A sermon based upon Luke 24: 44-53
Dr. Charles J. Tomlin
The Ascension of Our Lord
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Today’s text has a rather “strange” ending, if you can call it an “ending” at all.
The Resurrected Jesus has just explained his death and resurrection to his disciples, then charged them to go and preach repentance and forgiveness to all nations. Now, in verse 51, we read that “while he blessed them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”
It is strange enough to grasp this description of Jesus being “carried up” into heaven (carried by whom, angels?), but the text becomes even stranger when it says in verse 52, that after this, the disciples of Jesus “returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Why are these disciples overjoyed that the Jesus they have come to know and love is now leaving them? Is this a rather strange joy?
There are all sorts of “strange” parts of the Scripture. By strange, I’m referring to moments in the Bible which are out of the ordinary for us, which shock our sensitivities and our normal way of thinking. Just reflect on the text where Jesus says, that unless you “hate your father and mother”, you can’t be his disciple. Or what about that other text where Jesus says, “If your right eye offends you, pluck it out?”
I don’t think any of take Jesus’ literally in either of these texts, but we still must take him seriously. We do know that in order to be an adult in this world, we must move from “obeying” our parents to “honoring” our parents while being our own person. We also know that there are “pains” in this world that are worse than physical pains. Jesus is not literally given us commands, but describing spiritual wisdom we could not otherwise grasp, unless it came up and grabbed us.
One the “strangest” of all Bible stories is the story of God’s request for Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Even though God stops the “follow-through”, one still wonders “how could God dare suggest a father to give up his own son? You might never understand such a text until you see a parent so focused or obsessed with their child, the child ends up spoiled and all hope of a future is lost. Now, this text is not so far-fetched. It even comes into more focus, when we realize Abraham is no ordinary father of faith, and this is no ordinary son, but the son of the promise. While still “strange” in our minds, we can see why Abraham as the father of faith needed to keep his focus on the God of the promise, not just his child of the promise.
The Ascension is also a very strange part of gospel story. It is often omitted from the original formula of preaching Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection (1 Cor. 15: 4) and even Mel Gibson left it out of his movie, The Passion. Perhaps for many, the Ascension is kind of like a less than dramatic, even “unnecessary” ending to a very dramatic movie having trouble finding a place to land. But in reality, when you grasp it’s truth, the “Ascension” is actually more like the gospel needing to find a place to launch, rather than a place to land. With the Ascension the gospel takes off, not into “never-never land” but into the “real world” of you and me. The Ascension is where the story of Jesus, turns from being just a story going in one direction---needing an ending, into a story that now goes in two directions---so that it finds a beginning in our own lives. What you don’t find in the Bible or in your own life is a “failure to launch.” You want a story that takes you to new horizons, new possibilities and gives you new directions for your life.
FROM JESUS WHO IS SOMEWHERE TO JESUS WHO IS EVERYWHERE
The first ‘new’ direction of the gospel in the Ascension of Jesus is that Jesus changes. Jesus is no longer the man from Nazareth or a man of mere history, but from now own Jesus is the son, who is “seated at the (Father’s) right hand of power” (Matthew 26:64) or as Paul wrote, “seated at his right hand in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1.20).
What is very easily grasped from this ancient biblical language is the old world understanding of kings and their absolute authority. If the Bible were being written today, I doubt that it would use such language to describe God’s power in this way (The Ascension of Jesus into heaven does sound a lot like the Ascension of a King to his throne, doesn’t it?) But what we must keep in mind is that the “ascension” of Jesus to the Father’s right hand of “power” is an ascension to a very different kind of “power” in the heavens just like the cross is a very different kind of “victory” in the world. In Jesus we are not talking about the kind of power than makes people do what the king wants or wishes, but we are talking about the kind of “power” which enables people to do what they need to do—in order to live, in order to be saved, and in order to be “empowered” with a power that is beyond their own strength.
What “takes off” at the Ascension is what God wants the gospel to do in the world. God wants “good news” of repentance and forgiveness of sins to empower our own lives. And this “empowerment” can happen, not because of who Jesus was, but because of who Jesus still is. Through his ascension into heaven, Jesus cannot be regarded as a mere man found in history, which every-one has been looking for through all kinds of theoretical speculation, but through his Ascension Jesus becomes the “Christ of faith” who is the Jesus who can be lose “anywhere” in the world.
There is a lot of difference isn’t there. Its one thing to try to read the Bible or to try to uncover in history what Jesus might have been like. A lot of people have been doing this and it can be a very interesting adventure on its own. Did you see that Discovery Channel special around Easter with computerized graphics depicted what Jesus might have looked like in 3D? While we can all appreciate trying to look at Jesus as a real man and a real Jew from the ancient world, and trying to get away from the more Romanized images of Jesus as some blond-haired, blue-eyed, long-haired bearded “hippie” from Palestine, none of these “images” whether religious, mythical or scientific can get us to the real Jesus. They far very, very short of the Jesus, who no longer lives somewhere in history-past, to the Jesus who can show up anywhere and everywhere in the world.
I recall asking my home Pastor a question about his life as a pastor when I was headed for college to study for the pastoral ministry.
“Have you ever been to the Holy Land?” I asked.
He answered: “I don’t need to go to the Holy Land, because the land where we live right now is just as holy.”
While the answer took me a little off guard, there is a wonderful truth her that we must not miss and it is part of the truth of the Ascension. Because Jesus is everywhere and can be anywhere, there is no place on earth that is more holy, more special, or more important than the other or more special than the moment and place where you live right now. The point of the Christian gospel is not to make a pilgrimage in your life, as in some religions, but the point is to live as a pilgrim with a destiny for your life right where you are living right now.
Jesus is not somewhere to be discovered, he is everywhere to be uncovered. He can be revealed to us not in the place we want to get to, but he can be revealed in the place where we are already find ourselves. Jesus is not “out there” to be found on a mission trip or mission experience (though you might also find him there), but Jesus can also be known “right here” in the place where we want to find him. The Ascension means that Jesus is no longer restricted to any one time or to any period in history nor even to a single people nor (surprisingly) to a singular religion. Jesus is the son who has “ascended” so that he can be in any time, any place, or revealed to any people who are open to encountering him and letting him “ascend” to the throne of their own heart and lives. More than anything, the Ascension says that Jesus is not restricted, unless we restrict him.
The Gerald Manley Hopkins has written,
“For Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his,
to the Father through the feature of men’s faces” (From the poem: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” quoted from Christology: Gerald O’Collins, SJ, Oxford Press, p. 334). What the poet is trying to say is that through Jesus Christ, God can show up in “places” anywhere and everywhere thorough the “faces” of people who live and look like Jesus. And with the mention of “faces” this great poem brings us to a second important truth about the Ascension of Jesus.
FROM JESUS WHO IS SOMEONE TO JESUS WHO CAN BE IN ANYONE
The Ascension of Jesus is also about Jesus living in us---in our faces as we reflect the love and life of Jesus in our lives.
Remember we said that when Jesus “ascends” to the Father’s right hand, we are talking about Christ coming in “power”, but it is a very different kind of “power” than we might imagine. Most amazingly, the power Jesus attains and gives is never a power for himself, but it is a power in me and in you for the living of our lives. Do you notice what the ascending Jesus tells his disciples to do? He tells them to “stay here in the city until (they) have been clothed with power from on high.” (vs. 49). This “power” they are to wait for is Christ’s power and at the same time it is the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is a power that comes to them as Jesus ascends to the Father. It is the power that comes from the “right hand” of God’s throne, which is “on high”. It is the “higher power” which can empower and deliver the soul from self-destruction and it is the power of eternal salvation, but most of all it is the power of Jesus who was once “someone” living in the world, who is now, someone who can live in anyone.
I’m not sure that we can fully grasp the “power” of having Christ live within our own lives in today’s world. We understand the power of the internet to shape and ruin lives. We can understand the power of the gas engine to move mountains or the power of the atom or even the possibilities harnessing solar powers for our future needs. But what does it mean to have Christ’s own power available for having the power to live our own lives?
The truth is, we might not fully grasp “Christ’s power to live through us” or our own “life in Christ” until day we find ourselves completely and totally devoid of it. When that rich young man at the University of Virginia, who was big, strong, and powerful in his own right, used his own “strong” but very violent hands and killed his young ex-girl friend, we can say, at least, that there was a “power” that he did not have---a power to deal with his own violence, his own demons and his own pain. We might not grasp the power of Christ in a man, until it is missing.
In the same way, we might not fully grasp “Christ’s power inside of our lives redeeming our minds and hearts” until we have found ourselves or someone in need of being redeemed from some terrible tragedy or some negative force in our lives. I’m thinking right now of that young Muslim man, who, even though he spent 10 years in America, became so possessed by his fanatical religious and political understanding, that he armed a Nissan Pathfinder with a bomb, powerful enough to take the lives of all kinds of innocent people. While we might wonder what in the world he was thinking, but what we can know for sure, is that this Muslim man was not thinking with Jesus Christ. He was not thinking with Jesus how to change the world, nor was he thinking with Jesus how he could love the world, but he was making deals with the devil. And even though we might not grasp all that it means to have Jesus in us, if someone has a gun, a knife, or a hate toward us, we would all wish that he had “Jesus” in him. This would then be something we could easily understand.
But what does it mean for you to have Jesus ascend to the throne of your own heart and life, right now, in this day and in this moment? Could that be a question you should wonder about and not take for granted? I realize that for some of us plain spoken, get real, tell-me-what-I-should-do, preacher kind of listener, you would like for me to answer for you a question that only you and God can answer for yourself. To find this Jesus in you, this Jesus who is “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his” which are the also “lovely” to the Father, is not something I can answer for you, but it is something you must answer for yourself. You must understand, what it means to have Jesus ascend to the throne of your own life, in this, your moment, your history, and in this, your own time. I can’t answer that, but what I can answer is this: Whatever the repentance and forgiveness of Jesus means in your life now, when you let him and his truth ascend the ladder to determine your life and destiny, YOU WILL BE A WITNESS! Isn’t this what Jesus said: “You are witnesses of these things…” (vs. 48), and “I am sending upon what my Father promised, stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power form on high.”
Rosemary Brown makes raises a very important question when she asks herself: “Am I waiting
The Second Coming, or am do I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ comes to me every moment of every day when I receive the fullness of his presence?” (As found in her sermon: Sent Forth By God’s Blessing” at www.day1.org/570-sent_forth_by_gods_blessing.) That’s a good question, isn’t it? It’s a good question because it forces us not to “gaze up into the heavens” (Acts1: 11) wondering and doing nothing, as some of the first disciples did when they saw Jesus ascending, but it made them focus on the power of Jesus made available to them now, each and every day, so that they could have the power to live their own lives with creativity, with promise and with hope.
When a Christian burial is performed, part of the language usually says something like Jesus said on the cross, when he said, “Father into Your hands I commend my spirit.” When a Christian dies, we say something like, “now we commit this body to the ground, but their spirit we commend to God.” In a very different way, at the ascension Jesus’ body and spirit both go back to God so that God can “commend” Christ’s Spirit back to us (Rosemary Brown). After ascending into heaven, whether it is up, around or simply the language of the eternal, spiritual realm, God now sets Jesus’ own spirit eternally free from his body, so that we can now receive Jesus’ spirit into our own hearts and lives. Only the one who has ascended, is able to be the one who descends and lives within those of us who live on earth.
I realize this is a visual description of a great spiritual truth, far beyond our human ability to grasp, but again, we can grasp what it means better than how it happens. What it means is that this Jesus who was once somewhere, can now be everywhere and this Jesus who was once someone, can now live in anyone, through the Spirit, whenever a person allows Jesus to ascend to the throne of their own heart and soul. But what does this mean? Can we finally wrap our minds around this cosmic Christ who was once somewhere, but is now everywhere and this spiritual Christ who was once someone, but can now live in anyone who surrenders to His Spirit?
FROM JESUS FOR THEM TO JESUS WHO IS ALSO FOR US.
To understand the indwelling, living, spiritual and even the cosmic Christ who can live in us today, we must get out heads out of the clouds and finally look into our own hearts and even examine our own lives. We must ask ourselves: Where is it that we need both the repentance and forgiveness of sins? Where is it that we need to both be and give a witness to goodness and truth? Where is it that we need the “power” from “on high” to face the challenges and disappointments of every day? Can we know the Jesus who is more than a name in a book from history? Can we know the living Christ who calls us by name, whose voice we can hear within our hearts and can distinguished clearly from all the other voices of the world? How will we recognize Jesus and be “clothed” with the power he has for our own living?
The message of the ascension of Jesus to God’s throne in the heavens is finally about the Jesus who must ascend again to the throne of our own hearts. Without letting him ascend in our hearts, minds, wills and wishes, we cannot understand and we will not experience the forgiveness nor find the power we need for living. Maybe this is the greatest message of all the Bible, when you think about it? For what good is Jesus’ life, what good is Jesus’ mission, and what good is even his death, burial, and resurrection, if we do not let the Christ of the cross and the Christ of the resurrection ascend to the throne of our own hearts?
What is perhaps the most power-filled message of the entire life of Jesus is Jesus did not just come for them (the Jews), but Jesus also came for all of us. Jesus was Jewish and he was a Jewish prophet, who by his rejection, and through God’s plan of salvation, became the global savior of the whole world. This “transition” from them to us did not begin to take place until Jesus ascended into heaven. And this “transaction” of grace, for lack of a better word, does not become realized in our own hearts until we allow Jesus to ascend the throne of our own lives.
So let me ask you, on this Ascension Sunday, May 16th, 2010: Do you have the power of the risen and ascended Christ living in you? Do you have his power which comes from repentance of your sins so that you can find the forgiveness to live in your own skin? Do you have his power of witness, of mission, or of purpose, which empowers you with strength from beyond yourself?
The Christ who has ascended in heaven is still the Christ who wants to ascend in your life. He wants to bless your life with “great joy” and the continual blessings of God, but you must put him on the throne of your own life and worship only him. As the apostle Paul also came to understand in his great letter to the Romans in chapter 8. Jesus wants to indwelling and rule our lives, not because he wants to “own us”, or because he needs to “control us”, but his spirit comes to empower us to live in hope and he wants us to know, more than anything else, that he is “for us”, even when the worlds seems to be against us.
31 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?
32 He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?
33 Who will bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.
35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?.... 3
7 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:31-39 NRS)
This is the kind of “power” a Paul experienced when the Christ who lived, became the Christ who ascended to the throne of his own heart and now lived in him. Jesus did not just come to be “the way”, but he also came to be “your way” and “the right way.” He is still only the true ‘way’ in our world, when we allow his truth to go in two directions as the one who descended from God’s heavenly place, becomes the one ascends to the throne of our own hearts. Amen.
© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.
© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.
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