So this is goodbye? The disciples probably weren’t sure. After all, since they said goodbye on that tragic Friday, they had been saying hello to Jesus a number of times. Jesus kept popping into their lives after God raised him from the tomb on that day we now call Easter. He had shown up walking along the road to Emmaus and had allowed himself to be revealed when he broke bread with his fellow travelers. Then he appeared in the locked room where the most of the disciples had gathered for safety and to consider the report of his resurrection. He reappeared the following week to assure Thomas and future generations of followers that his resurrection was real. Then he had breakfast on the lake shore having told the disciples which side of the boat to fish from. And he reconfirmed the call of Peter. We can deduce that he must have spent a lot of time with the disciples in the forty days which had elapsed since the resurrection.
So, was this goodbye? It would certainly seem so. Otherwise why would the two men stylishly dressed in white appear and greet the disciples, saying, “Galileans, why are you standing here, looking toward heaven?” (Acts 1:11).
After the amazement of the resurrection, how comfortable it must have been for the disciples to have Jesus around. Every day he is there; it was like old times. The Acts account speaks of “many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3). Too often we treat Easter as a moment, an event, like opening the presents on Christmas. A careful reading gives a much richer picture. It’s not ham or turkey and the family gathered around; instead, it’s a series of meetings in which Jesus comes to people deeply wounded by grief and spins them around to joyful hope. Every time that Jesus appeared, they must have believed that things would now go on as they had before, even better than before.
Still, there’s impatience. When Jesus takes them out to a hill a few weeks after the resurrection, they ask: “Lord, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now?” (Acts 1: 6). Not a very subtle hint of “Let’s get going, Jesus.”
It’s not that simple. Now Jesus was gone. He wouldn’t be back anytime soon. Now the disciples were able to worship Jesus, because he had ascended to the Father. Neither resurrection nor ascension is about human longing for life after death. Resurrection is a call to mission. Nothing is said about the disciples’ resurrection. They are too busy being focused on waiting in Jerusalem. They worship daily in the temple, doing the familiar even though their sense of the familiar and the ordinary has been stretched to the limit and beyond. They stand calmly as Jesus is taken from them, but they also engage in expectant waiting, until the mantle passes to them and the Spirit’s power anoints them for the mission ahead.
In Luke’s first and briefer account of the ascension, Jesus touches on the whole range of salvation history and human reaction to it. The ascension is about past, present and future.
Jesus tells the disciples that “everything written about me in the Law from Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44). That’s the entire scripture as Jesus and his contemporaries knew it. We have been nurtured on contemporary values, relatively speaking. Those values may be the ones we grew up in 20, 40, 60 years ago. But that is still contemporary compared to 2,000 years ago.
F. Belton Joyner, Jr., writes that “tradition becomes a feeding tube by which God's work in days long ago is delivered to our own time.”(1) Old is good. It’s comfortable and reassuring. The books of the Law tell how we are to live as God’s people. The Prophets are not shy about telling God’s people that the ongoing predicaments they are in is because have missed the mark. The Psalms share the full range of feelings experienced by God’s people: praise, lament, confusion, doubt, or hope. As Joyner puts its, God has not just arrived at the party! We are not the first to encounter the living God. When we draw on tradition, we are taking cues from those who have gone before us as we seek to avoid dangers and find refreshment.
Jesus does not ignore or downplay the past. He fulfills it as eternal Word present from before creation came to be and he is vaster than all we think we know about him. To deny the past is to deny who God is.
Then Jesus “opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45). He moved from the past to the present. How does all that we have received apply to the here and now? The disciples had three years of experiences with Jesus interpreting the scriptures outright and highlighting them in parables. But more than that, he lived and breathed the meaning of the scriptures in prayer, in healing, in teaching, in speaking truth to power.
Scripture addresses several questions to the ever-present now:
- Where is God’s truth seen as “real” in the twenty-first century?
- Where is grace being experienced?
- Where is forgiveness being accepted?
- Where is healing breaking through brokenness?
- Where is reconciliation happening?
- Where is the gift of faith being received?(2)
Some of those questions we can answer as a community of faith. Some of them we can answer only as individuals. In other words, where is God in our own life? How, where, and when do we experience the grace-filled presence of God in healing, mending, growing our life?
God provides means of grace, avenues through which God makes God’s transforming presence accessible in this day. The catechisms have long told us that those means are public and private prayer, personal and corporate worship, reading, studying, and hearing the Scriptures, fasting, and frequent coming to the Lord’s Table. When we engage in these means of grace, God ordinarily brings gracious gifts. Luke called it opening “their minds to understand the scriptures.” For us it is allowing our lives to be totally open to what God is doing today.
All this doesn’t end here. Jesus is clear. His instructions to the eleven disciples are direct and simple: “Stay in the city until you have been furnished with heavenly power” (Luke 24:49). Luke sets the stage for Pentecost. The gospel may end in a few verses, but the story goes on. Acts picks up right where the gospel leaves off. It’s like those continuing television shows: “Previously on ‘The Life and Times of the Early Church....” God makes good on God’s promises. If God says power will be given, power will be given! In this sense, says Joyner, the resurrection of Jesus is an appetizer (or foretaste) of a future in which all in God's family are given new life.(3)
A number of churches have used this acronym for their prayer ministry: “PUSH = Pray Until Something Happens.” This concluding reading in Luke’s gospel is definitely leaning into the wind of tomorrow. Something is going to happen.
We have lost that sense of expectancy. Oh, we do expect things, but usually from a cynical bent. We live like A. A. Milne’s Eeyore, that donkey that could find a dark cloud around every silver lining. Something will happen, God’s something, something filled with grace, something that will fulfill God’s plans and God’s promises.
The ascension invites us into that kind of expectation. The disciples worshiped Jesus and “returned to Jerusalem overwhelmed with joy. And they were continuously in the temple praising God” (Luke 24:53).
God is active. In early Christian art, God was depicted by means of a cloud. It’s a presence, a mystery, a force, a power that can’t be described. God was in the cloud that led the way out of Egypt. God was in the cloud at the transfiguration. God was in the cloud that lifted Jesus up to heaven. God has been active. God is active. God will be active, in our lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of believers who come after us, who are prepared by our experiences of God’s presence and grace, and who will share their experiences with still others. “When the Holy Spirit has come upon you, ... you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8),celebrating God’s activity in the past, in the present, and in the future.
Alleluia! Thanks be to God.
(1) F. Belton Joyner, Jr., “Luke 24:44-53 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Year C, vol. 2, 517.
(2) Ibid., 519.
(3) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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