Today at church we observed the feast of the Ascension and our pastor preached what I thought was a fine sermon. His message, in essence, was that the Ascension is important because it shows that the love that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is affirmed to be the sovereign force over all of creation. Because Jesus, as Paul says in the reading from Ephesians is now seated “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come,” we know that the self-giving love that characterized his life and ministry also characterizes reality at its deepest level.

Though it didn’t come up in the sermon, this got me to thinking that the Ascension (and the related feast of Christ the King) presents a stumbling block to any thoroughgoing religious pluralism. It’s one thing to affirm that Jesus is our way to the divine, a way that we have found helpful. It’s another to affirm that Jesus – the crucified and risen one – is the sovereign lord of all creation. This implies that those who don’t affirm this are wrong about a fundamental fact of reality.

This doesn’t mean, though, that adherents of other faiths can’t perceive the power of the kind of love that Jesus embodied and, seeing it, give their allegiance to it. In fact, if they do that, they’re acting in alignment with what Christians believe to be the deepest truth about reality. Just as many theologians, including early church fathers like Justin Martyr, believed that non-Christians could have access to the logos that Christians believe was incarnate in Jesus, we can say that those who follow this path of love are in touch with the same reality that we believe was manifested in Jesus’ life and which reigns supreme over all lesser powers.