The Renewed Mind...

 Thoughts on the 7^th Sunday of Easter 2026

Acts 1.6–14; Psalm 68.1–10, 32–35; 1 Peter 4.12–14; 5.6–11; John 17.1–11

 

Holy Spirit, Painting by Yeinier Gonzalez (born 1989)

I’m going to talk a little about the Ascension of Jesus into heaven this morning. It’s such a spectacular event in the life of Jesus that it’s well worth dwelling on. It also contains a spectacular promise for us, because as our Gospel reading suggests, everything the Father has given to Jesus is also given to us.

We celebrated the feast with a wonderful choral celebration of the Eucharist on Thursday evening, and after that I have found my mind drawn back, again and again, to the Man in heaven. The Man (yes that’s right – a man, who also happens to be God) who is seated at the right hand of the Father and to whom all dominion and power belongs.

There’s an ancient Christian tradition that the devil fell from grace through envy. It wasn’t that he envied God so much; it was that he knew that there would come a time when God would take flesh and become a Man, and that he would be subject to something human. Pure spirit that he is he couldn’t abide that thought! In his mind we are so beneath him as to be unworthy of respect and veneration. God only knows how it must torment him that he will have to respect and venerate us, as well as Jesus,  when God’s work in us is done and we are glorified alongside him.

I had mixed feelings about heaven for the longest time. That is, until I came to understand something a bit better.

You see, my fantasies about heaven (the pictures I had in my imagination) were all rather sterile to say the least. There’s the old cliché that hell must be more fun because heaven is a place where all we do is sit around on clouds with angels listening to harp music.

I never really believed that, but I was infected with a certain misconception, because I didn’t have a strong enough sense of the resurrection of the body. Somehow I imagined (or even feared) a disembodied afterlife. I believed in  the immortality of the soul but neglected the resurrection of the body. I had a misguided sense that I would live on as a purely spiritual thing and to be honest I don’t like that idea at all.

The first reason that I don’t like it is because I don’t think that in any real sense I will continue to be ‘me’ without some ongoing relationship to what I am now – and what I am now is not a soul imprisoned in a body, I am a single being of body and soul.

The body without the soul is just inanimate matter, the soul without the body leaves us somehow incomplete in ourselves.

So in many ways I have to admit that I wasn’t really ‘Christian’ in the fullest sense of that word, until I began to appreciate that there is a place for the whole of me, body and soul, in God’s eternal plan for me.

This can get quite difficult for us to understand can’t it? It’s fairly straightforward to imagine ourselves living on without a body; after all we often dream in ways that suggest we don’t really need a body to be functioning at all. There are whole worlds we seem to inhabit in our dreams, and those worlds seem to be conjured in our mind’s eye, so why the need for a body at all?

So it’s within our capacity to picture the possibility of the immortality of our souls but that’s not what the Christian tradition teaches.

Another fairly easy thing to imagine is a rejuvenated body; a re-animated body. The straightforward coming back-to-life of the very body we are at the moment, without any particular change occurring, save for the fact that our hearts are beating again and there is air in our lungs.

But that’s not what the Christian tradition promises us either.

We are promised something rather wonderful. We are promised something St Paul calls the Resurrection Body or the Spiritual Body (spot the paradox). The Spiritual Body is not a disembodied spirit, but a body infused with, and powered by, the Holy Spirit. It’s a body perfectly suited for the eternal realms.

It’s a body that cannot suffer decay, sickness, or death; it’s imperishable, glorious, and powerful and it needs to be understood using metaphors of transformation: so both Jesus and St Paul use the image of seeds, which go into the ground and ‘die’ before rising from the ground, in a new form, and to a new and fruitful form of life (see John 12:24 and 1 Corinthians 15:36).

I recently read bits of a wonderful book by a Benedictine Monk called Dom Aelred Watkin (Downside Abbey) and this is how he suggests we might begin to imagine what a Spiritual, Resurrection Body is: At the present moment…all the reality that comes to us, all the reality that we can express, our communication with the world around us and with the persons in it, is conveyed through our five senses. Yet we know how undeveloped some of these senses are: our eyes cannot see all the colours of the spectrum, our ears do not hear the full range of sound and our sense of smell is largely atrophied...

But what if we were totally to be transformed? If, in place of five inadequate senses, we were endowed with, say, fifty thousand senses? We should then know for the first time what fullness of living was; we should be in touch with the beautiful and the true in a way beyond our present conceiving; we should be one with other persons in a manner outside our present imagining and what we gave and received would lead to a self-expression beyond our dreams.

He goes on and I will read that too because he’s got such a poetic turn of phrase: Our present bodies are embryos in the womb of time waiting to be reborn. Of the glory, the power and the splendour of our reborn body, of the extent of our ‘transformation from glory to glory’ we may not speak, for it is beyond all our knowledge and experience; but that the transformation is one that goes far beyond our wildest expectations is certain. We can, happily and hopefully, join with the excited expectancy of the Creed: ‘I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and to the life of the world to come.’

It’s quite a picture isn’t it? This is our destiny. This is what our faith promises us and if we struggle with the notion that we will be glorified, just as Jesus was glorified, then I suggest our imaginations need to be enlarged so that we can begin to live in the truly Christian hope that is promised to us.

Jesus described his teaching as a new kind of wine and he said that a new wine needed to be stored in new wineskins because the fermentation process would destroy an old wineskin (I hope you remember that image). It’s a way of explaining that his teaching is so powerful that our minds will need to be transformed in order to contain it. Old ways of thinking cannot cope with the truths Jesus came to reveal to us (see Mark 2:22 on this).

St Paul puts it this way in his Letter to the Romans: Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters… Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will (12:1-2).

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind! Allow these truths to seep deep into your psyche and begin to paint a different picture of your destiny. Allow them to fill you with a genuine version of the Christian virtue of hope. A glorious future awaits you!

And now for the sticking point; and this is something I struggled with for a long time in my own journey to the hope I am talking about: what if you don’t particularly like the body you are saddled with at present? What if it’s something you have felt ashamed of from time to time? What if you wish you were taller or thinner or more beautiful? What if you’d like to be fitter or more muscular? What if your body is sick, or wounded? What if, as you age, the thought of leaving this body behind and living as a pure, disembodied spirit is a very appealing thought?

Well then I suggest that Paul’s advice is tailor made for you: Be transformed by the renewing of your mind! How? you might ask. A mind that’s set in its ways (often over decades) can’t be changed by the simple flicking of a switch.

I think we are given a clue in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostle’s. The disciples have just watched Jesus ascending into heaven but that happens after Jesus has promised them something. He says, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

It’s all there: without the Holy Spirit, the One who inhabits us and remakes our minds so that we can know, for ourselves, the great truths of the Christian faith, we can do nothing. We can’t transform our own minds any more than we can transform our mortal bodies into Resurrection Bodies, and so here, as with everything else in the Christian faith, we are entirely dependent on the grace of God for our salvation.

As we approach the great Feast of Pentecost (next Sunday), which celebrates the very thing that Jesus promised his disciples, let us double down in prayer and ask for the gift of the Spirit. Let’s ask for the Holy Spirit to come and transform our minds so that we can begin to live with a mind that sees, and believes, in the glorious future to which we are all called.

Let us  pray.

“Come, Holy Spirit, send forth the heavenly radiance of your light.
Come, father of the poor, come, giver of gifts, come, light of the heart.
Greatest comforter, sweet guest of the soul, sweet consolation.
In labour, rest, in heat, temperance, in tears, solace.
O most blessed light, fill the inmost heart of your faithful.
Without your presence, there is nothing in us, nothing that is not harmful.
Cleanse that which is unclean, water that which is dry, heal that which is wounded.
Bend that which is inflexible, fire that which is chilled, correct what goes astray.
Give to your faithful, those who trust in you, the sevenfold gifts.
Grant the reward of virtue, grant the deliverance of salvation, grant eternal joy.”

PS the prayer above is The Veni Sancte Spiritus, translated from the Latin. It's also called The Golden Sequence and is used on Pentecost Sunday. There are several modern translations but the one above is a literal translation of the Latin and my preferred version. It might interest you to know that it was probably composed by an Englishman, Archbishop Stephen Langton (Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and 1228)