Acts 1:6-11

Sisters and brothers in Christ,

This evening’s Bible passage is Acts 1:6-11:

⁶ So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷ He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. ⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” ⁹ And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. ¹⁰ And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, ¹¹ and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

A few verses earlier, Luke has provided a chronology for these events, writing that Jesus “presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God” (1:3). Which explains why Ascension Day falls on a Thursday (count to forty from Easter Sunday as #1 and you arrive on Ascension Day as #40). But it also makes me wonder what went through the disciples’ minds during those forty days.

Jesus had been raised from the dead, but now what? Was he just going to show up once in a while and cook breakfast or let doubters touch his wounds? He wasn’t a ghost—he could eat broiled fish (Lk. 24:42-43)—but he wasn’t exactly an impressive figure, was he? If he was going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” (1:6), why didn’t he get on with it? But Jesus has a global not a local plan: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (1:8). They must have wondered how this resurrected but still earthbound Jesus was going to manage that. And then the Ascension happened, which changed everything.

Ascension Day isn’t widely celebrated in the way that Christmas and Easter, or even Pentecost, are. One reason for this is that it falls on a Thursday. Our secular culture isn’t used to taking a holiday on a Thursday, unless it happens to be July 4. Another reason is that the importance of Christ’s ascension to the history of salvation is not as well understood as it might be. We’ll consider its significance more in the next few days. But for today, I want to focus on a third reason. Paintings like these, by Hans Süss von Kulmbach and Adriaen van Overbeke (early 16^th cent.), in which a pair of feet disappear into a rather ordinary cloud, whether white and puffy or dark and stormy, have misled us.

Luke tells us that, after the Ascension, the disciples “worshiped [Jesus] and returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (Lk. 24:52).” If all they’d seen was Jesus being sucked up into an ordinary old cloud, their joy and worship is hard to understand. Bewilderment and confusion would be more likely responses. But, if the “cloud” wasn’t an ordinary cloud at all but was like the cloud of the Transfiguration, in the brightness of which Jesus’s “clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them” and God’s own voice could be heard (Mk. 9:3, 7), then that’s a different matter. Or, to cite an even older precedent, if the ascension cloud was like the dazzling cloud that during the Exodus not only “covered the tent of meeting,” such that “the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle,” but also led the Israelites by day as a “cloud” and by night as “fire” (Ex. 40:38), then that, too, was a thing of wonder. (F. F. Bruce, in his Commentary on the Book of Acts (Eerdmans, 1954), argues cogently for this being the case.) In that case, the disciples had seen the resurrected Jesus taken up into the very presence and glory of God.

This was something almost more wondrous than the resurrection. The resurrected Jesus wasn’t just going to hang around on earth indefinitely, making occasional unpredictable appearances. Jesus had been glorified. He’d risen into in the presence of God himself. God had come in glory to welcome Jesus to a position of heavenly power. This still human Jesus was an integral part of God’s own glory.

We’ll think about this more in the coming days. For now, I invite you to meditate on what it must have been like for the disciples to witness that kind of Ascension. No wonder they worshiped the ascended Christ with great joy.

Your brother in Christ,

Max