Luke 24:44-53

Ascension Day | May 9, 2024 | Luke 24:44-53 (RCL) | David Zersen |

Then he 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 the scriptures, and he said to them, “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, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

BREAKING FREE

This year, 40 days after Easter, today is Ascension Day in the Western Church, although it won’t be celebrated in the Eastern Church this year until June 13. The difference has to do with the dates when Easter is celebrated in the Gregorian Calendar (West) and the Julian Calendar (East). In both churches, however, it is a Feast Day, one of seven such days in the liturgical calendar. As such, it is a day of great importance in the church and has been celebrated since the fourth century. One might think, therefore, that this day might be lauded with trumpets and kettle drums. In fact, there are 55 countries in the world that still regard Ascension Day as a national holiday! Not so in the United States. And that could be the reason why gradually church attendance on this day in the U.S. is low. In some churches, there will be no worship service at all, and if a sermon like this one is to be received, it will merely be read online!

How did this happen? Will it happen with Christmas or with Easter? Surely it has something to do with the fact that this Thursday is a workday in the U.S., encouraging many churches to celebrate the event this coming Sunday. It may also have to do with the fact that the ascension of Jesus has often been portrayed so fantastically in art that modern Christians find it difficult to enter into the meaning of the event. Although the text simply says, “he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven”, since the earliest centuries that scene has been dramatized with hosts of angels lifting the glorified Jesus into a home in the skies. Knowing what we know today about the limitless nature of space, it’s not easy to take such a scene with the literal specificity of a medieval artist’s brush.

Nevertheless, the powerful story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that has embraced us in the last months needs to have some kind of climax. Like children who have been held captive by a grand narrative, we wait in silence for some moments, and then we say, “And then what?” The Ascension story is the response to that question, but we may need to interpret it differently for our adult minds. We can use a 1st-century worldview aided by the imagery artists have depicted and imagine Jesus zooming home to the Father’s throne. Or we can try to understand as a climax to Jesus’ life and ministry the destiny that has been prepared for us. With the disciples, we have been witnesses to the power of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. We have been baptized into the new life that celebrates how our world can be changed when all that the Father has promised through Jesus can begin to have an effect in our world through us. How have we been doing with that?

I realize that we have learned to make distinctions between what secular governments do and what we as individual Christians are capable of doing, but let me engage you in a current question for a moment. Our news media focuses daily on the Israeli/Palestinian situation, and we are asked to make judgments about it. An element of one human community (Hamas, a political arm within the Palestinian community) attacks Israel and 1500 people are killed. Israel’s leadership, the very leadership that grew up learning to say “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord”), assures the world that vengeance will be taken. Not long after, we learn that 35,000 Palestinians have been killed as a sign of Israel’s vengeance. I pick this contemporary example not to condescend to Israel and Palestine, but to say that the very practice of revenge that all countries have practiced for time immemorial is being practiced once again. And we have been sucked into it—we who claim that through Jesus we have been set free from the need to take revenge.

Is it really possible for us to say, “Well, that’s a government thing. Governments can do that.” When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and President Roosevelt said, “This will be remembered as a day of infamy,” American citizens knew that revenge was called for. We may try to avoid being vengeful against those who hurt us in our families, circles of friends, and associates, but at the level of governments, that’s a different thing, we may argue. At the moment, I’m simply raising a question, wondering if we shouldn’t take some time together to debate it. What is the larger meaning of repentance and forgiveness if we can only apply it at personal or local levels?

While we’re thinking about that, let me invite you to consider some alternative views of ascension on Ascension Day. Some years ago, I received a calendar from Lutheran Brotherhood, an insurance agency that now is known as Thrivent. Each month there was a large image that had been drawn for a contest in which high school students participated. The image that struck me—and that I’ve never forgotten—was the one for the month of May. The student pictured the ascension of Jesus. All one saw from below were the feet of Jesus penetrating a grid that crumbled into falling confetti as he entered the new dimension! I could ponder that imagery for hours. What does it mean that the world we have known with its rigid, hard-hearted, structured, legalistic responses to others’ actions has been transformed by Jesus’ life and ministry into confetti—lighthearted, joyful, incomprehensible, supportive gestures of love?

The people who did what I’m about to describe had never seen this high-school student’s picture, but they would have understood it. They own a paper store in Dublin, Ireland, and were troubled that the newspapers were filled with hate-driven commentary about a marriage equality referendum. Admittedly, in every debate, there are issues that need to be resolved, but these owners of the paper store decided to sell bags of the torn-up newspaper called “Shreds of Decency”. They were creating bags of confetti “made up of 100% lies,” as they put it, to allow purchasers to throw it around and create a new perspective, a new world.

“Behold,” says Jesus, “I make all things new.” Would Ascension Day become the celebration that it needs to be, that would fill our churches once again, if we considered together how, based on who and what we have become in Jesus, we tried to make all things new? It’s not that even in the secular realm this hasn’t been considered before. Out of interest, I decided to google the term “Breaking Free” because it occurred to me that the film with that name starring Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens dealt with people who tried to reject a past and start over again. A troubled teen has a choice between incarceration or providing service for blind people in a co-op. Thinking he’s chosen the easy way out, he decides to go with working with the blind—but it transforms him. Not easy to surrender what you thought you were, what you considered to be important, in order to become something entirely new!

And then I noticed that there were 58 film titles that dealt with some aspect of “breaking free”. In the Shawshank Redemption, Dead Poet’s Society, Good Will Hunting, Rudy, Ratatouille, etc., someone had attempted to avoid dead ends, revenge, being lost, feeling useless—and fashion a new life.

But this is nothing new! You and I have known this is a possibility for a long time. As Christians we know that when Jesus gathered his disciples together and left them, he had given them all that they needed to life a fulfilling life. With his parables and healings, his teachings and actions, he had made all things new. He had helped them to break free from a way of life that leads to a dead end. Isn’t that something that you and I want to talk about this Ascension Day? Have we not been given the means to say hate and revenge are not the answer—even among nations? Can we not, just “little you” or “little me”, but, in fact, “little Christs”, say with our words and show with our lives that there is a better way?

Just as the disciples left Bethany and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, knowing that in the face of all that can bring us down, we have been given the love, the acceptance, and the insight to call ourselves to a new and better life, a life that follows Jesus on the road ahead.

All of us have pasts, but on this Ascension Day, we remember that Jesus’ love and forgiveness can help us to be set free.

Hymn: Savior, I follow on, Guided by Thee

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David Zersen, D.Min., Ed.D., FRHistS

President Emeritus, Concordia University Texas

zersendj@gmail.com