Acts 1.-11:
6 So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
7 He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But 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."
9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11 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."
You have probably heard the expression, "an elephant in the living room." The source of this saying apparently was a substance-abuse counselor, who said that families in which there is a drug user are living with an elephant in the living room: It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, makes loud noises, bumps into them, knocks things over, smells bad - yet the family members are usually in denial and pretend it isn't there.
The story of Jesus' ascension is sort of an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity. Clergy of mainline churches like the UMC know what dominates this story but we usually pretend it isn't there. In previous years on Ascension Sunday, I ignored the elephant, too, but today I'm coming clean. What dominates this story is Jesus' bodily ascension into Heaven.
A miracle, in
other words. That's the elephant.
The 21st-century Western mind pretends the miracle isn't there. We search for the moral of the story or its implied meaning and ignore the miracle. Lay people are taught, by implication, to do that in our secular school systems and colleges. Clergy are taught to do that in mainline seminaries and divinity schools. Almost every mention of biblical miracles in my classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School was to show how the event itself wasn't really important and wasn't the real point of the story, anyway. Don't dwell on the miracle - with the unspoken implication being that the miracle didn't really happen or that the event was really an ordinary event that occurred in unordinary circumstances and was mistaken for a miracle. Besides, the people who wrote the Bible were educated for their day, but not for ours, and did not enjoy the benefit of the scientific method as a way of understanding reality.
But we have to
face the elephant in the living room of 21st-century, North American
Christian faith, the fact that the entire Christian religion inescapably rests
on miracles. And whatever other points the Ascension stories may have for us in
our day, the central part of the story is that Jesus ascended bodily into
Heaven.
In defense of
modern scholarship, though, I readily agree that in miracle stories, including
those of Jesus' healing, the miracle is not the only point of the
stories, and sometimes not even the main point. For example, Jesus healed the
servant of a Roman centurion whose faith in Jesus was so profound that Jesus
exclaimed, "I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith"
(Matt 8:10). That's the real kicker of the story, not the healing, which takes
place entirely offstage.
But there are
three miraculous events of Jesus' life in which the miracle is so central to
defining who Jesus was - and who he is today - that explaining them away cuts the heart from our faith.
The first is
Jesus' miraculous Incarnation as the unique Son of God. I do not refer to the
virgin birth. I mean that, as Paul wrote, "In Christ all the fullness of
the Deity lives in bodily form," (Col 2:9), which cannot be said about any
other person past or present. That Jesus was fully God and fully human is an
essential miracle of his very existence that cannot be intellectualized away
without surrendering the essence of who Christ is, what he means and what he
does.
Second is that
Jesus was dead, buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. The
resurrection is the hinge of Christianity, about which everything
else rotates. Everything about our faith depends on it. Once its affirmation is
abandoned, Christian faith becomes pointless, another fact that Paul
recognized. He wrote the Corinthians that if there is no resurrection, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die' (1 Cor. 15.32).
The third miracle
is the Ascension.
The Reverend
Robert Hansel described most classical art of the Ascension. "We see Jesus
dressed in gauzy, flowing robes and he appears to be floating weightlessly on a
couple of insubstantial‑looking white clouds. The clouds are being lifted up by
some smiling, chubby cherubs. It seems like some kind of pre‑technology
elevator or a circus levitation act. Even though we understand that what we're
seeing is artistic and poetic, we just have to smile at the apparent silliness
of the whole thing. Jesus lifting off like a rocket? Peter Pan with pixie dust?
Come on! Isn't this whole idea of Ascension dated and embarrassing ‑ something
we'd be better off simply leaving out of contemporary Christian theology?"
The modern mind
replies, "Yes."
Yes, we all know
that people do not fly unassisted through the air and that precious few of us
have seen angels, although we can all imagine circumstances when that would be
greatly improved if one showed up now and then. And we know that wherever
Heaven is, it isn't directly over our heads, as hundreds of spaceships have
proven.
And having
affirmed all that, we are left with the cold, hard fact that Jesus isn't here
any more, and neither is his body.
The suffering,
death, resurrection, appearances and ascension of Jesus Christ form a single
narrative. In religious terms, they use poetic imagery and mythical literary
language to describe the central events of the most important person in all
history. Religious language is used best for religious experience. But there is
also a very practical matter addressed, an important one for a faith that
claims to be grounded in real events of actual history, as ours does. That is,
What happened to Jesus' body?
Matthew records
that this question was of foremost concern to Jesus' opponents after he was
buried and the tomb turned up empty. Disbelieving that Jesus was raised from
the dead, the question of what happened to Jesus' body was both obvious and
urgent.
The story of
Christ's ascension leaves us with much the same question, too. Namely, if Jesus
didn't ascend into heaven, where is his grave? For he is no longer walking
around, continuing his ministry. A crucial historical fact of Christianity is
that Jesus' body is missing. Peter preached to the people of Jerusalem on the
day of Pentecost, "Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are
witnesses. ... I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both
died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day." Jesus' tomb is still here, too, but unlike
David's tomb, there's no body there. So for people who dismiss the Ascension
story from a scientific-technical point of view as I once did, I have to ask:
- If Jesus was not raised from the dead and seen by the Mary and the other women and the disciples, why did they disciples devote the rest of the lives to preaching that Christ is risen, even to the point of suffering brutal death for their witness, save one apostle, John, who died imprisoned? And why did anyone believe them and endure similar fates by the thousands?
- Accepting for the sake of argument that Christ was raised from the tomb but denying that Christ ascended into heaven, then what happened to his body? In a religion with two thousand years of raising innumerable monuments to even the most obscure saint or martyr, where is the church or reliquary or plain granite obelisk claiming to stand on Jesus' final resting place?
If Jesus is not
here, and he is not ascended, what happened to him? And more importantly, what
will happen to us?
For Christ's
resurrection to be decisive, it had to be permanent. After all,
Lazarus was also raised by God's power, through Jesus. Note that we call
ourselves "Christians," not "Lazarites." Lazarus'
resuscitation was a temporary reprieve from the grave and therefore of no value
to our salvation.
The Ascension of
Christ is a critical element of Jesus's story, and therefore of our salvation.
But we are a scientifically minded, technically trained people, and unlike the
uneducated, superstitious masses of earlier centuries, we know better than to
believe in fairy tales like the Ascension story. At least, that's how I used to
think, including for quite a while after I became committed to Christ. But I
think now that we cannot gut the story of Jesus of its miraculous content,
leaving holes in the narrative, and expect something sensible to remain. If
Jesus didn't heal the sick in inexplicable ways, then what did he do? Just
preach? There have been countless thousands of extraordinary preachers since
Jesus' day. Quick, name two, not including Billy Graham ... or Donald Sensing.
So preaching itself gets no monuments dedicated to you.
Thomas Jefferson
was a man of the Enlightenment and the age of Rationalism, a deist rather than
a traditional Christian. He took scissors to the New Testament, cutting out the
verses that mentioned miracles. What was left was perhaps morally inspiring,
but not exceptional. As you may recall me saying before, any religion founded
only on Jesus' teachings would be simply an admirable form of orthodox Judaism.
That's no bad thing, but that is not what brings us here each Sunday. The
disciples knew this, even said so explicitly. Paul wrote the Corinthians that
if Christ is not raised than we are still in our sins and have no hope.
Reverend Hansel again:
Whatever we may think of the poetic
imagery, the Ascension tells us finally and completely who Jesus really is. The
picture of Jesus returning to God the Father enables us to let go of previous
and incomplete pictures of Jesus. Certainly Jesus is the baby in the manger at
Bethlehem, but that's not who he is now. Yes, he is the great teacher of the
Sermon on the Mount, but we know much more than just a record of his words. We
know that he hung and died on the cross, but that's not where he is today. We
believe that he rose victorious from the empty tomb, but he's not just hanging
around like some sort of wandering ghost.
Ascension adds a final and critical
photograph to the album of who Christ is and what he does. He is ascended -
once more with the Father, enthroned forever as the ruler and judge of all
human history. This is the final picture and a very important one indeed
because it puts all the other pictures in perspective."
http://www.explorefaith.org/Homily04.28.02.html)
There is a lot
more to the Ascension story than the Ascension itself, but without the
Ascension itself, there isn't much else about the story that matters.