Grant, we pray,
Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ
to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend,
and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
It
is good to be with you all this evening to celebrate the Ascension of our Lord
Jesus Christ. You know, in this pandemic situation, it would be easy for us not
to have this liturgy. Even in a normal year, if we had more than 50 people here
that would be a good crowd. But I want to commend you all for taking part in
this liturgy. In the midst of so many unsettling things, it’s so important for
us to gather, even virtually, to recount the story of Jesus with each other, to
give our thanks and praise for God’s goodness, to be nurtured in God’s grace, and
to celebrate that by the Ascension, Jesus reigns as our King, our Judge, our
Lord. In the presentation of the Ascension in the Gospel text from Luke, there
are four distinct movements. By paying attention to those actions, we’ll gain a
better sense of the grandeur of the Ascension and its importance in our faith.
The
first thing that Jesus does is that he opens the disciples’ minds to understand
the Scriptures. This is very similar to what happened earlier in chapter 24 of
Luke. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus meets two disciples and opens the Scriptures
to them, showing them how all of Scripture is pointing towards these recent events.
Jesus says, “Thus it is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from
the dead on the third day.” There’s just one problem – there is no verse in
Scripture that says the Messiah was to suffer and rise from the dead. There’s a
reason why the disciples were despondent after the Crucifixion – they thought
it was the end of the story.
Jews,
both today and then, greatly value sacred Scripture and know it quite well. It’s
not as if there’s a verse tucked away in Isaiah or Daniel that says that the
Messiah would suffer, die, and rise from the dead that has been forgotten or
overlooked. And if the suffering Messiah was expected, the disciples would not
have abandoned Jesus at the Cross and been disappointed afterwards. They would have
on the edge of the seats and cheering on the whole thing as the coming of God’s
salvation. But that’s not how they saw Good Friday – they saw it as a defeat because that’s the only way to make
sense of their teacher’s execution. And the fact that only a few women gathered
at the tomb of the morning of the third day tells us that no one was expecting
Resurrection. Even those faithful women were there to mourn and anoint a dead
body.
What,
then, do we make of the fact that Jesus tells us that the Scriptures – the
Torah, the prophets, and the psalms – all culminate in the suffering Messiah
who rises on the third day when we can’t point to a single verse tells us this?
When Luke writes that Jesus “opened” their minds, he uses a compound word of made
up of “between” and “open.” In other words, Jesus is reading between the lines
and our assumptions. No, there isn’t a single verse of Scripture that says “The
Messiah will suffer and rise three days later” but the entirety of Scripture
points towards Jesus; from the first letter of Genesis to the final period in
Revelation, it’s all about Jesus. The whole thing points to Jesus, which is why
it’s so important to read Scripture instead of cherry-picking verses here and
there. It’s one of the strengths of praying Morning and Evening Prayer – that our
days are saturated with Scripture so that we get caught up in the whole sweep
of the Bible and come to know Jesus who is found in and between all of its
lines.
Not
only does Jesus open the Scriptures, but he opens our minds. Jesus works
between our assumptions, opening new ways of being in this world. That’s why it’s
important to have time for silence, for prayer, for meditation, and to pay
attention to those gut feelings, to those still small voices in your head. Often,
that’s Jesus opening our minds.
Jesus
then commissions the disciples, declaring them to be witnesses and telling them
to preach repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name to all nations. The mission
that Jesus came to begin is now to be fulfilled through his Church. And this
mission has two parts – repentance and forgiveness. It’s only because the word “repent”
has lost its Biblical meaning that I so often remind you that repenting isn’t
about making apologies, it’s about having a change of heart and changing your
mind. Our minds, having been opened by Jesus, start to see new patterns of
reality – that love is more powerful than death, that it is the least who are
greatest, that greatness is about humility, that grace abounds. This is the
message that we are to proclaim, that there is a different way of being in this
world, that the way of love is the way of life.
The
other half of this is that sins have been forgiven in Jesus’ name. While much
could be said on the topic of sin and forgiveness, what needs to be said here
is that nothing separates us from God. Our shortcomings, our failures, our
mistakes, our laziness – God doesn’t count those things against us and those
things are not obstacles or excuses to us living the life of love that God
intends for us. All that stands between us and God has been taken care of by
Jesus.
The
next action is that Jesus blesses the disciples before ascending. That word, “bless,”
literally means “to speak well of.” So often when we think about what a
blessing is, we think in terms of something that we are given – a bit of good
luck, a favorable outcome, a tangible thing that we didn’t have before. And
while those aren’t wrong ways of thinking of a blessing, they don’t capture the
root of what a blessing is. Being blessed by Jesus means that he speaks well of
us. And someone that speaks well of us is on our side, who vouches for us, who
fights for us, who works for our good. It’s sort of like an endorsement. When
someone endorses a candidate, they say good things about the person, and then
they go out and do things on behalf of that candidate to ensure the best
possible outcome for them. This is what it means that Jesus blesses us; he’s
endorsed us. Know that Jesus speaks well of you. Jesus sees you and says “That’s
one of my favorites,” “That’s one of my beloved,” “I trust my mission with that
one.” What grace it is to be blessed by God.
The
last action is that Jesus ascends. Don’t get bogged down by the physics of this
– where did Jesus go? Why did he get launched like a rocket? That’s not the
point. The Ascension is not Luke’s way of figuring out how to get Jesus
offstage, it’s about Jesus being seated at the right hand of God. Throughout
Easter in the Pashca nostrum, we’ve been singing “For as in Adam all die, so in
Christ shall all be made alive.” The idea is that the story of Adam, and all
those who came after, are caught up in the story of disobedience, separation
from God, and death. But Jesus comes and brings us into his story, a story of redemption,
of union with God, of everlasting life. So when Jesus ascends, it’s not that he’s
leaving us, but rather, because we are connected to him, he is taking us to the
very throne of God. In John, Jesus says that he is going on ahead of us to
prepare a place for us – that’s what the Ascension is about.
As
Jesus ascends, we are not left alone. We will celebrate this more fully on
Pentecost, but when it comes to the story of Jesus, everything overlaps – so we
can speak of the coming of the Holy Spirit even on Ascension just as we
remember the scars of Good Friday though we are on the other side of Easter. It’s
all part of one story. The Ascension, then, isn’t about Jesus withdrawing from
us, it’s that his Spirit is infused into all of us. No longer is Jesus located
in a single human body of flesh and blood, he is located in the Body of his Church,
in the minds of his disciples, in the movements of the Spirit. Just as Moses
passed his mantle to Joshua and Elisha received a double portion of Elijah’s
spirit, Jesus gives us his promised Spirit that we might fulfill his mission of
being witnesses to his Death and Resurrection.
This
is how Jesus departs from his disciples – by opening us to see him as the
meaning of all Scripture, by commissioning us to be witnesses to the
forgiveness of sins, by blessing us with the good words of grace and love, and
by gloriously ascending to the throne of God that we might inherit the mantle
of his Spirit. In the Ascension, we see the glory of Jesus and we are told that
it is the very same glory that God intends for us. What a gift that is, for
which we say: Thanks be to God.
