Let our heart ascend and our lives be moved in Christ

Jesus said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand these scriptures [we call the OT] … "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations … There it is in short: God’s promise given to Abraham, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and … through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.” And of course if you read Jesus’s genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, you will find that indeed, his human father Joseph is of Abraham’s line. Jesus is a Jewish man whose human flesh, pierced with a crown of thorns and nails pounded into him at the demand of his own people, is the source of his suffering and death. 

But Jesus of course is also God, eternally begotten of his divine Father. And so as he tells us today, his rising from death is not the end of life and hope for all people; but instead, the very beginning. The Person in and through whom repentance and forgiveness comes. The one who fulfils God’s promise to Abraham, shouted out by the prophets to those who didn’t want to acknowledge or hear this:  will gather you no matter what nation you’re in and bring you to me. That is a promise that cannot be thwarted by any principalities or powers, as Paul tells us in Romans. 

What a challenge it is to believe this in our day and age though isn’t it? Things seem out of control. Pride, ignorance, and arrogance run rampant, everyone seems exhausted and angry, there’s violence of one sort or another going on in all nations. And contestation over morals, ethics, and religion, wow … where are the fruits of Christ’s death and resurrection? At one point, watching a horrific event unfold before me on a screen, and then a tirade of social media posts coming from every angle about what occurred, I cried out in prayer: God, where are you? Sometimes it can seem as if we are adrift, or even abandoned.

As I usually do, I picked up my Prayer Book for evening prayer, and this was the line that caught my attention: “... [A]s they were watching, [Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and [his disciples] were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." 

And the Scriptures were opened to me too. I suddenly understood something. Jesus says in the Gospel of John that it is a benefit to us that he will depart and go to his Father so that the Holy Spirit will come to us, drawing us and reshaping us into Jesus’s own likeness so that when he comes again for all people, we might be gathered to him. While we might think that it would be better for Jesus to stay with us, the reality is that if we are willing to give ourselves over to the Spirit to reshape us into Jesus’s likeness, then Jesus himself might become present in all places, across all time, through our words and actions. Not - as I would plan it, expect, and desire it - in one big monumental moment; not in a huge, world wide shift of perspective or of faith; but in particular relationships, through particular situations, one at a time, or maybe thousands here or there; particular moments, often unseen, of witness that is gathered, knitted together, made into the body of Christ in God’s time and in God’s way.

Why does Jesus tell us that he will go away, that in the Spirit, his effect will be even more powerful than when he is alive? Because he knows us so well; how our minds work; how our society and culture changes and is sustained not through revolution, force, coercion, or fear; but through the steady hand, the steady, very small, seemingly insignificant, very particular witness of relationships extended through time. Indeed, it is one thing to hear about the life of Jesus with his disciples from 2000 years ago. It is quite another for someone who is suffering hunger or despair, to encounter Jesus who reaches out with food, kindness, conversation, fellowship, humanity on Yonge Street in Toronto; or for someone in Columbia or Iran who is controlled by a tyrannical group or leader who often kills to get what they want, to instead encounter the love and peace to which God in Jesus Christ calls us. 

You see when Jesus ascends to his Father, it is not that he leaves us behind to suffer the consequences of our fear, greed, lust, anger, desire for power, control, and revenge. Rather he goes to the Father so that God’s life is not concentrated in just one man, but is in fact poured out through his body of followers, bound to him and to one another in the Holy Spirit, to all nations through the lives of billions of followers with the courage to let go of their own agendas, their own timelines, their own ideologies and idols, their own methods and presumptions. Step out, Jesus said to me, from living your life by sight. Abraham could not have seen what came to be. Live, not by sight, my son, live by the courage of faith that in laying down your life for another, I might touch their lives and awaken their spirits and draw them to me, even if only at their last breath. AMEN