The upward trajectory

2025 is a year of anniversaries. Every year apart from the very first, is, of course, but it’s 2025, not any other year. It will be, for example, 60 years ago that Paul McCartney woke up with a song in his head which he though was someone else’s but turned out to be not only his creation but the most successful tune of all time, Yesterday. 30 years before that, Elvis Aaron Presley drew his first breath and gyrated his hips. 20 years ago against my better judgement I let a bishop lay his hands on me in Chelmsford Cathedral, and here I am now.  Fifty years ago Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, and a hundred years ago this year she was born. I didn’t say it was going to be all happy anniversaries. Composer Erik Satie died 100 years ago, Jane Austen was born 250 years ago, the Second World War ended 80 years ago and 10 years after that, Birds Eye began selling fishfingers in the UK, an event that has certainly had a more positive impact on subsequent decades than many mentioned previously, certainly any that involve Grantham. See,  2025- you can’t move for anniversaries.

My purposes today will, however, take us further back than anything I’ve mentioned thus far- a whole- 299 years  ; this year is will mark the 299th anniversary Anniversary of (cue drumroll) the publication of the third and final edition of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton. Who was also born in Grantham, thus giving a little shine back to that Lincolnshire town’s subsequently tarnished reputation.

Anyway, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. 299 years!

What? You’re not excited? Come on! Newton was probably the greatest scientific genius of them all and in that book the Principia he first elucidated the three laws of motion that have been the ground rock of modern physics.    Still not impressed? Put it another way, no Newton, no TV, no mobile phone,  no internet, no car, no microwave, no Ryan Air… OK I know when to stop. Remember the curly-haired guy on the back of the pound note? The Mr Clever-Clogs who thought up the theory of gravity when the apple fell on his head?

Please don’t worry: this is not going to be a physics lesson. I for one couldn’t bear that even if I myself was in charge of the teaching. We’re going to go just as far as Newton’s first law of motion which goes something like this:

‘An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an external force acts upon it.’

In everyday language, that means ‘something that is moving will keep moving unless something else stops it’. Sounds obvious, but then most things do in everyday language. It’s not obvious: it’s profound and fundamental. With his laws of motion Newton had burrowed down the very the bones of the cosmos, sticky with the glue that binds the universe together. That law, the one that sounds so obvious, is a basic building block of reality. It applies not just to the big guys of the heavens: the stars and comets and meteors and planets, but to everything in the universe, great and small alike. Including humans.

This first law of motion, though I didn’t know it as such at the time, I discovered for myself,  entirely independently, about 300 years after Newton. It was my greatest, nay my only achievement in the field of Physics. I discovered it when I was cycling over a field by the Thames in Oxford. My bicycle with me on it was what was moving, the external force  was a rock cunningly concealing itself in some long grass. It acted upon my bike strictly according to the laws of Newtonian physics, and it came to an immediate stop. Of course the rock wasn’t so large that it acted directly on me: if it was that big I might have seen and not cycled straight into it. So I, no force acting on me, carried on moving at the speed and direction I was already travelling in, except now without a bicycle and  through the air, until the force of gravity  reacquainted me with the force of friction rising up to greet me from the rather hard earth from which I came. There was less of me back then but still enough to make me quickly subject to laws of gravity. 

It was a rude, painful and when the bruises came, multicoloured, shock. I’ve clearly lived to tell the tale, it hasn’t increased my liking for physics any, but I now have first-hand experience of Newton’s first law, an increased caution when cycling off road, and  all these years later,  a tale to divert you temporarily you on a Sunday in June. There’s an Oxford education for you: not bad, but on balance I think I’d have rather stayed on my bike.

Anyway, the point is, according to Newton, and I for one think he’s right,  once we’re going, we keep moving unless something stops us. 

So much for the physicist. What most people don’t know, is that what really , really interested Newton wasn’t test-tubes and experiments and science, it was theology. He wrote many more theological books than scientific ones, though posterity, understandably has not chosen to remember his musings on God: indeed those writings, where they have survived, have tended to be treated with disdain, bafflement or contempt. Nobody has bothered to remember what Isaac Newton had to say about God.

Shame. Because I wonder if he’d ever looked at his laws of motion, then looked at his theology and thought… hold on. I can see a connexion there. I’m on to something here. Because, you see,  it’s not just on a bike that we keep going unless something stops us. Its psychologically too, and culturally, and socially. And spiritually.

Now there are two ways you can see this. There is what we might call the ‘gravity’ view. This would say that ever since Adam and Eve first dined on Eden’s forbidden fruit humanity has fallen. And we’re falling still. Such is the mass of our sin, the great lump of our perdition in the charming words of St Augustine, that the motion of humanity is irresistibly pulled towards it, constantly  propelled downward, towards the mire, the weight of our corruption dragging us inexorably down, down, down. And we will keep on moving like that- it’s in our nature- unless something external acts to stop that movement, that something being the grace of God as manifest in faith. It’s a grim view,  but one widely held view among Protestant Christians. Follow it to the conclusion and you will believe that almost everyone who has ever lived- including Isaac Newton of course- is now turning on the spits of hell, apart, of course, from a few, Protestant Christians who managed to put their motors into reverse and buck the general trend by reading their Bibles. There may be something in it, that’s one way of looking at it, but- call me a wishy-washy pinko liberal who’s got it badly wrong- that doesn’t sound too much like a loving God to me.

The other way of looking at our spiritual momentum comes directly from what we are celebrating today, so we might call it the Ascension view. To put it at its simplest, we can look where Jesus has gone and say that’s where we’re headed too- unless something gets in the way to stop us. Forward, or rather, upward motion, is the default direction of humanity: you, me, everyone who ever lived, not plummeting down to the pit unless something pulls us out, but hurtling on the heaven-bound track, rushing towards God, yearning,  hungering, craving for the light.  And we will keep on moving that way unless something- greed, selfishness, pride gets in our way. God did not set us up to fall, he made us to rise.

It’s not all going to be plain sailing. If our inherent sinfulness is not pulling us down, if we’re not trying to climb out of a treacly mire just to avoid a sorry end we’ve been set up for since the day we were born,  sin might still stop us dead in our tracks. Sin still matters, it’s still a serious matter, but the ascension allows us an amazingly positive perspective. And the way you come at something does matter. Humans are transcendent; we can and will rise above it. That is what the ascension means.

It might seem sometimes that the Christian journey ends with the cross. But it doesn’t. It ends in heaven. And that, we celebrate today.