Sermon for Ascension Day, May 13, 2010
Solemn Mass
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23, Luke 24:49-53

My understanding of Jesus’ ascension has been shaped primarily – and narrowly – by today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles and by the Church’s fixed celebration of Ascension Day as one of the seven principal feasts of the year. I’ve been doing some work on the ascension this week. I want to look very briefly at all of the gospels on the ascension with you, then to the passage from Acts, and then come back to what I think the ascension is all about – and that is, the Easter, the Paschal, mystery.

First, Matthew. His gospel ends with what is called the giving of the great commission on the mountain in Galilee where he has sent his disciples after the resurrection. In Matthew, there is no ascension narrative.[1]

Mark’s gospel commonly concludes with twelve verses called the “long ending.”[2] These verses are canonical, but they were not written by the evangelist himself, but by a later editor.[3]  (And as far as I know, there is no significant scholarly debate at all about that.) This “long ending” contains a simple ascension account – “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to [the eleven disciples], was taken up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God.”[4] And that is it.

In John, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene at the tomb and says, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”[5] But we hear no more about how and when or how often Jesus does this.

In the gospel lesson we heard from Luke, it’s not forty days after Easter, it’s the evening of the first Easter Day. Earlier in this same day, Mary Magdalene and the other women go to the tomb and are met by “two men . . . in dazzling apparel,”[6] who say to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”[7]

In Luke, the risen Jesus appears that first Day to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. When they return to Jerusalem, Jesus appears to the eleven and the others who are with them.

Jesus eats with all who are there and, as he did on the road to Emmaus, he helps them to understand the Scriptures, what they say about him, what they say about God’s plan for humankind.[8]

The very short gospel passage we heard is the rest of Luke’s Easter Day story. Jesus leads all of them – not just the eleven – out of Jerusalem to Bethany. There he blesses them and is carried up to heaven.[9] Ascension, like the resurrection, is part of Luke’s Easter Day.

The account of Jesus’ ascension in the Acts of the Apostles is not that much different from Luke save for one significant detail – it happens forty days after the day of resurrection. New Testament scholar Joseph Fitzmyer in his commentary on Luke concludes simply, “Why Luke has dated the ascension of Jesus in these two different ways no one will ever know.”[10] Fitzmyer’s remark made me think of a line from the late liturgical scholar Aidan Kavanagh wrote, “…there is nothing conventional, neat, or altogether logical about a crucifixion of the Church.”[11] There is nothing “conventional, neat, or logical” about the Paschal mystery.

Everything we know about Jesus comes to us from men and women who proclaimed Jesus was raised from the dead. The risen Jesus was no longer mortal; he would never die again. His appearances on that first Easter Day and those that were to come much later to Paul happened in real time, in human history, but his risen reality was beyond time and space.

Canon Donald Allchin, in his short but very fine book Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition, begins his last chapter with these words, “The Christian tradition is . . . full of an affirmation of God’s nearness to humankind, and of our unrealised potential for God.” [12]

My own sense of whenever I have had that personal, powerful, and rare sense of the presence of God, I am in a place where words fail quickly. Several times this Easter Season I have wondered aloud in sermons why we know so little about the reaction of the disciples to the risen Jesus. It is just hard to use words to describe something beyond created reality.

You and I gather tonight to remember what we believe God did for Jesus. We Christians hope to share in the life beyond this life that the risen Jesus showed the men and women he called to be his disciples. We listen to his word, and we break the bread and share the cup, with faith that he is not only risen, ascended and glorified, but that he is here. This is the Paschal mystery.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York.