Jesus said to his disciples: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs. (Mark 15.15-20)
For convenience sake, the church has moved the celebration of the Ascension of the Lord to the Seventh Sunday of Easter, in this way allowing people in the pew to hear about the Lord’s return to the right hand of God in heaven, something they would not know about if it stayed on its traditional day of celebration, Ascension Thursday, when everybody is hard at work.
If we take a moment to look at the feast day, it is full of ironies. First, there is no mention of the event of the ascension in three of the four gospels. Matthew, Mark, and John have no ascension stories. Yes, I know Mark’s text has one–we hear it today, but everyone agrees it was added onto the original text down the line by somebody who didn’t like the way that Mark had ended his gospel with 16.8.
Honestly, the second writer didn’t try to hide his handiwork. The vocabulary, literary style, and content are all different from the earlier gospel. Not only different, but very different. The earliest manuscripts do not have this so-called longer ending and the early Christian writers were not familiar with it either. Looked at closely, it comes off as a compendium of resurrection stories as found in the other gospels, all of which were written after Mark. Apparently, whoever added this ending thought the original wasn’t good enough. We can make it whatever we want.
Only the evangelist Luke tells of the ascension in his gospel and retells it in his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles. And even there, the two presentations are miles apart, or, better said, forty days apart. In his gospel, Luke makes it clear that the ascension occurs on the evening of Easter Sunday, after the appearances of the Risen Lord to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, followed by an appearance to the eleven back in Jerusalem.
Immediately after speaking to them and telling them to stay in the city until they are “clothed with power from on high,” he led them to Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them.” Here, Luke offers a one sentence description of the ascension, writing, “As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven.”
Later, when writing the Acts of the Apostles, he places the ascension not on Easter evening, as he had done in his gospel, but forty days after Easter, writing, “He presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Also, Luke adds a fuller version of the ascension than he had in his gospel, stating, “When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”
So, we are left with an interesting situation. We have only one evangelist who actually speaks of the ascension and he contradicts himself, placing it on the evening of Easter in one telling and pushing it forward forty days in the second telling of the story. As happens so often in the scriptures, an attempt to reconcile is impossible, at least so long as we are working from a literal point of view. In these situations, it is always better to delve deeper.
Whatever Luke’s purpose in expanding the the story of ascension in Acts, it certainly enriches the story, bringing in new characters such as the two angels who speak to the disciples, probably a throwback to the resurrection scene in the garden when “two men in dazzling garments appeared to the women and said to them, “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised.”
Interestingly, only Luke’s version has two men at the tomb. As we may recall, Mark has a young man, Matthew has one angel, and John has two angels in white seated at the tomb. Despite the discrepancies, Luke surely intends us to understand them as angels since they deliver messages, which is the job of angels when they appear in the scriptures.
What I find more interesting is that in both events, the resurrection and the ascension, Luke tells us that the two men ask pretty much the same question. Truthfully, there isn’t a dime’s difference in what they ask. At the tomb, the two men say, “Why do you seek the living one among the dead,” and at the ascension they say, “Why are you standing there looking at the sky?” As I read it, in both situations, the angels seem either petulant or impatient. Or, perhaps they are just puzzled.
Regardless, it seems to me that the question they pose makes clear the point that these two men think the women at the tomb and the disciples at Bethany have positioned themselves in the wrong place. Neither the women nor the disciples are going to find Jesus where they are standing. “He is not here,” they tell the women and they tell the disciples, “This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return.” In other words, if you think you’re going to find him here, you’re sadly mistaken.
And I think that’s the whole point. The Risen Lord isn’t going to be found in the tomb and, for that matter, he isn’t going to be found by our staring up into the skies. He’s in neither place. Which, of course, leads to the question, “So, where is he?” The answer that Jesus gives before his death is that he will be found in the Spirit that will stay with his followers, goading, guiding, and energizing them.
In other words, in the same way that his presence with them after his resurrection was not the same presence as it was before the resurrection–his resurrected body is unrecognized by his followers and unrestricted by any physical laws–so his presence with them in the future will not be the same experience they had previously with him.
Hereafter, his presence will be found in his Spirit, an immaterial force that allows them to do the same work that he did while he was on earth. For Luke, it is some type of power, the Risen Lord saying to his followers, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” the Greek word for power the same word from which we get our word dynamite, suggesting a force of unimaginable magnitude.
The composer of the longer addition to Mark’s gospel tries to convey the same point, having the Risen Lord say, “These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” Again, these are not skills or powers that are granted to normal folks.
Before we get bogged down in the minutiae of snake handling, it seems that these so-called signs likely have been lifted from the Acts of the Apostles, minus the deadly drink. As we know, Luke tells us that the apostles spoke new languages and he tells us that Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake and survived. Rather than testing the temperaments of snakes, we should look at the bigger picture suggested by these signs.
It is this. The continued presence of the Risen Lord through the gift of his Spirit makes us do big things, things we might think we can’t do. Which brings me to my last point. The ascension accounts in Luke, whether in the gospel or in Acts, and the addendum to Mark’s gospel that refers to the ascension are essentially missionary stories. They’re about what we’re to do, not about what Jesus did when he ascended into the heavens.
In other words, the attention is not so much on Jesus–as we have seen, the two men make that clear, befuddled by people trying to find Jesus in the wrong place–but the attention is on us. In Luke’s accounts, the Risen Lord gives marching orders right before he leaves, “You will be witnesses, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth.” In Mark’s text, it is the same, found in Jesus’ words, “These signs will accompany those who believe.”
So long as we put our attention on trying to find Jesus in the wrong places, we are not putting our attention on where it should be. And that is getting the work done that he has left us to do. If his message is to be preached and lived, then we can’t stand idly at the tomb and we can’t stand staring into the skies overhead. We have a mission to do, commissioned by Jesus to continue his work on earth.
In my mind, the Ascension story is more about us than it is about Jesus. Simply put, it tells us that he’s left the picture, at least in the physical “I can see you” way. Now, we have to step up to the plate and take his words and works to the next level, which according to Mark is “to every creature”; according to Luke is “throughout Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth”; according to Matthew is “to all nations”; and according to John is found in the words, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
It is not that we have to do it alone. In fact, left to ourselves, we really couldn’t do much of anything except sputter and stutter. However, Jesus made it clear that he would not leave us orphans. So he accompanies us on the way, his presence felt in a new way in the Spirit, the dynamo that energizes our bodies, invigorates our minds, and makes possible the impossible. Inspired and filled with the Spirit, we do not stand still and do we stand in one place. As missionaries who are assigned a task, we go out into the world, as the two men at the tomb and again at the Ascension make very clear to us, telling us that if we aren’t moving, we aren’t doing the work.
In short, the Spirit has been given to us to get us on our feet, motivated and in motion to do the job that awaits us in the world. The fifth century preacher and teacher John Chrysostom once said, “The gospels are a history of what Christ did and said, but the Acts are a history of what that other Comforter said and did.” Taking him at his word, I would only suggest that the full history of the Acts isn’t completed yet, not so long as we witness to the words and works of Jesus, the Galilean Teacher. Inspired and invigorated by the Spirit, the Acts of the Apostles continues to be written by our actions.
His Ascension simply tells us the world waits for us to do our work. The next move is ours to make. Empowered and embraced by the Spirit of the Risen Lord, we stand ready at every moment to do just that, bringing the Kingdom of God into a world desperately in need of the good news in the same way that the Man of Galilee did while he walked upon the earth, humbly and faithfully doing the will of his Heavenly Father until his stay on earth had ended.
–Jeremy Myers
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