Ascension – Thursday 5 May A✠D 2024
✠ Psalmody: Acts 1:11;Psalm 47:1-2, 5;Psalm 47:5;68:18a
✠ Lection: 2 Kings 2:8–15;Acts 1:1–11;St. Mark 16:14–20
Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Church is blessed with two lengthy accounts written by St. Luke. First, his Gospel text that concludes with the Ascension of our Lord. Second, the book of Acts, which begins with the Ascension of our Lord, but with different details from the Gospel, some of which give us insight into the Son of God’s intention in descending and ascending. St. Luke says that he wrote of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, until the day in which He was taken up, after He through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom He had chosen, to whom He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.
The Gospel of Luke is a beautiful story of the eternal Son becoming incarnate, living and teaching in the midst of those whose humanity He took upon Himself, doing and teaching many things that stirred up marvel and wonder in the hearts of those who witnessed and heard His ministry. Time after time, He gave tastes of the Kingdom of God that He was bringing, the Kingdom of God that He is, while mercifully and relentlessly trying to keep the people from seeing only the temporal effects of what it is to have Him. But we are a stubborn people, consistently wanting to have God added into our lives where we would have Him fit, to do what we would have Him do.
Instead of clearing the Romans out of God’s promised land in a manner similar to how He had driven the robbers out of the temple, Jesus was cursed and hung on a tree by them. Luke recounted how the Christ repeatedly clued in His disciples to the fact that He must go up to Jerusalem and be handed over unto death and rise again on the third day. Such sacrifice He accomplished, such victory He gained and it was during the 40 days following His resurrection that He gave physical proof to all His claims and to the fact that He alone now holds the keys to Hades and Death.
It was this resurrected, glorified Christ Who appeared in the midst of the Jew-frightened Disciples in the upper room, speaking words of peace, and breathing the Holy Spirit onto them as He commanded them, as He sent them out, as His apostles to continue His ministry of forgiveness of sins. If you forgive anyone his sins they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.
His victory over death for them, for you, for me, for the world, was made known as He presented Himself alive after His suffering. He left no doubt that though He was dead, behold He lives. He appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the women returning from the grave, to the Emmaus disciples, to James and 500 brethren at one time, and assembled here with many at the Mount of Olives on the Day of His Ascension. The truth of His life, death, and resurrection stands firm by a great cloud of witnesses.
Yet even His appearance after rising from the dead was not for shock factor, show, or entertainment. His intention has always been living faith in Him to be kindled in hearts that were once as cold, dead, and hard as what was rolled over the entrance of His tomb. His time during the forty days post-resurrection were spent by speaking further of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God. All of this, Luke says, Jesus did until the day in which He was taken up. Do not think or feel that Ascension, that this departure from how He was with us for more than three decades is our crucified Lord taking a hard left turn off the clear course He was traveling in all that Luke had been telling us that He had done and why. Do not feel that Christ’s ascension was Him abandoning us, that it was His going away and sending a sort of consolation prize in the Spirit since now Jesus is apparently done dealin with us closely. Christ has ascended to the right hand of the Father, but that does not mean that He is now far from us or that we now live in a second- or third-rate version of the Kingdom in comparison to what it was like to have Jesus in our midst the way that He was before His ascension. Is the Jesus that you think of now distant and detached from all the good that He got started in those few years of His earthly life instead of the One Who calls you to embrace the true kingdom of His grace by faith?
Dear friends in Christ, His ascension was planned. His ascension is part of His salvation. We cannot look to His earthly ministry and long to have that. We cannot grow nostalgic and think only if Jesus hadn’t ascended and were still among us; only if He were standing here right now, oh how much better would that be for us! Such a reality is not ours to be grasped. He never came to give that as the kingdom. We cannot groan and say that if only Jesus were to come multiply our potluck and miraculously feed all of North Royalton that then they would see that He is worth their time and attention and that we would finally have more members in our congregation if Jesus came and did one of His tricks, no, His miracles. If only Jesus would be our bread king, our disease healer, or our old-age-stopper, then we’d have here what would finally get people’s attention and that would be a Jesus they could not deny. Beloved, that might play out for a short while, but the flesh would eventually get bored with charlatan Jesus. Only the true Savior can satisfy the hungry heart, and only the true Savior as He has worked salvation, including His bodily ascension into heaven. A life built on show-me-a-trick-Jesus is not the kingdom of God. His true kingdom that has no end comes when, from the Father and the incarnate, crucified, raised, and ascended Son, proceeds forth the Holy Spirit, so that by His grace, we believe His holy word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity. The eternal kingdom isn’t one in which we have an earthly knock-off restored to us here in time so that life is cleaner and easier, but so that we have faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, Who came down from heaven, and has returned there, for us. Christ’s ascension was the final piece of Him putting into place a kingdom of faith, not merely in what God does, but in Who He is, for the fact that He is eternal and living means that those who are found in Him will inherit the same.
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the now-ascended-One Who shall come again. We now wait as that same One, Who isn’t again separated from us as when our sin alienated us from the Father, but lo, He is with us, even to the end of the age; to the end of all this. He has ascended, so that now, by faith, His ministry is no longer just in the villages of Galilee, on the shores of the Sea of Tiberius, in the Garden of Gethsemane, or kept upon Golgotha, but is where His people gather around His Word and Sacrament. By ascending and giving the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have now received the greater kingdom, for by faith that He gives by His Spirit, we see Him in the fullness of His redemptive glory, no matter what He gives or takes away in this short life. All that St. Luke wrote in His Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles is for our joy that this same Jesus, Who was taken up from us into heaven, will so come in like manner. Until that day, we trust that He is always with us, just as He intends to be, and we lack nothing.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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