It is forty days since we met here
early, early in the morning, or perhaps at 08:30am or at 06:30pm and celebrated
Easter 2014. And that was 47 days after we
met here on the 5th March on Ash Wednesday. We’ve journeyed through 40 days of Lent, 7
days of Holy Week and 40 days of Easter.
The Ascension is explicitly described
only in Luke, but is hinted at in Mark and John, and Matthew draws out its
meaning in another way. All of them of
course, describe the Resurrection, again each in their own unique way. Just as we can't discuss Resurrection without Good Friday, so too we can't discuss Ascension without Resurrection.
The Resurrection, in short, is
presented by the evangelists not as a “happy ending” after an increasingly sad
and gloomy tale, but rather as the event that demonstrated that Jesus’ execution really
had dealt the death blow to the dark forces that had stood in the way of God’s
new world, God’s Kingdom of powerful creative and restorative love, arriving
“on Earth as in Heaven.”
The Resurrection declared that the
cross was a victory, not a defeat. It
therefore announces that God has indeed become King on Earth as in Heaven.
To understand the Ascension requires
that we recall what I said a few weeks ago about Israel’s Temple theology. The Temple was the intersection between
Heaven and Earth. To meet with God, you
went to the Temple.
Now, however, the place where Heaven
and Earth meet is a person, Jesus Himself, who is equally at home in either or both of
the twin halves of God’s good creation....heaven and earth.
Luke’s Ascension story is that Heaven
and Earth are now joined in the person – in the risen body- of Jesus Himself.
The One who sits in Heaven is the One
who rules on earth. With the authority of a king, He therefore sends
out His followers, equipped by His own Spirit. (On Ascension Sunday we will notice that if Ascension locates a part of
“Earth” in “Heaven”, Pentecost sends the breath of Heaven to Earth.) But, as I was saying, the one who sits in heaven sends us out to celebrate His sovereignty
over the world and to make it a reality
through the founding of communities rescued by His love, renewed by His power
and loyal to His Name.
Jesus’ followers, equipped with His
Spirit, are to become in themselves, individually and together, little walking
temples, rescued ourselves from sin through Jesus’ death, and with the living
presence of God going with us and in us.
With His Ascension, Jesus has come to His rightful place, at the right hand of the Father, our Father, claiming the allegiance of every creature in Heaven, on Earth and under the
Earth. But He has come to that place and
maintains it by, and only by, His humility and self-giving love.
So when the disciples, at the start
of Acts, ask Jesus whether this is the
time for Him to “restore the Kingdom to Israel” His answer is not, as we might
think as we read it, a “no”……it is a “Yes”…but as so often with Jesus and His
Kingdom it is a “yes but.”
He said to them: “It is not for you
to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you
will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my
witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the
earth.”
And that witness, is not a matter of
“telling people about your new religious experience” of or informing them that
there is now a new possibility of a much better outer-worldly destiny (Heaven)
than anything our bleak world has to offer…but you just have to wait until you
die before you can get there. No! The “witness” of Jesus’ followers is the
message that there is now another King, Jesus (Acts 17:7 "They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.”), and He is the
true Temple (John 2:19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”) . He is ruling the world as
the one who was crucified. His subjects,
servants, followers (in other words, us) are the fuller version of the same
thing, so that the dwelling of the living God is now spreading increasingly
across and around the world.
In Luke 17:21, Jesus spoke about the
Kingdom of God and said people won't say, “Here it is” or “There it is” because
the Kingdom of God is within you.
And so at His Ascension the disciples
ask, “Are you going to restore the Kingdom” and His answer seems to say no, but
it actually says, “Yes, I am……but that Kingdom is now in you. Where you are……there the Kingdom is.” And He says that to you and to me.
This was really nothing new to the
disciples, because Jesus had often said to them – when you go somewhere tell
people that the Kingdom of God has come near.
In Luke 10 when Jesus sent out 72 of the disciples, He said to them if
you are welcomed there, eat and drink and teach and heal. But if you are not welcomed, go into the
streets and say “even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning
to you. Yet be sure of this: The Kingdom
of God has come near. It will be more
bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.”
The disciples (remember there were at
least 500 of them) had heard it before, but still on Ascension Day they were
hoping for something else.........
Are you going to restore the Kingdom
– and Jesus, on his day of Ascension, leaves them and you and me with this answer from the gospels: The Kingdom of God is
in you. You will be my witnesses to the
presence of this Kingdom, and it will spread from Jerusalem across and around the
world. And this Kingdom will spread and
grow, not by coercive or violent power, the way of the Caesars/rulers of the world, but by the rule of love, the way of Jesus and his disciples. That was the message of the first Ascension Day....that is the message of this Ascension Day. And just as the disciples discovered that they were the means by which the LORD was restoring the Kingdom that they longed to see restored, so on this Ascension day hopefully we see that we are the means by which the LORD is restoring the Kingdom that we longed to see restored, that we pray for whenever we pray Your kingdom come.
With the death, resurrection and
ascension of Jesus, He has shown us a new way to be human.
The ascended and enthroned Jesus
invites/commands us to be fully human as He was, to be the place where Heaven
and Earth meet in Alberton (or wherever we are) and therefore to be the place where God’s
Kingdom comes and God’s will is done.
