Happy Ascension Sunday! Yes, let me give you formal greeting on this, the first Sunday after the most under-celebrated holiday of the Christian year!
And of course I use the word ‘holiday’ in the traditional sense of ‘holy day’ in this case because this is in fact the only ‘holy day’ marking those boundary events in the life of Jesus – His birth, His death, His resurrection and His ascension – that is NOT also celebrated as a public holiday (at least in this country)!
Christmas Day marks the birth of Jesus, and we don’t just get one day off then but a series of days, and of course that is a ‘holy day’ surrounded by an enormous amount of commercial fuss and bother!
Good Friday and Easter Sunday, while not reaching quite the same commercial heights as Christmas are also public holidays for us, and each is celebrated in its own special way (with hot-cross buns and Easter eggs, respectively)!
I didn’t get any gifts on Ascension Day though, nor any chocolates. I didn’t send out or receive any Ascension Day greetings cards either, and I suspect that not many in my congregation even remembered when the actual feast day of the Ascension was! It always falls on a Thursday, forty days after Easter. Not many of us know that!
Why is it that we make so little fuss about the Ascension? Why is it that we don’t hand out chocolate clouds to one another on Ascension Day? Mind you, I actually thought fairy-floss might be the better form of confectionary – a great big cloud of fair-floss, perhaps with a pair of feet sticking out of the bottom of the cloud?
No, we don’t have any Ascension Day traditions like this because we don’t normally celebrate Ascension Day at all! Unlike the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, the final disappearance of Jesus is something we prefer to keep quiet about! Why is that? Is it because we don’t like to face the fact that Jesus actually left us?
However you figure it, one thing you find when you scour the Scriptures for Ascension Day material is that the relative silence of the church pretty much reflects the silence of the Scriptures themselves, for the Ascension of Jesus is something that the New Testament itself says very little about!
Three of the four Gospel-writers never mention it! Matthew, Mark and John each go into great detail regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus, and Matthew and John are full of stories of the resurrection appearances of Jesus but there’s no mention from either of them as to when those resurrection appearances actually stopped!
And if the Ascension gets scant attention from the Gospel writers it gets none at all in the letters of St Paul and the other Apostles. There are some references to Jesus being ‘in glory’ (e.g. Ephesians 4:8 and 1 Timothy 3:16) but there are no allusions to any particular Ascension event. No, you only find two ascension accounts in the entire New Testament and they both come from the same author – Luke – who wrote both the Gospel that carries his name and the book of the Acts of the Apostles.
The Acts version of the story is the more detailed one, so let me read from there:
“So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 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.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:6-9)
It’s only three verses long – this most-detailed of the accounts of the ascension of Jesus – and the opening of the account is almost as extraordinary as its conclusion!
The disciples ask “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” to which the obvious answer surely should have been “have you not been listening to me at all for the last three years?”
Perhaps that’s too harsh? Certainly Jesus seems to take the question seriously which suggests that I am being too harsh. Even so, you would have thought that by this stage of their relationship the disciples would have understood that the message and ministry of Jesus were not focused on the restoration of political Israel as an independent state!
I know that there are some who would debate this, such as Reza Aslan, who in his recently-published book “Zealot” argues that this was in fact precisely the message of Jesus, and it’s just that the church has subsequently obscured that.
I read Aslan’s book some months ago and, oddly enough, I don’t remember him making any reference to this passage though it would have suited his thesis well. I found the book disappointing from a scholarly point of view as (like most books of its kind that try to tell us the real message of Jesus that the church has lost) it can make its case only by highlighting certain passages in the New Testament at the expense of countless others that it has to disregard as later additions.
At any rate, as even Aslan would agree, by the time you get to the end of the New Testament it is clear that the authors of the books themselves understood that the work of Jesus was something much greater than the political independence of any one nation, even if the disciples at the time of the ascension did not understand that.
Perhaps the fact that Jesus took their question seriously should be a reminder to us that the independence of a subjugated and oppressed people is something that the Lord Jesus always takes seriously. Even so, I think if the disciples had known that this would be their last physical encounter with Jesus they might have framed their questions a little more intelligently!
Even so, no sooner has Jesus given the disciples a reply to their question than we find Him miraculously on the move again! He was ‘lifted up’ the Gospel writer says, and a cloud appears, or rather Jesus disappears into the cloud, and then all of a sudden Jesus is gone and two men in white robes are there (whom we might assume to be the same two men who appeared outside the tomb after the resurrection) telling the disciples to move on and that Jesus will return to them in the same way that they just saw Him leave. And so they did move on.
That’s the story as we get it in Acts chapter one, though I suspect that most of us are more familiar with artistic depictions of the scene than we are with the written story.
Paintings of the ascension always seem to picture Jesus as taking off into Heaven much like a rocket-ship, with the disciples left standing there, looking at the soles of his feet as He gradually gains altitude!
I don’t think the written version of the story gives us exactly that depiction. Luke says Jesus was ‘lifted up’ which is a phrase we normally associate in the New Testament with Jesus being lifted up onto the cross, so it doesn’t necessarily mean he ‘took off’.
As to the cloud and the men in white robes the whole story does remind me of that other very mysterious mountain-top experience that the disciples had with Jesus, namely the transfiguration, which also featured strange characters appearing and Jesus appearing and disappearing and then reappearing as someone altogether different!
I suspect that the ascension experience was probably something a little more mysterious and inexplicable than the rocket-ship image, though I don’t pretend to be in any position to give any authoritative account as to exactly what happened.
All we know of the ascension is that Jesus was with His disciples, they talked to Him, then He left them, after which they never saw Him again, at least not in body. That’s the Ascension! It’s an event of real significance in the greater story of Jesus, though one we don’t know anything more about.
It was the last time Jesus’ disciples saw Him in body, and yet only one of the Gospel-writers mentions the event and, apart from this mention in the book of Acts, it is mentioned nowhere else in the New Testament. The Ascension is one of the great boundary-events in the life of Jesus, along with His birth, His death and His resurrection, and yet neither the New Testament nor the church since has ever made too much fuss about it! Why? Is it really because, as I suggested earlier, we just don’t like to face the fact that Jesus actually left us?
I don’t think that is the issue, either for the New Testament or for the church. My guess is that the reason the New Testament writers make so little of the last physical appearance of Jesus is because most of them were never really sure as to whether that was going to be His last physical appearance!
Keep in mind that the letters of the New Testament, despite the fact that they appear after the Gospels in our Bibles, were all actually written before the Gospels. Hence you find references to Jesus’ resurrection appearances in those letters and I don’t think that the authors were necessarily convinced that there weren’t going to be more resurrection appearances!
Yes, by the time the Gospel of Luke is written it’s evidently been broadly accepted that the days of meeting physically with Jesus are over, and so Luke looks back at that meeting on the mountain-top forty days after the resurrection, recognising that this had in fact been the last such meeting, and so he tries to interpret what was said accordingly. But I don’t think that prior to that the church had accepted that the post-resurrection appearances had come to an end!
When the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John conclude the resurrected Jesus is active and moving about and meeting with his people at unexpected times and in unexpected places! I think the assumption of those Gospel writers was that Jesus was quite capable of continuing to appear in unexpected times and places. They weren’t willing to limit the possibilities of further encounters!
My understanding is that most of those early followers of Jesus were expecting the world as they knew it to end and the Kingdom of God to come in its fullness within their own lifetime. You get that feeling from the writings of St Paul especially – “that our salvation is closer to us now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).
Luke is a more sober Gospel. It was written later and with the wisdom of hindsight. No, the world had not come to an end and Jesus had not returned as soon as most of us had expected and, in retrospect, we should have known that, just as we should have known that those post-resurrection appearances weren’t going to continue.
I think that’s a big part of the Ascension-day silence, both in the New Testament and in the early church, and I think the other factor we need to take into account is that these early Christians didn’t always make a sharp distinction between experiencing Jesus in His physical form and experiencing Him in the way we all experience Him.
Jesus met different people in different ways, and whether that first meeting began with a handshake or whether it took place on an entirely different level altogether, meeting with Jesus was evidently always somewhat impacting and mysterious, and regularly the lines between physical and spiritual encounter were somewhat blurred!
St Paul well illustrates this. He referred to himself as the ‘last of the Apostles’ (1 Corinthians 15:8) though the term ‘Apostle’ was normally reserved for someone who had met physically with Jesus. Was Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus a physical meeting? Well … Paul seems to think it was!
I’m not suggesting that there is no difference between meeting Jesus and touching Him, and meeting Him in the Scriptures or in the Eucharist. Of course there is. Even so, the church of Jesus Christ has entirely been built upon the fact that countless people throughout the last two thousand years, at different times and in different ways, have continued to meet Jesus!
And so I did not send out any Ascension Day cards this year, and I’m not planning on sending out any next year either. And that’s not because I want to downplay the significance of that last mountain-top experience that the disciples had with Jesus. It is though because I’m actually far more interested in our ongoing meetings with Jesus.
He lives, He lives, Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
A-long life’s narrow way.
He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
First preached by Father Dave Smith at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, on Sunday the 2nd of June, 2014.
Rev. David B. Smith
Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of four. www.FatherDave.org
