Commentary on Lectionary for June 5, 2011

Easter 7A

Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 32-25; 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11; John 17:1-11

So if Jesus rose from the dead, where is He? Why isn’t He still around, perhaps making visits to other countries like the Pope and the U.S. President do? We really NEED Him!

Well, we answer: The reason is that He ascended into heaven! Some people say they have seen him AFTER the Ascension, beginning with Saul, the man from Tarsus, whom many say is responsible for the international spread of what is now called Christianity. There are many other stories of people through the centuries that have had visions of Jesus, though none so compelling as the appearances to the first Apostles. Those Apostles were encouraged to touch him, to eat breakfast with him, to feel his breath on them, to insert fingers into gaping wounds.

But then one day he gathers them together, says two sentences, and disappears into a cloud. The irony is that he had just spoken to them about power. They, of course, wanted to know if now was the time he would restore the kingdom to Israel. That would be such a great event in their eyes, the one thing they were waiting for, the thing that had been foretold. When the Messiah comes, he will restore the kingdom.

So Jesus’s last words on earth were about power and about witnessing. After a few decades of persecution, when they surely experienced that the Greek word for witness is translated “martyr,” they would have to take another look at what power meant.

They may have forgotten that He warned them His kingdom was NOT of this world. This forgetting is understandable, since He taught them to pray “Thy Kingdom come.” And they may have taken a while to remember what sort of power he wielded while on earth. After so many of their number were killed, they may have felt like an ancient version of Beetle Bailey—beaten to a pulp again and again.

The power, it seems, was in getting up and continuing to do good works, tirelessly, one foot after the other, responding to the needs of the least powerful around them. Peter is able to write: “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings…7Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 4:13, 5:7). So the power from the Spirit Jesus sends is going to be in sticking to your values in the face of serious opposition, devoting your energies to the disadvantaged and downtrodden while being accused of ineffective “do-gooder-ism,” in being dismissed as a serious player in this world where it’s political power and wealth that count.

Jesus has ascended into heaven. Wherever you think heaven is or what ascending to it might mean, the fact remains that He is no longer in the world even in His transfigured form, but we are. And those of us who have been traumatized by apocalyptic stories of rapture and cataclysm and people left behind can hardly take much consolation from the angels’ assurance that He will come again. Luckily, in John’s Gospel, Jesus prays that we may be protected. He can’t mean protected from suffering and death. He must mean protected from losing contact with His Father and from losing our “oneness.” Perhaps, in Him, we can regain it.

And maybe as we mourn the Ascension as the loss of our Master, we can ponder what Barbara Brown Taylor meant in her wonderful book Leaving Church, when she wrote: “I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything” (p. 111).