“Missing the point”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Friday, May 9, 2024
Luke 24: 44-53 (Forward, p. 11) CEV p. 1098
Many moderns would have trouble with this passage, given two questions that would invariably rise in their heads. Firstly, they would wonder about the aeronautics of this event—in other words, how Jesus ‘managed’ to rise up in the air unassisted. And secondly, they might wonder about destination, namely, just where is Jesus now?
To me, the detailed answers will always remain something of a mystery. We simply do not know how Jesus did many of the things He did and we don’t have a rational, supposedly scientific explanation for them. However, seeing as science is both inadequate and partial, we cannot expect it to come up with answers for everything. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen!
And as for ‘location’ or destination: we can presume that this is heaven, but who knows where heaven might be spatially speaking. Everywhere that it is mentioned in the Bible there is a sense that it is a real place, that it actually has a physical location, but never told where. We speculate that it is ‘up there’—especially seeing as Jesus went up—but astronauts have never seen it. But, again, that doesn’t mean much: it can still exist nevertheless.
Actually, I think that these two questions miss the point. In the context of the Ascension event, we learn xx things:
-Firstly, that Jesus took pains to remind them that what happened to
Him in terms of the Crucifixion and Resurrection were totally in line
with the Hebrew Scriptures and were a fulfilment of them. In other
words, this is nothing new. He wanted to stress the continuity of
His ministry with what went before. It was not a vain invention of
recent Human origin, but rather was something ordered by God
and predicted in the Scriptures.
-Secondly, that Jesus, before leaving, gave them instructions, a
mandate to accomplish something. No longer were they to sit
around twiddling their thumbs as it were, but were to go out to do two
things, to tell the Jesus’ story and to repent and turn back to God—
beginning right there in Jerusalem.
-Thirdly, they would be given the resources to accomplish this,
namely the Holy Spirit.
-And finally—and somewhat incidentally—that He’d no longer be with
them in person.
So, to me, getting hung up on the Ascension is something of a waste of time and thought, whereas we should be getting on with the task. The Ascension is a mystery, and will remain so, but what Jesus was commanding us to do is no mystery at all. He wants us to go into all the world, starting right where we are, with our message of repentance and what Christ has done for us. So, why not get on with it?
Forward notes: “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven” (verse 51).
“One of my friends claims that Jesus’s ascension is even harder to believe than the resurrection. After all, for us today, the desire to see someone raised from the dead is understandable, but someone randomly flying into the sky is less explicable. But Jesus’s contemporaries would have understood the ascension as signifying the deification of a noteworthy person. Both in scripture and in contemporaneous sources, ascension stories were common. Although it might seem to present an outdated cosmology where heaven is ‘up,’ the ascension is nonetheless theologically significant to us today.
“At the ascension (or exaltation, as it is referred to sometimes), the resurrected Christ is no longer bound by place or time but becomes the Redeemer of all places and times. Because of Christ’s ascension, we are no farther away from the events of the resurrection today than the first disciples were. Christ is not merely an historical figure but someone who is present to us here and now.”
Moving Forward: “Do you struggle with the ascension? Reflect on the implications of Christ’s ascension—both in biblical days and now.”