Ascension (Year C)

“Gone from Our Sight”
Feast of the Ascension (Year C)
13 May 2010
Homily
Delivered at Private Mass for American English Teachers
Beijing, China
Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53; Psalm 47

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was a boy and I heard the story of Jesus’ ascension told in Church, I pictured it very literally:  Jesus took an invisible elevator of sorts up, up, up until he was beyond the sight of his disciples.    The two angels came and added, “you saw him go that way, and that’s the way he’ll come back.”  I understood this to mean Jesus taking the celestial elevator down, down, down, back to us here.   The descent was accompanied with appropriate clouds and lightning, and angelic choirs playing trumpets.

When I was eight years old (this dates me), my literalism ran into a problem named Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit the earth.  A Soviet Cosmonaut publicly pushing his nation’s official atheism, he was famously quoted as describing the earth from orbit in the heavens as a stunningly beautiful blue, and then adding, “I looked and looked but I didn't see God.”

“Well of course,” I said to myself.  “He was up in the sky, not in heaven! He was in space, not where God and Jesus are seated!” 

That was probably the start of me moving from the literalist doctrines of my childhood denomination to becoming an Episcopalian.  I had learned in a small way that the Bible tells its truth mainly through stories composed of images and metaphors:  had Commander Gagarin’s heart been right, maybe he would have “seen God” (note the metaphor) in the stunning beauty of the earth from space. 

The readings today about the ascension of Jesus, one from the Book of Acts and one from the Gospel of Luke, were both written by the same author.    Acts is volume two of a two part series of which the Gospel of Luke is volume one.   Luke, a meticulous author whose Greek style is the best of the New Testament, wrote them.    The Gospel Reading has the resurrected Jesus ascending to heaven the evening of Easter Sunday after he has appeared to the disciples and eaten fish with them and then walked with them out of the city as far as Bethany (Luke 24: 42, 50).  The Acts passage places it forty days after Easter (Acts 1: 3, 9).   In the original publication of Luke-Acts, before the Gospel of John was interposed, these two passages were juxtaposed against each other by the careful author.  Why? 

Luke at the beginning of his Gospel says he will give an “orderly account of events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1: 1-2).   Luke’s is an orderly retelling of stories of events by eyewitnesses passed on through the early preaching in the Church.  It is not intended to be a literal, perfect chronicle.

His juxtaposing the two stories of Ascension is deliberate.  The first one concludes the Gospel narrative and brings that volume to an end.  For purposes of narrative order, he must place the first on Easter evening. The second one begins the narrative of the Church after Jesus.   For narrative purposes, he places it after a period of  Jesus’ “appearing to them forty days, and speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

The detail “forty days” tips off any sensitive reader that Luke’s editorial hand here is bringing an “orderly account” to the stories he has received.  The number is symbolic of a completed period in God’s hand:  forty days and night for Noah’s flood, forty days and night in the wilderness fasting, etc.  

The point is this:  When Jesus died, everyone knew he was dead.    And everyone knows without a doubt that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  Dead people don’t come back, except maybe in people’s imaginations, dreams, or as some kind of spectral vision, as the “ghosts” of folk traditions.  They don’t come back as such. 

But when Jesus was killed, about a day and half later he came to his disciples in such a form that they had a very hard time figuring out what was going on.  Here was a Jesus much more tangible, much more alive than they had ever seen him.  It took several of them a time before they even recognized that this new, more-than-alive being before them as Jesus (Luke 24:16; John 20:14; Matthew 28:17). 

Reflecting on their experience and their scriptures, they later associated what had happened with an image in the later prophetic books and the image-rich, coded persecution literature called apocalyptic, books like Daniel and the later Revelation of John.  The image is that at the end of time, when God acts definitively to set things right in this messed-up world of ours, God will bring to life again the people who had suffered horrible deaths because they had only been faithful to God’s religion, the martyrs.  They would be created anew, fully alive and happy, in a new world, where everything is as God truly intends.  The Book of Daniel says they come forth from their graves and “shine like the stars of heaven” (Dan. 12:3).  Jesus’ disciples found that this obscure image—the resurrection of the martyred righteous at the end of time—this described this strange thing they had seen in Jesus’ death and subsequent bodily reappearances.   “Resurrection” is not merely a resuscitation of a corpse; it is God’s act of populating the new creation he intends to replace this defective world.   

One of the earliest formulations of this faith in the New Testament is found in the letter to the Corinthians (15:3-9):  there Paul says he passes on what he was taught, that 1) Christ suffered and died for us in accordance with the (Hebrew) scriptures, 2) on the third day he was raised, and 3) that he appeared, first to Cephas (Peter) and the Twelve, then to James and the apostles, then to over 500 Christians at once in a large gathering, and then to Paul himself (here he moves from tradition to his own story), the “least of the apostles.”   This earliest citation of the early apostolic preaching tradition makes use of the technical “was raised from the dead,” a reference to this idea of the coming forth of the righteous dead at the end of time. 

But the risen Jesus did not continue to appear to his followers as a matter of course.   Paul recognizes this when he says that when the risen Lord appeared to him, it was “last of all."  He adds that his experience, later that all the others, made him like  “something born at the wrong time.” (1 Cor. 15:8).  

The image of Jesus “going back up to heaven” early on became a symbol for when such appearances generally stopped.  Various authors in the New Testament treat the matter differently. 

The longer ending of Mark has the risen Lord sitting at a meal with disciples, after which he is “taken up into heaven to sit at the right hand of God” (Mark 16:19). 

Matthew has the disciples return to Galilee where they see the risen Lord on a mountain (Moses receiving the Law imagery is big in Matthew), and he gives them what we call today the “Great Commission” to preach the Gospel to every nation (Matt. 24:50). 

As we have seen in today’s readings, Luke in his Gospel places it on Easter evening in Bethany, while in Acts he places it forty days later and ten days before the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. 

John, as always, is the maverick.  For him, the moment that Jesus is lifted up into glory is the moment of his suffering and death on the cross (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32).  In John, there is no Pentecost, but on Easter evening Jesus breathes his spirit onto his disciples (John 20:22). 

The different writers make the same point in different ways, with different stories:  Jesus may be hidden from our sight, but this is because of our defective sight, not because he is not here.  In Acts’ image of the clouds surrounding the Ascension, it is because we are unable to see through the bright clouds that surround him. 

So the next time someone belittles you by saying they take the Bible literally while you do not, just remember that the Bible itself often asks us to read it in more than literal ways.  

And may we all pursue the spiritual disciplines of daily prayer and reflection, and quiet but steady amendment of life, to help us have the kind of hearts that can see through the brightness. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen.

 HYMN FOR ASCENSION DAY (to “Earth and All Stars”)

Alleluia! Jesus ascends now! God has gone up with a shout in all might!
Bright clouds and wind beckoning onward, Jesus is hidden in glorious light!
Christ has gone up with the ram horn’s loud blast.
Give God the glory, Alleluia!


Weeping be gone, sorrow be silent.  Death now is conquered and we are now free.
Sin cast aside, illness and weakness all are retreating from God’s bright glory. 
Jesus is seated at God’s own right hand,
Tell out his mercies!  Alleluia!


“Be not afraid, I will be with you” so he tells all who await his return. 
“My breath is yours, power from the heavens, don’t stand here looking and waiting forlorn.
New gifts and tongues will come down to you soon.
Go forth and serve now, Alleluia.”

              © 2010 Anthony Hutchinson