Ascension (Acts 1)

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”  From the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 1, verse 11.

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     It seems to me that the Gospel of Luke, and the Book of the Acts, should be put together as one narrative in our Bibles. As we know, they were composed by the same writer, and the Book of the Acts is a direct continuation of the Gospel of Luke. Of course, it is easy to see why the compilers of the New Testament separated the two books as they did; the Gospels concern themselves mainly with Jesus, and the Book of the Acts is concerned mainly with the activities of his followers after his Ascension. But the two books overlap, and their area of overlap is the Ascension. Luke says, in his last chapter, that “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” That’s it, the entire statement in the Gospel about the Ascension. Luke expands on this in the first chapter of Acts. He expands the final blessing with some more teaching of Jesus, during a forty day period, no less, and only then does Luke say, “As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” So we can understand the opening of the Book of the Acts as a rewrite, an expansion, of the last few verses of Luke’s Gospel. We can see this rewrite, this expansion, if we read Luke and Acts as one continuous narrative.

     In Acts, Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God (about which he doesn’t give many details, at least at this moment), and promises that the Father will baptize the apostles with the Holy Spirit within a few days. Typically, the apostles somewhat miss the point with their question, “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus answers the question by repeating his promise about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and then he is lifted up.

     The teaching about the coming of the Holy Spirit IS the core of Jesus’s teaching about the Kingdom, at least in this passage. The question about the restoration of the Kingdom received the correct, the complete answer, when Jesus redirected the attention of the apostles away from the time of the Kingdom’s restoration, to the manner in which the Kingdom is to be proclaimed: “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and to the ends of the earth.” There is no limit, no time limit, to this proclamation. “To the ends of the earth” is not simply a geographical statement, but a statement of time as well. The Kingdom is not limited to Israel. There will be no “end” to the earth, and no “restoration of the Kingdom,” at least not in the short time that the apostles were hoping for, and not in a narrow, worldly sense. The Kingdom is not about time or place or extent at all, but about the coming of the Holy Spirit. The witnessing of the apostles to the reality of Jesus, risen and ascended, is the beginning of the restoration of the Kingdom. Jesus does not allow the apostles to limit themselves to too narrow or shallow an understanding of the Kingdom, but helps them to understand that all they will need is the power which the Holy Spirit will give them, to be his witnesses. That is the clue to the real nature of the Kingdom, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the apostles, and in all of us who are baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, as the apostles were.

     “And a cloud took him out of their sight.” We can all easily imagine what this event may have looked like. We can see in our minds’ eye what a Hollywood filmmaker could do with this, with computer-generated imagery and music to match. But I would like us to think about this in a less pictorial way. I don't wish to sound flippant, but I want to emphasize that the story of the Ascension is not about Jesus’s flight plan and the technical details of his takeoff.

     Luke’s Gospel says that Jesus’s departure is from Bethany. It is not accidental that the story of the Ascension is set here. Bethany comes from “Beth Anya,” which has the somewhat alarming meaning of “House of Misery,” which apparently means “Poor House,” a site for the care of the poor and the sick. It is the home of Martha, Mary, Lazarus, and Simon the Leper, the site of Jesus’s important meeting with Martha and Mary, and of the raising of Lazarus. Siting the Ascension in the place where women have a prominent role in the life of Jesus, and where he raised Lazarus from the dead, and where the sick are cared for, keeps the Ascension firmly connected to important this-world events in the ministry of Jesus. It is not an event which separates Jesus’s earthly life from his heavenly life, but one which unites them, and reminds us that in Jesus the earthly and heavenly, the divine and human, are not to be separated.

     “And a cloud took him out of their sight.” Let us think for a moment about this “cloud.” It takes Jesus out of the sight, the earthly sight, of the apostles. That is to say, it takes Jesus out their view of him as limited to a  particular time and place. We know this, because the text goes on to say, that “they were gazing up toward heaven.” The apostles, in other words, were letting go of a limited, earthly understanding of Jesus, and replacing it with a heavenly understanding of him.  The “cloud” does not need to be some external physical phenomenon, like fog flowing over Twin Peaks, but it can be an internal, spiritual phenomenon, a way of expressing the growing spiritual maturity of the apostles and their understanding of Jesus. Their understanding has grown to see Jesus as earthly and heavenly, as human and divine.

     But the apostles don’t remain in the heavenly cloud for long. It is a constant temptation in the spiritual life, to want to leave earth behind and attain, and remain in, some vision of a divine world, so much more beautiful, we are tempted to think, than the world that God has put us in. And what happens? “Suddenly two men in white robes stood beside them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’”  In other words, heaven and earth, human and divine, are not separate.  We are not to imagine that all we need to do is ‘stand looking up toward heaven.’ We are to remember Our Lord’s promise, that he will send the Holy Spirit, which enables us to witness to the reality of Jesus, divine and human, in the here and now. The Ascension, in other words, brings heaven to earth, just as it brings earth to heaven. Not only Jesus, but we, ascend to heaven, and we return to earth to continue its transformation in the power of the Holy Spirit.

     “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.