How Christ’s Ascension Impacts Our Everyday Walk of Faith
When I think of the Ascension, what comes to mind for me is the word “trajectory,” not just in terms of a final destination, from earth to heaven, but also a course for life – a way, as it were, of getting from here to there.
Living in Wonder
But that’s a problem. It’s a problem because so many of us want to somehow disempower many of the miracles of the New Testament to fit within the context of our own rational way of thinking. And the Ascension just laughs at that.
Quite honestly, the Ascension of Jesus is weirdly ridiculous if you try to fit it within the way the world works according to our understanding. But here, Galileo, Newton and Einstein must take a back seat. This is much bigger than a particular theory of gravity or other postulates about how the world often works.
Instead, what we see in the Ascension is God exerting his own authority over the entire created order, all of our understandings about the way the world normally works, to say something very clear to His disciples.
Indeed, all of the events of Jesus’ life fall into that category, not just the Ascension. Think about it: How does God incarnate himself into the form of a baby? There’s nothing rational about that. That makes no sense.
How does a word spoken from a person (if Jesus were a mere human being), literally re–create matter in the form of a healing miracle or the casting out of a demonic crippling power? That doesn’t make any sense either.
How does Jesus take into his flesh the sins of the entire world, doing so in a way that breaks that power and releases forgiveness? How does that happen in a capital punishment called crucifixion?
How does a body come back from the dead?
Our tendency, then, is to back away from what John Updike in his poem on Easter calls “the monstrous nature” of events such as this. (Read the entire poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” at this link.) We figure that somehow if we can, in essence, devalue the uncomfortable, challenging nature of miracle, then perhaps we‘ll have a better grasp of feeling more in control, that the world operates in the way it’s supposed to, in the way that we understand it.
But honestly, the Ascension and all the other miracles literally laugh at that kind of limitation. What Updike says in his poem about the Resurrection miracle could also apply to the Ascension.
We cannot understand it. And so we live in the wonder of his miraculous works.
Walking in Faith
The essence of Jesus’ life is not to fit into our categories of what it means to be human, what it means to be divine, even what it is to love. All of those are smashed. We are challenged with the starkness, perhaps even the weirdness of a God who lives not on our terms, but on his. He calls us away from our understanding of life to his understanding, which is, in fact, our salvation.
In Luke’s accounting of the Ascension, when he tell us Jesus is taken up to heaven, he says the disciples return to Jerusalem, and they are filled with joy (Luke 24:52). They are willing and excited to take the time to pray before Pentecost for the coming of the Holy Spirit. They’ve seen enough to know that his words are utterly trustworthy, and they go to Jerusalem without his body but still filled with encouragement, knowing the promises he made to them will come true. There’s no sense of loss; instead, there’s a sense of hope.
The Ascension is meant to produce the very same responses in us, because he who ascended into heaven is declaring his authority over all of life and inviting us into a relationship where we yield to that authority, realizing with great relief that we don’t have to understand. We don’t have to try to take the stories of the New Testament and reshape them in a way that fits into our own understanding about how life works. Scripture would, in fact, call that idolatrous.
Instead, God invites us to bend the knee, to call him Lord, to walk as a child and to trust him in the face of things we do not understand. To know that we don’t have to understand. That what we can do, even in the darkness of no understanding, is to know that there is light, and that he takes us by the hand, even if we don’t feel it, and leads us where he desires us to go, because he walks by his terms, not ours.
Because he is Lord over all creation, nothing is outside his purview or his knowledge. And therefore we can trust him, even in the midst of the wild uncertainties we are experiencing in this life. Because Ascension says he is Lord overall.
So beloved, I would invite you to set down the rational questions. Allow your imagination to soar. See the human body of Jesus literally absorbed into eternity, shedding once and for all the limitations of time and space, taking his place among “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven,” being Lord over all.
As the scripture says, “God has gone up with a shout” (Ps. 47:5a), and I know that for Jesus to be in that sovereign place of authority, the name above all names, means I can trust him beyond the limits of my own understanding and walk in faith that he will lead the way where he has gone before.
How does the miracle of the Ascension challenge your faith? How does it give you hope for the future? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.
(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon for May 23, 2020, in the Diocesan Chapel of the Diocese of Central Florida in Orlando.)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.