Jesus ascended? we have work to do

Three days after Jesus died, there his friends were, standing at the empty tomb, and suddenly two men in white robes stood beside them, and said, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember what he told you?’ 40 days later, there the disciples were again, looking at the empty sky where Jesus had just ascended, and two men in white robes appeared again, and said, ‘Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?’ Isn’t it obvious what’s just happened? Two thousand years later, here we are, so familiar with the stories of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension that we can (and do) recite them from memory. And yet still, we could use a few guys in white robes turning up beside us and saying, ‘Don’t you get it yet? Maybe we should explain.’

Because of course the disciples back then didn’t really get it. It’s not everyday stuff to have your beloved friend and teacher appear before you when you saw him dead just a few days before; it’s not everyday to have him disappear from your sight just when you’d got used to having him around again. It’s no wonder that the disciples were confused, standing there gaping upwards with no idea what to do next. All the explanation in the world, all the careful teaching and preaching Jesus did with them, could not prepare them for this. No more than it does for us, even though we have the benefit of time and tradition and overfamiliarity to help us get used to it all. What in the world does this mean? there he went – what are we supposed to do now?

The Ascension isn’t a feast that gets a lot of emphasis these days – I admit that for me, it always conjures up old paintings of the disciples gathered around with their mouths wide open, and only Jesus’ feet and ankles visible in the top of the frame as he rises slowly into heaven. There are many medieval churches like York Minster, the cathedral in York, England, where you see the bottom of Jesus’ feet as you look up to the high ceiling of the nave. There’s a silliness to this literalism, the idea of Jesus slowly rising in the air before us like a stage angel on a wire. But when I try to think about the Ascension without that image, then I’m not really sure what to make of it. Or to be frank, I don’t really make anything of it. Obviously Jesus isn’t around here anymore, so the Ascension does explain where he went – to God. But that’s kind of where we think he went anyway, so why make a big fuss and feast over his departure? Maybe someday we’ll go there too and see him. In the meantime, we have more pressing concerns here on earth. 

But actually, those pressing concerns are part of the point of this feast of Ascension – Jesus isn’t physically here any longer, so we have work to do. The impatient men in white show up to push the disciples forward to that work, which is our work too. Jesus came to start the work, to show the way, to make it possible for us to step forward in great faith and hope and love. There’s a world of people to save, a world of hurt to heal, a world of darkness that needs our light. That work that lies before us is what we heard about today in Jesus’ prayer from the gospel of John. Before entering into his Passion, knowing that he would be dying and leaving the disciples to fend for themselves, Jesus prayed for them, and for all of us. He knew he’d be gone soon, and he knew the ones he’d been gathering would need God’s strength to carry on.

But we often misunderstand what Jesus says. All his talk about ‘eternal life’ we’ve often taken to mean ‘heaven,’ a place somewhere else where we go when we die, where Jesus has gone, where we will live forever with God. Just like the disciples standing staring up into the sky, the Christian church has too often put its emphasis on what will come after, as if this place were only a proving ground and a training place for the better thing. As long as we do what we’re supposed to do and believe in Jesus, then we’ll get to go there, and from what we hear, it sounds pretty great. It’s like we’re focused only on those feet rising up above us, leaving this hard world behind. Standing there looking at where Jesus was, waiting for him to come back and take care of everything for us.

And yet God’s laws and prophets and teachings through Jesus repeat over and again that we have a responsibility to care for the injustices and problems of this world. To take one example, the Jewish Talmud tells a story of God taking Adam and Eve around the Garden of Eden and saying to them, ‘Take good care of this, because if you destroy it, there is no one else who can help repair it.’ And yet some of our Christian theology was twisted into believing that it’s ok if broken things on earth are left unrepaired, because it won’t matter in the long run anyway – my more fundamentalist brother once told me in all seriousness that we don’t really need to support environmental causes, because this world will just end soon anyway. Our Anglican tradition puts more emphasis now on creation care and our stewardship of the planet, but that hasn’t always been true in our faith. This is just one example of a grievous wrong we’ve allowed to continue here on earth, in the same way that sometimes the old spirituals were criticized for focusing people too much on the freedom of heaven instead of working toward real freedom from slavery in the here and now. Pie in the sky by and bye, and who cares about what happens here.

But Jesus clearly gives us his definition of ‘eternal life’ in this prayer we heard today, and it doesn’t include anything about a place or somewhere to go after death. ‘This is eternal life,’ he says, ‘that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’ To know God and know Jesus – and this is ‘know’ not just in the factual sense, I know something about this, but ‘know’ in the most intimate way possible, in full, vulnerable, complete relationship with God. That, Jesus says, is eternal life here and now. To be one with God as Jesus is one with God; and for all of us to be one with one another as Jesus is one with God, to share that full and complete intimacy of love with all in the community. That’s what we’re meant for, the eternal life we’re promised here and now. And in that eternal life, we will live as God desires us to, as Jesus showed us. Loving and serving all God’s beloved.

But we aren’t expected to just make this happen all on our own initiative. We aren’t left here as Jesus ascends to heaven, making it all look so easy while we flounder about. Jesus prays for us specifically that we might be protected, and that we might have the Spirit of God with us. And that our feeble desires and attempts at following Jesus’ way might be magnified and made full and perfect by God. In other words, the power to do this impossible task will come to us if we only try, in love and in hope and in risky vulnerability, to fulfill the mission we have been given. The mission of continuing Jesus’ way here on earth, in the here and now of this messy place.

So on this Sunday after the Ascension, the charge is simple: be Jesus here now; do as he would do. God will be with us all as we try. We can trust his presence here with us always – as we seek to help repair and love this world.