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May 29, 2005
Jesus Ascended to God’s Right Hand
Genesis 28: 10-14 / Acts 1: 6-11
May 29th, 2005
This morning the matter about which I speak may seem very far removed from real life. We are used to thinking about Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. But what is there to think about Jesus ascension to God’s right hand when His ministry here was over?
This seems in that mysterious, mystical realm like Elijah’s ascent to heaven in a chariot of fire. The Jews have a highly developed kind of spirituality called Kabbalah mysticism that develops Elijah’s ascent to heaven. But this is a totally mystical idea. Christianity as most of us know it is a practical faith. “Help me know how to get through next week,” you ask. “Let the mystics talk about their imaginative subtleties.”
I thought about this. And I come to the conclusion that the reason why I want to talk about the ascension of Jesus to heaven is to help you and me make it through tomorrow and next week. Because tomorrow and next week, you and I are living in a vestibule on the threshold of what God holds beyond this life.
Not long after Easter the theme of the morning service was again Jesus’ resurrection—as we had arrived at that subject in the Nicene Creed. We sang that morning, “Because He lives I can face tomorrow” and “I serve a risen Savior; He’s in the world today.” These hymns reminded us how relevant to today and tomorrow Jesus’ resurrection is.
At our Christmas Eve service and then on Christmas Day I invited you to come with me in heart and mind to Bethlehem. And you came eager to kneel in heart and mind at the side of the manger, looking on the miracle of God’s love embodied in that little child. It brought you refreshment to do this.
But forgotten in our celebrations of Jesus’ life is His ascension at the end. I looked to one of my treasured sources for understanding Jesus, Bishop Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, and discovered he didn’t mention the ascension of Jesus. Why, when it was the capstone of God’s victory in Jesus Christ?
Jesus’ birth and His ascension to heaven are like two bookends that provide the explanation of the meaning of life. Jesus was born like we were with a body in order to know life as we know it. He ascended to the Father bodily to let us know what will happen to us.
At funerals I will sometimes read the promise in I Thessalonians 4: 16-17:
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven . . . and the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
This picture of what will happen to us follows the model of Jesus’ ascension.
So a subtitle to this morning’s message might be, “Our bodies really do matter.” “Glorify God in your body,” the Apostle Paul tells us. Here is why. It is because this life we now live is a vestibule for heaven. Here as we live as unto the Lord we are carved into the kind of people enjoyable to the God who made us. Then, one day it will be for us as Paul describes in that beloved passage in I Thessalonians. We will “rise” to be with Him in heaven.
We face this odd dilemma that we now are more interested in what happens to our bodies now than in anything else. Our senses are very insistent. So we obey the bodily senses, sometimes exploit them, sometimes unwisely and even sinfully because they are so insistent.
But in some reflective moments, maybe after having exploited our senses, we sense this didn’t satisfy us, no matter how much we spent. Or, we realize it wasn’t wise or good. So we try to correct our thinking by musing that our bodies are only temporary and don’t matter. But this is the wrong corrective, and I think we all know it. Our bodies matter. And we can live enjoying them in a way that glorifies God; if we remember that we live this life in a vestibule to heaven.
Try to imagine what it will be like one minute after you die. The nurse just put her stethoscope on your chest; she listens and discovers there is no heartbeat. Those who love you are gathered around your hospital bed. They begin to cry as though your life had ended. But you are still in that room—as Catherine Marshall told us she realized when she made it to her husband Peter’s room shortly after he died. You want to say something to your loved ones, but you can’t. Your lips won’t move. You will realize then, as you look down at your shell how important your body was to life, but in a different way than you do now.
Whereas you used to think that things like politics, the Indianapolis Cols, Purdue Boilermakers, or your golf handicap, or your car, your home, your love life, your bank account, your career, retirement and all of that were fundamentally important, suddenly you realize that all of this was just ornamental.
What was really important you barely noticed, the life inside you where you made your way on a wavelength created by God. You were on a pilgrimage through life but you didn’t realize it. You thought it was just one thing after another until you retired and could do what you really like to do—and discovered you weren’t sure what you really wanted to do.
In the moments after death it will flash before us that all along we were on a pilgrimage in these bodies, and all the things that charmed us most were like wickets in a game of croquette. They were things to get through on the way to hitting the stick at the end of the game. This morning I hope I can encourage you to remember the stick at the end of the game. The stick at the end of the game is going to heaven to enjoy life with our Creator. That’s why it’s important and wonderful to glorify God in our bodies now. We easily lose sight of what is really important.
I’m reminded of a scene in the wonderful PBS movie of Delderfield’s novel, To Serve them All my Days. David Powlett-Jones, the hero in the story and a survivor of three years of battle at the front of the bloody battlefields of France, is talking with two young students in the hall of the main building of the boarding school where he teaches. The two boys are supposed to be busily polishing “Founder’s Oak,” as punishment for being late for chapel. Up comes Mr. Cordwein who tells Powlett-Jones not to distract the “late boys” as they polish Founder’s Oak. Powlett-Jones tells his older colleague they were discussing the war—the First World War which was then in progress—a topic the boys had more interest in than the teachers at the school. After all, they might have to fight in that war. But Old Cordwein, much too old to fight in a war, sarcastically replies that he has no control over the war but he does have control over polishing Founder’s Oak—which is the reason why there are wars to begin with, to preserve such important things as late boys polishing Founder’s Oak.
In remembering Jesus’ ascension I want to lure you into thinking that polishing Founder’s Oak is not what really matters.
Forty days after Easter, ten days before Pentecost, was Ascension Thursday. Christians once would not go to work on this day. They would attend special services to bless God for this day. There was good reason for this. It’s a subject mentioned often in the New Testament. But let us remember how it describes the event itself.
Luke tells us at the end of his Gospel: “Then Jesus led [His disciples] out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.”
Luke tells us in Acts 1:9, “He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” They stood there looking up, as dumb-founded as you and I would be when two men clad in white robes appeared and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who has taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” This was the reason why they were happy. They would join Jesus again.
My favorite NT professor in seminary, Bruce Metzger, remarked about Jesus’ ascension, “no other story of the New Testament creates for the modern reader a greater sense of conflict between what he knows of astrophysics and what he thinks the Biblical account necessarily implies.” Even though Jesus’ disciples knew nothing about modern astrophysics, what they saw tells us something about what happened. My impression is that they actually saw Jesus rise and then disappear in the clouds even though heaven was no more up there than now.
Tom read this morning the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. The Lord stood at the top of that ladder in his dream. “Up” was not only the ancient imagery of where God lives. We somehow think this way too. We find it more difficult to image God as everywhere present than to think of a place for Him, as earth is a place for us. God’s place is “up.” Our place is down to earth. The Bible accommodates itself to our intuitions and speaks of heaven as up. And when Jesus ascended my sense is that God accommodated to the disciples’ understanding—even though Jesus would continue to be present with them. “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” Jesus said. Even though He said, “I go to the Father,” this did not mean He went from them. But now there was the moment of closure on Jesus’ immediate physical presence as He disappeared, going up to heaven.
This gives us a clue to the greater reality in which we live our busy little lives. Jesus is with us as we strut and fret on the stage of what we can see in this life. He is with us in our dithering about this and that, calling us to live in terms of a larger and grander picture. This larger picture has to do with heaven. See life as a vestibule for heaven. All of this is wrapped up in Jesus’ ascension—the moment when He left our vestibule and went home.
We’re told that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father where He intercedes for us. That’s not far away. If only we could see! But we can’t see this that is beyond our capacity. Faith requires trust not sight. But maybe you can you picture Jesus here in this place praying for us, that is, talking with the Father about us, willing that we should win in the battles of life that we are fighting. Because what we do now in this bodily life matter eternally.
Jesus wills us to win some battles that we would prefer to lose—because it momentarily feels so good to lose some of the big battles of life. I imagine when we’re on our death bed we’ll not feel quite so good as we do now at some of the battles we chose to lose. When we ascend to heaven we will remember with gratitude God’s forgiveness of the battles we chose to lose.
The great Apostle who learned to follow Jesus after a very earnest religious life of rejecting Him tells us, “Seek those things which are above. Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” The special imagery gets all mixed up because Paul urges us to do something, which implies we are not in this life, while we know very well that we are. We think of Jesus being with us now, but we’re right where we are—no getting around that. So of what use is it to us to think of Jesus’ ascension to the Father even as He is here with us now?
It is helpful to me to think of this life as in a very real sense a vestibule of heaven. Jesus ascended from this vestibule to the Father, and we wait our turn. But He is still with us, though not seen. We are to win these hard battles now—with all sorts of temptation.
When the great Apostle tells us, “Make every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” he describes a struggle you and I are to engage in every day. Scrutinize your thoughts, your intentions, and your automatic reflexes. You and I who live in this vestibule to heaven are engaged in a cosmic struggle. There is a place “below” us as well as a place “above” us. Hell appeals to us ever so seductively; making seem glamorous those instincts that arise in us that we know would seem miserable in the presence of Jesus.
Heaven not hell is our true home. One day, the Bible tells us, we will ascend to heaven. In this earthly vestibule in which we live now, it is our privilege to live so that when we ascend to the heaven, we will discover that it was good to live in the sense of being in God’s presence all along.
Jesus, in the course of His life continually asked the Father, “What is your will?” He told His disciples, “My will is to do the will of my Father who sent me.” When He ascended to the Father He had finished His time in this vestibule we call “life,” obedient to the will of the Father. God will not impose on us His will. But it is the way of life of the Christian to ask to know the Father’s will, so that when we one day follow Jesus in His ascension, we will recognize how like heaven earth can be.
I find my mind moving in many directions in applying this truth to life. It affects my marriage, my ministry to you, and my relationship with friends. I cannot think of an aspect of life untouched by this sense. I pray we may be responsive to the voice of the Holy Spirit who politely prompts us to desire to live in this vestibule of earthly life in such a way that we will be glad when we see Jesus face to face. This will happen at our ascension. I’m convinced we have an atrophied understanding of how good is this life, how filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory, when we deliberately present our bodies to God, to live to His glory.
We celebrate Jesus’ birth, when He began life as we all do. We thank God for His death on the cross to bear our sins in His body. We rejoice at Easter because then Jesus overcame the death that one-day will tag us. Each of these details of our trust in God finds its capstone in Jesus’ ascension to His true abode as God, to heaven. You and I still live in the part of Jesus’ life that we call “the earthly life.” But this is not the whole thing. We now live in the entryway, the vestibule of heaven. I think you and I have probably had moments when we thought we saw some glimpses of something more. They were hints God provided of what will be.
We will ascend too as Jesus did. I pray God’s Holy Spirit will lure us successfully to live our days in this vestibule so that our ascension will be a time of great joy.
Let us pray: We ask that what we have pondered in the past few moments may guide us to live so as to be pleased to see Jesus when we follow Him in due time. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at May 29, 2005 09:30 AM