for
Jesus had not been touched—fingers on
a hem swinging loose make no impress
on the wearer’s body. It was Christ’s
spirit which felt the touch of faith. What
happened in the woman was mixed, part
earth and part Heaven. It was heavenly
that her faith should lay hold of divine
virtue; it was earthly to lay hold of it in
a physical sign, the border of a garment.
ND
From Lord I believe by Austin Farrer
(1955), edited by Arthur Middleton
June 2016 ■ newdirections ■ 21