Ascension Sunday: Luke 24.50-53
I was a teenager.
I was a reluctant churchgoer, cynical towards the world generally and sneering towards the faith especially. I was about six months into my mother’s mandated worship attendance when I came forward, like so many other ordinary Sundays, down the aisle, hands held out like the beggar I refused to believe I was, when suddenly, for a moment, like a rip of lightening, the hands tearing off pieces from the loaf were no longer the hands of the man I knew to be named Steve Chiocca. Nor was the body to which those hands belonged his body.
I cannot say how I knew.
I simply knew.
I knew it was Jesus.
“This is my body, broken for you,” he said— out loud? In my head?
There were holes in the hands that placed the bread in mine. It scared the shit out of me. And it made me a believer. It’s probably the only thing that could’ve made a person like me into a believer.
I don’t often speak of it because scripture warns us against becoming spiritual experience seekers. But I know that Jesus is risen not because the scriptures and the apostolic testimony so attest; I know that Jesus is not dead because I’ve met him. If he is risen then perhaps, as Luke reports, he ascended indeed.
Yet—
How are we to speak intelligibly of such an event, knowing, as we do, that heaven is not “up there?”
I remember—
I dipped the piece of bread into the chalice and glanced furtively to the left of the woman bearing the cup. I saw that the server was once again Steve, and I felt relieved.
I know not how Jesus departed, but I do know that he did not go up, up, up, and away.
In some ways, Christ’s ascension is an item of dogma on the slimmest of basis. Only Luke mentions it and he does so twice. Read in isolation, Luke’s account of the ascension could create the impression that Jesus has spent the last forty days since his resurrection on terra firma but this is straightforwardly not the case. Luke tells us that on the third day after his crucifixion, the Risen Jesus encountered two disciples who were on their way home in Emmaus. Strangely, Cleopas and the other unnamed disciple do not recognize their traveling companion until “he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him…” Coincident with the instant of their recognition, Luke reports, the Risen Christ “vanished from their sight.”
Luke does not say, “Jesus walked off into the distance.”
No, it’s, “He vanished from their sight.”
An odd body indeed.
Later that night, the disciples are hiding behind locked doors when at once the risen Jesus is standing among them. Jesus does not knock on the door. Jesus does not step through the door. Jesus is simply and suddenly standing amongst them.
Whence did he come?
If the risen Jesus ascends forty days after Easter, then where was he in between his appearances and how does that influence our understanding of the ascension?
The Gospels make it clear. Between his Easter appearances, the Risen body of Jesus had no location in this world. The Risen Jesus did not rent a room at the Super 8 in Jerusalem. He was not glamping in Galilee. He did not couch-surf in Samaria.
He appeared. And then he vanished from their sight.
Whatever else the ascension means, therefore, it does not signal a change in Jesus’s spatial location.
The risen Jesus was not exclusively located on earth during the forty days after his resurrection just as the ascended Jesus is assuredly not now located “up there.”
Where was the risen Jesus in between his Easter appearances?
Where is he now if the ascension does not narrate his journey from one place in the cosmos to another place in the cosmos?
Diane was a member of my first congregation in New Jersey. The first funeral I ever preached was for Diane’s father, who came home from work one afternoon, went down to the basement, and committed suicide. Before the police were able to reach Diane and break the news to her, Jesus came to her.
“He was standing in the kitchen, on the linoleum floor, in front of the microwave and toaster oven. I don’t know how I knew it was him, because he didn’t say anything, but I knew he wanted to comfort me for some reason. Jesus wanted to comfort me, and here I was embarrassed by all the dirty dishes in the sink.”
“How did he leave?” I asked her.
“How did he leave?” She stammered, “I don’t know. He just, you know, suddenly wasn’t there anymore.”
Ever since Copernicus’s heliocentric revolution, we cannot seriously entertain the picture of heaven as above us or, even, out there in the beyonds of space.Just as we know the earth is not the center our solar system, we know heaven is not above the clouds. The medieval art that depicts the ascension is not meant to make us laugh but it does nevertheless. After all, we cannot envision the topography of the cosmos as they did in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Though, it’s not even clear from scripture how literally they took that topography.
Notice—
The disciples respond to Jesus’s ascent into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father by going to the temple (“continually”) to bless God. Why do they go to the temple? Because they are Jews and the God of Israel who was in heaven at Jesus’s left hand was likewise seated on the cherubim throne in the temple.
It was just so at Mt. Sinai in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Lord who was in heaven was also above Moses on the mountaintop but also on the earth as great fire yet also still in the fire whence his voice came.
Centuries before Copernicus, scripture nonetheless had a more nuanced understanding of heaven’s address. Despite the plot of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, we cannot venture our way to the body of the Risen Jesus by means of air travel. There is no “Man Upstairs.” If we really believed that Jesus ascended to another location above and beyond us, then fundamentalists would be launching rockets into space instead of banning books from school libraries.
So—
If heaven is not “up there” then where? Whither the risen Jesus?
Nesteron, lived in Iran and belonged to an observant Muslim family, yet one day the risen Jesus appeared to her.
“What was it like?” my friend asked her.
“It wasn’t like an audible voice, but it wasn’t like a voice in my head either. It was something altogether different but altogether real.”
Unbeknownst to Nesteron, at this same time, her sister, who was studying in Europe, had received the gospel from a classmate and been baptized. Jesus later appeared to her and told her that she needed to go back home and share his gospel with Nesteron and their family. When Nesteron’s sister arrived back at their family’s home in Iran, Nesteron greeted her by saying, “I know—you’re here to tell me about Jesus. I believe in him. I’ve met him.”
If not “up there” then where?
And given that wherever how is he also here?
Actually, the ascension is not about a where.
It’s about a when.
The ascension is not about space.
The ascension is about time.
To be sure, Luke uses spatial imagery to proclaim Jesus’s whither because the truth is almost impossible to conceive. Where Luke gives us a picture, the rest of scripture instead relies on the concept of time. So then, the risen Christ in the Book of Revelation attests that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.
Jesus talks about himself in terms of time.
Likewise, the risen Christ, the apostle Paul writes, is the first fruit of what? The new creation. That is, the risen Jesus is the first moment of God’s promised future.
The question isn’t, “Where is Jesus?”
The question is, “When is Jesus?”
The Father raised Jesus from the dead and immediately translated him to the first moment after the End of this old aeon. The ascension therefore is simply the demonstration of what was true forty days earlier. The mystery is that God raised Jesus into the future. The good news is that this future is also by grace your future.
His Easter appearances, therefore, are exactly what the Gospels would have us conclude— ghostlike yet not ghostlike, embodied yet different than before. They are so because the risen Jesus comes from the future. Thus, the question about the risen Jesus’s body is not a question of place but of time.
Resurrection translates Jesus from one point in space-time to another point without interfering with the Triune life.
Much like folding a piece of paper in half and piercing it with a pencil, leaving two holes that permit you to pass directly from one end to the other, Christ’s body can “pass” from one location in spacetime to another without interval or interruption.
Hector was an inmate at the prison where I served as chaplain. Hector came to see me one hot summer day, his olive skin blanched white from fright.
“Man, no joke, Jesus Christ was just there—in my cell—last night before lights out. He told me everything I done is all forgiven. And then he told me my kids are going to be alright. Preacher, don’t you get it? Everyone up in here is trying to get out and Jesus Christ broke in to tell me I’m forgiven.”
Hector looked terrified, but it didn’t stop him from asking me to baptize him on Sunday. I didn’t ask him, but I think he would’ve mentioned it had Jesus left him by lifting off, up into the sky.
Of course, Luke depicts Christ’s ascension spatially. Two thousand years later, it’s still impossible for us to visualize what it means that the Father raised the Son in to the first moment of the last future. Fix instead on the good news.
Not only does Jesus live.
Jesus lives in the last future.
Therefore, the promises Jesus speaks to us in the present from that future are unconditional. They can’t be undone, not even by your sin— exactly because he lives with death behind him.
Not one of us can speak unconditional promises to another person. Every one of our promises are rendered conditional by the future of death. We cannot commit a future we do not control. Not so Jesus. Jesus’s promises to you are like wedding vows that do not end, as our vows do, with, “Until we are parted by death.”
The table, the font, the word— they are time machines.
So when the ascended Jesus speaks from the final future into the present through wine and bread and says, “For you…for the forgiveness of all your sins…” you can take it to the bank.
Because he lives with death behind him.
When the ascended Jesus speaks from the last tomorrow into today through water and says to a baby, “You are mine. I will never let you go,” well, that child can live her life like she’s playing with house money.
Because he lives with death behind him.
And when the ascended Jesus speaks from then into now, through the lips of a preacher, “No matter what is going on in your life, your marriage, your family, the world or the church…chaos, confusion, heartbreak… everything is going to be okay…;”when the Jesus then says to you through me now, “Everything is going to be okay,” you can trust that that future is your future.
You can trust that future because he already lives there.
Everything is Going to be Okay