The Church celebrates Ascension Day this year on Thursday, May 1. Forty days after Easter Sunday, it marks the lifting up of the risen Jesus Christ into heaven. I’ve read that congregations used to consider it a major festival of the Christian year, but few people now (for various reasons) reckon it to be of much worth theologically or practically. Reading Douglas Farrow’s provocative book, Ascension and Ecclesia, has me rethinking the matter. May I share with you four earth-shaking implications of this event for Christians?
1) The ascension means the risen Christ has entered into His eternal ministry as our high priest. At the resurrection Jesus Christ was given eternal life, and with it all authority to judge. As the one who had taken humanity’s place, living and dying as our representative before God, He was at Easter bestowed with the special right to speak on behalf of humanity. Jesus’ ascension into heaven signaled His entrance into that very capacity. Even now, “He sits at the right hand of the Father,” meaning He has the highest authority. And He has God’s ear. The Father always listens to Him. If the Son says, “Forgive that woman who keeps nagging at her kids,” the Father does. If the Son says, “Sanctify that guy in Des Moines with the drinking problem,” the Father grants it. All us idiots need His intervening prayers. Indeed, “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb 7:25). He lives. And He lives to be on our side. How amazing that we don’t need to be terrified of God’s judgment anymore! Jesus – not just God’s Son, but one of our very own – has entered into heaven’s court to act as our eternal defender. We mistakenly think of salvation as being some kind of static idea which happened only at the cross. Not so. Jesus Christ saves us even now. Aren’t Jesus’ actions telling as He disappears into the clouds?: “While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51). He has been blessing us ever since.
2) The ascension means Jesus Christ is absent. I know this sounds terrible and impious, even untrue. Did not Jesus say He would be with us to the very end of the age (Mt 28:20)? Did not the disciples go away with great joy after the ascension (Lk 24:52)? Yes, but the fact of the matter is that Jesus Christ was not there anymore. He could not be seen or heard or touched like He had in the forty days after Easter. “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God,” Paul writes (Rom 8:19). We have much weight to groan under in a world of schoolyard bullying, inescapable poverty, credit fraud, chemical warfare, shattered marriages, prostitution and crime, ADD and Down’s, miscarriage and abortion – all the moral and biological evils we experience in the continuum of suffering and dying and death. The truth is, Jesus could have stopped it all. As the resurrected King, He could have raised us all too that very moment – but He didn’t. What surprised sadness the disciples must have experienced when, asking if He would now restore the kingdom of Israel, Jesus effectively tells them No (Acts 1:6-7). Instead, He ascends into that other place, heaven, the place far from us. We live and wait in that absence.
3) The ascension means Jesus Christ has filled that absence with the witnessing Church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, the word and sacraments. If the ascension leaves an absence, it is an absence pregant enough to include us: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). Do you realize how incredible this is? That we should be His witnesses, His spokesmen, His heralds? That this is the reason He has delayed the final judgment, to permit others to repent and believe when they hear our testimony? This is the case. This Church, this pitiful group of disciples, will go out into the world with the good news that He is risen. If the Church does not speak, it is missing out on its very reason for being! Fortunately, Christ has not left us alone in this mission, for He has sent the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to be with us (Jn 14:15-18, 16:7). We can therefore speak and live and minister with the authority of Christ. Now I must clarify something straight away: This does not mean that we are the new Jesus Christ or a continuation of His incarnation. Not by a long shot. We are not “Jesus with skin on” (as I heard someone say recently), for Jesus already has His own body thank you very much. And, to speak biblically, He primarily is the one testifying to Himself through the Spirit, calling people and awakening them to faith. But He still wants us, as His little brothers and sisters indwelt by the Spirit, in on the deal. He insists that His followers go out and testify to His resurrection, whispering and speaking and shouting out that He is Lord and Saviour of the world and that in Him is eternal life. Also as a priceless gift for this task is the Bible, the word of God in which we meet the Word of God. What’s more, we are nourished by the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. With regard to the latter, Douglas Farrow makes the interesting point that the Lord’s supper ushers us into the eschatological presence of Christ, something made possible only after the ascension, for “[o]nly then did its eucharistic form become necessary, somehow anticipating a second and more profound ‘change in the darkness and matter’ that is yet to come” (Farrow, p. 10). The word and sacraments are indispensable tokens of Christ’s presence on the road between Christ’s resurrection and the general resurrection at His return, so that in this middle time, this “Church age,” we witness with confidence and joy in the Spirit.
4) The ascension means He is at work in heaven preparing our eternal abode. On one hand, we can reason on the ground of the ascension that if Christ is in heaven, we too are welcome there. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q49) declares that “we have our own flesh in heaven,” guaranteeing that Christ will welcome us other fleshy people there too. But the news gets better – or, I should say, more specific – than that. We’re not supposed to live in heaven, dead or alive. It’s not our home. It’s only the workshop. In a remarkable speech, Jesus tells His disciples, “In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (Jn 14:2-3). Jesus didn’t ascend to prepare heaven for our disembodied souls to find repose. He went to heaven to build a mansion, a whole new place, for us to live in once He returns at the end of time. Truly, the One who ascended will be the One who descends. Then, raising the dead and enacting the final judgment, He will give this new mansion, this new city, to His beloved people. He will raise them into everlasting bodies and give them an everlasting playground. Can any of us fathom what will it be like? “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2). Heaven will come down to earth with Christ. So will the dead Christians (1 Ths 4:14). All who are given the gift of Christ’s resurrection body will live in that amazing, earthly place. A resplendent, bride-like people will live in their resplendent, bride-like home.
How can one not celebrate this festival? The ascended Christ is busy not only interceding for me in heaven and equipping me here on earth to live a Spirit-led life of witness - He is busy preparing my dream home for an endless day of joy. That, I think, is plenty reason to party it up on Ascension Day.
(pic. 1a. These newborns had figured out the game King of the Hill)
