The Ascension of our Lord

Acts 1: 1-11

Eph. 1: 15-23

Luke 24: 36-43

Of the great feasts in the Resurrection-Pentecost cycle, that of the Ascension is the most puzzling and the one most likely to be skipped over as of little account. It doesn’t help that there are two accounts by St. Luke that are not compatible in all their details. At the end of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus ascends to Heaven right after his appearance to the eleven disciples which occurred while they were discussing the report of Jesus’ appearance at the breaking of bread to the two disciples traveling to Emmaus. In the first chapter of Acts, Jesus ascends to Heaven after he has been with his disciples for forty days. The only other mention of the Ascension comes in John where Jesus tells Mary not to touch him because he has not yet ascended to the Father, but to tell the disciples that he is risen and is ascending to his father. Whether or not it will be okay to touch Jesus after he ascends, or how Mary is going to do it in any case, is not explained. More confusing is the suggestion that the Ascension is a process rather than a discrete event either one day after the Resurrection or forty days.

Discrepancies in details aside, one thing both accounts by Luke and in John’s Gospel hold in common is the connection between Jesus’ leaving the disciples and his sending the Holy Spirit. Several times, in his final discourse in John, Jesus tells his disciples that only if he leaves them can he send them the Holy Spirit to be their comforter: “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you.” Here, Jesus seems to be talking more in terms of leaving the disciples by his death rather than his Ascension, but the Holy Spirit’s presence to the disciples and to us seems to hinge on Jesus’ departure. Why is this?

Maybe Jesus’ departure in order for the Holy Spirit to come to the disciples was not a cosmic necessity, but something made necessary by the disciples themselves. The liturgical observance based on the chronology in Acts suggests that Jesus had a schedule made out for him that had him ascending on the fortieth day after the Resurrection and sending the Holy Spirit ten days later. Maybe. But let’s take a look at the last conversation Jesus has with the disciples before he ascends to Heaven. The disciples ask Jesus: “Is this the time when you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” I can imagine Jesus banging his head against the nearest tree at that. This is the sort of question that could have had Jesus saying: “I’m out of here!” There was hardly any question that could have shown more emphatically that the disciples still didn’t get it than this one. Several times, the disciples had expressed the hope that Jesus would lead a revolt along the lines of that led by Judas Maccabaeus. This path may have seemed tempting because Judas Maccabaeus scored a resounding victory at the time, but the long-term result was the institution of a yet another tyrannical regime, in fact, the same regime, albeit under Roman hegemony, that the common people suffered under during Jesus’ time. With Jesus’ throwing cold water on the idea as many times as it came up, there is not question that Jesus’ attitude to the idea was: Been there, done that. Maybe the Resurrection revived hopes of a repeat of the Maccabaean revolt, making them forget the crucifixion and everything Jesus had taught about the Kingdom.

Like a liturgical refrain, Jesus had solemnly warned his disciples three times that “he would be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” He did this at precisely those times when the disciples could be tempted to think that a Maccabean triumph was just around the corner, such as right after Peter proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, right after the Transfiguration, and when James and John ask if they will sit at Jesus’ right and left in his kingdom. When they fought about who was the greatest (right after one of the solemn warnings of Jesus’ death), placed a child in their midst and told them “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” In Matthew, Jesus contrasts his idea of rulership with that of the rulers of the Gentiles who lord if over their people and are tyrants over them. As for Jesus, the “Son of Man came not to be served by to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

After his Resurrection, Jesus tried again to get across to the disciples what his kingdom was really all about. When Jesus meets Clopas and another disciple on the Road to Emmaus, a glum Clopas said that they had hoped that Jesus “was the one who was to redeem Israel.” Jesus then rebukes the two disciples for their slowness of heart in believing what “the prophets have declared.” Then he “interpreted to them all the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Then, while the larger group of disciples was discussing Jesus’ appearance and disappearance in the breaking of the bread, Jesus appeared and explained that everything written about him in “the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Usually, the phrase “the Law and the Prophets” was used to refer comprehensively to the Hebrew scriptures, so the inclusion of the psalms in this instance is significant. What we find in the psalms are many laments over persecutions from the standpoint of the victim. Not only were these laments about the victims in their times, but they also pointed to the story Jesus himself would enter. Then Jesus went on to say that when the scriptures say that the Messiah was “to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day,” it means that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed” in Jesus’ name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Proclaiming repentance and forgiveness is a very different proposition from starting a revolt to restore the kingdom to Israel.

And yet, after forty days, the disciples ask again: “Now are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” They are like little children who try to wear their parents down by asking the same thing over and over again. This obtuse question must have convinced Jesus that the disciples still didn’t get it and they were never going to get it. They were never going to stop hoping for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel as long as Jesus was walking on the earth with them. Maybe Jesus was planning all along to leave after forty days, but maybe this question was the last straw.

The Ascension, then, does what the Resurrection failed to do: it put paid to the notion of reviving Maccabean theology. Jesus was gone and there was no way he was going to lead the revolt they were hoping for. This left the disciples no choice but to try whatever the Holy Spirit lead them to try: to preach repentance and forgiveness to the whole world.. This gives a vital clue to the meaning of Jesus’ parting words: “it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” What the kingdom is about preaching repentance and forgiveness, not even the Father can accomplish the task unilaterally. It is contingent upon human beings. Like us. It is up to us, God’s creatures, to repent and forgive, and then to proclaim repentance and forgiveness to the rest of the world. This is what the kingdom is all about. In John, we see confirmation of this understanding of where the Holy Spirit will lead the disciples. Jesus breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” So, once again, the work of the Holy Spirit is forgiveness.

In Ephesians, Paul prays that we may come to know the hope to which God has called us, to know the riches of God’s “glorious inheritance among the saints,” and the immeasurable greatness” of God’s power. Paul goes on to say that God put this power to work by raising Christ from the dead and seating him “at his right hand in the heavenly places.” This triumphalist picture shows us where the Ascension ends up. The sense of triumph is heightened when the author goes on to say that all things have been put under Christ’s feet. This seems to allude to the practice of asserting dominance by using defeated enemies as a footstool. So, this is God’s kingdom, where God restores the kingdom to Israel. There is a sobering element to this triumphalistic picture. The one who has triumphed is the one who was crucified. This passage gives us the same trajectory as the famous hymn in Philippians 2, only in Philippians, the emphasis is more strongly placed on the suffering and death of Jesus, thus stressing the point that the one at the right hand of God is the crucified one. Especially with the feverish way the author of Ephesians writes of Christ’s triumph (the difference of emphasis from Philippians adds to the suspicion that Paul may not have written this later epistle) it is easy to get intoxicated with the idea of defeating one’s enemies. But if it is the crucified one who sits at the right hand of the Father, and our directive is to preach repentance and forgiveness, then the kingdom God has in mind is one where everybody has repented, been forgiven, and has forgiven others, and there are no enemies to put under anybody’s feet.