Saturday, May 27, 2006
Acts 1:9 After He said this, He was taken up before their very eyes . . .
THEIR LOSS IS OUR GAIN!
There stood Jesus' followers, trying to make sense of what their eyes just saw. What was so difficult? Sure, Jesus returned to the right hand of the Father -- we recite so each and every Sunday. What begins at the Annunciation has reached its end with the Ascension. It still is very strange (let's admit it), but we can handle it. But there and then the disciples have not even words to properly describe what they witnessed. How could they? Nobody ever saw what they have seen: it is an entirely new experience.
A very moving one, actually: Jesus speaking to them, lifting His pierced hands in blessing, and then silence, a cloud, nothing. What now?
Remember what it was like for those disciples. This was just the last strange event in a whole chain of events: the weird mixture of triumph and tragedy in Jerusalem, the gruesome day of His death, the mind-boggling morn of His resurrection. Jesus walks through closed doors, and yet He has a body to touch and feel. Jesus turns into a stranger with whom you could walk and talk for hours without recognizing His true identity. And now this: the final farewell. Jesus is gone. Definitively.
You and I never saw Him the way they saw Him. We never heard Him speak, never touched Him, never shared the day with Him. The great intimacy of their lives together with Jesus we never experienced, and therefore it is so difficult for us to understand how it must have felt.
And yet, their great loss is our gain, if I may say so. Their Jesus after all was the Jesus of Bethlehem, of Nazareth, of Jerusalem, living and walking in a certain time and certain places.
But that is not all that Jesus is or was. We do not have to travel to Jerusalem to get close to Him. His voice is not past but present. Now that He has ascended, He is what God is: always present, anywhere. The Jesus of the disciples therefore is our Jesus, at home in our churches and homes. We need neither ancient pictures or faded photos: He comes to us, in Word and Sacrament -- "Do not be afraid -- it is I!"
He left the disciples to come close to us -- to you and me! This is Ascension, here and now.
