Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The text is for the Ascension of our Lord, Acts 1:1-11.
This past Thursday was one of the lesser-known festivals of the Church year. It was the Ascension of the Lord. It snuck by like a thief in the night and most of you didn’t know it. Please don’t feel bad. Most Christians probably missed it. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, either, and let you know. The last Ascension service I went to I was in grade school. There were no more than a few dozen people in attendance. Even at Seminary, Ascension services are slim. Ascension is easy to overlook.
I submit we don’t just overlook it in the church year; we even plough right by it every week when we confess the Creeds of the Church, “He ascended into heaven.” We don’t just overlook it; we zoom right by it. Those four words are barely a speedbump to slow us down as we race through the words. Born of the Virgin Mary? That’s Christmas – lots of focus there. …The third day, He rose from the dead. That’s Easter – BIG focus there. But Ascension gets passed over. That makes me wonder: do we stop and consider what that means, why Jesus had to ascend, and what He’s doing while we wait for His return?
Ascension takes place forty days after Easter. During those forty days, “He presented Himself alive to them after His suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.” That wonderful number 40: a number of perfection and fulfillment. Jesus’ living, breathing body and nail-marked hands, feet and side stand as evidentiary proof that He is the one who died, but more than that, was raised. No ghost, Jesus is a living, breathing body again – raised, resurrected, in glory. He has accomplished the Father’s will, submitting fully and perfectly to the Law; living, being tempted, suffering and dying as a man. He, who had set aside the full use of His divine power and glory, is about to take it back up again. It is time for Him to return to His position of glory at the right hand of God in heaven. He, who came in human flesh born of the Virgin Mary, will return to the Father in His human nature.
As an aside, we usually think of heaven as “up.” Heaven isn’t a locatedness; it’s not a spot on a map. It’s a boundary-less, limitless, eternal place where God dwells. In our American mindset, I think we have delegated, or perhaps denigrated, “going to heaven” to a glorified “going on vacation.” It’s a place where we’re going to go, one day. And when we get there, we’ll have our private room where we can see Jesus out the window. While there is nothing wrong with speaking about heaven, I wonder if we might be better served by thinking of it as “being in the presence of God.” My rationale is to take it out of the realm of something I get to do (where I am the actor) and instead leave it in the realm of something I will receive.
Likewise, the right hand of God is not a place (physically standing right beside the Father) but a position of power. We speak of our right-hand-man. This is someone who speaks with the master’s authority and acts on the master’s behalf. Jesus is the voice of God, the Word of God to us. But the one at the right hand also has great, unlimited access to the master.
So, with Jesus’ saving work done, with perfect and unlimited access to the Father, He prays for you, interceding to the Father on your behalf. Just as, while on earth, He prayed for those around Him – there was an excellent example of this High Priestly prayer in this morning’s Gospel lesson, John 17; perhaps re-read this this afternoon – He continues to pray for you even having ascended into heaven. He prays in His human nature, knowing full well all of the aches and pains, the hurts and sorrows, the joys and excitements, the wonders and amazements, the empathy and the fear you experience. He takes each of your prayers, prayed through faith in Him, and He echoes them perfectly into the Father’s ears for you.
It doesn’t matter if you are the only person praying or if you have a thousand Facebook friends praying with you; it doesn’t matter if it is something that others might consider silly or if it moves the hardest of hearts; it doesn’t matter if it is a prayer that you have prayed every day for thirty years or if you don’t even know how to pray, Jesus – the perfect High Priest – prays for you. If the words aren’t perfect, or the motive isn’t as pure as you wish; if the prayer is as simple as “Lord, have mercy,” or even rumbles out as a groan, He makes it perfect, purifying the words and thoughts with His innocently shed blood and fleshing out your words with His own Amen.
It’s not that He couldn’t do these things on earth. It’s that He needed to ascend to fulfill the Scriptures. He had promised He would do so after His death and resurrection. Everything else He had done in his life and ministry had been done for the Father’s glory, to fulfill what had been promised. He was not about to stop now. Besides – think of the chaos that had taken place during His earthly ministry. There were days where He was exhausted from the teaching, healing, and demands of the people. When He fed the 5000, they wanted to take Him by force to make Him king. When He angered the Jewish leaders, they tried many times to (literally) corner Him and catch Him. If He were still physically on earth, imagine what it would be like - the chaos would be ridiculous. Jesus is here! No, He’s here! No – He’s here! By His ascension, He’s able to be everywhere, at all places, at all times. How is this possible, we demand to know! Again – the Father’s presence has no location, remember?
Plus, His ascension demands and commands faith. Faith, the book of Hebrews tells us, is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Because of His ascension, we do not see Jesus – at least, not as His disciples did, or as we see each other. We see Jesus with eyes of faith. With eyes of faith, we see Jesus where He has promised to be: in the very pages of Holy Scripture. When you open the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, the Torah or the Prophets, the Epistles or the Gospels, everywhere you look, there is Jesus. Every word inspired by the Holy Spirit and written “so that you may believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name.”
In faith, we do not need to see a flesh-and-bones body. We, through the words of Matthew and Luke, in faith, see Jesus ascend with His hands held high. Those hands that gave sight to the blind and hearing to the mute; the hands that touched the sin-stained hands of others; the infant hands that held tightly to His mother and the man’s hands that were nailed to the cross – He raised those hands in blessing, not just for the 12 on the mountaintop, but for all of the children of God of all ages.
Those hands were raised in blessing for you.
He blesses you as you watch and wait for His return. We say that in the Creeds, too, remember? He ascends and will one day descend and return again. Once He came hidden in humility via Virgin Birth; when He returns it will be in glory and every eye shall see and every ear will hear. The ascension marked the beginning of the end. The ascension leaves us leaning forward in our pews, looking forward to that day, ready for when that trumpet will sound. For two thousand years, the Church has looked up to the ascension with anticipation, not apprehension, for the day of Jesus’ return when all of the promises of God, from the first day until the last, will be fulfilled in the resurrection of all flesh. Everything we spoke of the last two weeks, reading from Revelation 21, all of those things will come to fruition when Jesus returns.
We’re not there yet. But we are still Easter people. We are Ascension people. We are God’s people, children of God by grace through faith in Jesus, who has ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and who waits to come, with glory, to raise you into eternity with Him.
Blessed Ascension.
Amen.
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