L.D. 18, Matthew 28:11-20 "The Ascension Hello" Scott Hoezee

Given a choice, I suppose we'd all rather say "Hello" than "Goodbye." We'd all prefer to say "Welcome home!" as opposed to saying, "Have a good trip." Watching the news on television, we may get tears in our eyes both when we watch soldiers leaving their families to go off to war and when we watch soldiers returning home to the hugs and cheers of spouses and children. We may shed some tears at both spectacles but we also know that the first kind of tear is a heartbreaking one whereas the second kind of tear is a joyful one.

Maybe that is at least part of the reason why the world, and more and more also the church, prefers Easter over Ascension Day. In case you're not certain, today is not Ascension Day, even though the Catechism is directing us to think about the ascension on this particular Sunday. No, this year's Ascension Day was back in May, on a Thursday as always. But you may have missed it--most of the world does.

In fact, the worship services that were held on May 20 this year garnered few people. As some folks explained to me later, in part that may have been because the Christian school system, Calvin College, and even the Christian Reformed Rec Center all held regularly scheduled events that same evening. Earlier that same day I attended a gathering made up mostly of pastors. But we went through the entire meeting, including a time of worship and devotions, without one person so much as mentioning that it was Ascension Day. I think it was because even most of those pastors were not aware of it.

Is it because we prefer the "Hello" of Easter to the "Goodbye" of Ascension Day? Is it easier to celebrate Jesus' return to life than his exit from this earth? Just what is the ascension all about? Why did it happen? What does it mean? On this July morning, let's see if we can answer those questions as we at the same time zero in on the most important question: What does the ascension have to do with who you are every single day?

To begin, let's ponder the what and the why of the ascension. A logical first item to note is that the ascension was completely unexpected. Even Jesus' closest disciples didn't see it coming. By the year 2004 we have grown accustomed to Jesus' physical absence. As a matter of fact, we would be blown away by his physical presence! If Jesus could walk right into this church this morning in physical form, the likelihood would be very high that even those of us who feel closest to Jesus spiritually would be startled to the point of being stupefied. We're not shocked by Jesus' being gone and so our eyes do not widen particularly to read the story of that day when he left.

But it was different for the disciples. And when you think about it, it ought still to be a point of some amazement to also us. All along the disciples had carried around with them a somewhat muddled, mistaken definition of who the Messiah, the Christ, would be. Certainly the one event they were absolutely certain could and would never happen to God's Chosen One was death, especially an ignominious one like being crucified as a criminal. For a few days after Jesus had breathed his last, the disciples believed that they had hitched their messianic wagon to the wrong fellow. Had they been right, Jesus would have been sitting on a golden throne ruling over the new Israel, not moldering in a borrowed tomb.

But then the most unexpected thing of all happened: Jesus returned to them from the dead. And so in flash, all their seemingly dashed dreams of Jesus as the Christ were revived. Anybody who could come back from the grave was not only the real Messiah, he would now prove to be also unstoppable. Pontius Pilate, King Herod, and even the Caesar himself would not stand a chance against the Jesus who couldn't be stopped by even death. For forty days Jesus met with his revived and reassembled band of disciples, and for those same forty days the disciples waited patiently for Jesus to make his move. They waited for him to appear to even more people, dazzling them with his resurrected presence and seizing political power from the Romans to create a new kingdom of justice and goodness.

But then, for the second time in two months, Jesus disappeared again. To the disciples this was as bewildering as it was disappointing. Just imagine how you would feel if you were a worker in a candidate's political campaign for the presidency this year. For months you stayed up late and got out of bed early so you could squeeze out every bit of work every single day to get your candidate elected in November. But then imagine how you'd feel if on November 1, just before the election is to be held, your candidate withdrew from the contest, packed up his bag, and returned home such that no one would ever see him in public again. You'd feel as though someone punched you in the stomach.

But once you got over that initial shock, you'd also want to ask, "Why?" In the case of Jesus, even Matthew 28 may reveal some of the drawbacks of Jesus' disappearing act. Actually, this chapter doesn't mention Jesus' return to heaven explicitly, but it is implied in the fact that Jesus sends the disciples to go teach, preach, and baptize. He sends the disciples out precisely because Jesus will not be physically present to do any of that himself. But this morning I included verses 11-15 to make a point. We all know about the so-called "Great Commission" with which Matthew concludes. But as Frederick Dale Bruner points out, we also have in this same chapter what could be labeled the Great Counter-Commission.

Following Jesus' resurrection from the dead, the governing and religious authorities concoct a cover story: Jesus' corpse was stolen by the disciples. Any subsequent talk of Jesus' having risen again from the dead would be defeated by this other story. "Yeah sure, he rose again from the dead. Right! I've heard that one, but my cousin has a friend who knows one of the guards who was at the tomb that day and he swears that the whole thing was just your run-of-the-mill grave robbery." That was their story, and they were sticking to it. Matthew concludes that little snippet of the larger narrative by saying that this story continued to circulate even years later.

In one way or another, counter-stories about what really happened on Easter morning are still alive and well today, too. Recently I read a book that contains a fairly standard way of treating the resurrection in more liberal theological circles. In this particular case this author was trying to make Christians more open to the validity of other religious traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism. But this author knows that if Jesus really had been physically raised from the dead, that would give Christianity a unique place among the world's religions. It would make Christianity, and the Jesus at its center, look like the one true faith.

Since this author wanted to avoid that conclusion, here is what he does with Easter: The resurrection was an event that took place in Jesus' followers. Jesus arose in their faith, in their renewed conviction that his message must go on. The resurrection did not cause faith; faith caused the resurrection. Something happened to Jesus after his death but since whatever that something was took place only the hearts and minds of Jesus' followers, this same kind of thing has probably happened to other believers and other saviors from other faith traditions, too. So even the resurrection, when seen from this angle, need not establish Jesus as the only savior of the world. Religiously speaking, this kind of thing happens a lot.

As Matthew might say were he to read such claptrap, "See what I mean? The counter-story, in one form or another, continues to circulate among people to this day." But that's just the maddening irony of even Matthew 28. With the guards and others scurrying around to spread this cover story, why is Jesus sequestered away on a remote mountaintop in Galilee and doing no more than telling his bumbling disciples to go out and tell the world the real truth about him? Why doesn't he do this? Since the Great Counter-Commission has now been issued by the religious authorities in Jerusalem, why doesn't Jesus do the logical thing of making a grand public appearance smack in the heart of Jerusalem or Rome, defiantly proving to the world his real, physical restoration?

But he doesn't. What we should never forget is that when you get right down to it, what Jesus left his disciples with was little more than words, water, bread, and wine. Jesus left them with the gospel message and the sacraments. It was their word against the rest of the world's counter words. And even if they could get people to believe their message, the key signs and seals of the faith would be no more than ordinary water, common loaves of bread, and a simple chalice of wine.

The physical absence of Jesus that the ascension brought about made things not only very different for the church but also much more difficult. Even the Heidelberg Catechism goes through some curious Calvinist contortions in trying to figure out how we can say Jesus is still with us when we are simultaneously very clear in saying that Jesus is at the right hand of God the Father. If Jesus' resurrected flesh and blood are that far away from us, how can we say he is also with us? John Calvin's answer, reflected in Q&A 48, became known as the "extra Calvinisticum." Calvin did not want in any way to separate the human side of Jesus from his divine side. So how could he keep humanity and divinity together and yet still be able to claim that Jesus is with us on this earth even though his human body is not at all on this earth? Calvin's solution to this puzzle was to say that the divine nature of Jesus goes "beyond the bounds of the humanity he has taken on." In other words, this is yet another theological both/and: Jesus' human and divine natures can be both utterly united to one another and at the same time Jesus' divine nature can be everywhere at once.

Not everyone is wild about Calvin's idea. Many think you can avoid this contorting if you just allow the Holy Spirit in our hearts to be the Jesus in us. The Spirit of Pentecost is our living connection to the living Jesus. But lest we still be sitting here on Tuesday morning figuring all this out, suffice it to say for now that this additional wrinkle with which the Catechism wrestles is yet another demonstration of the fact that the absence of Jesus generates some tension.

Why didn't he just stay? Having won the victory over the devil and over death itself, why not celebrate this by proving to the world, through his own physical availability, that he is alive and that the good, gospel news he had been preaching all along really is the truth for all people? Why leave it up to the disciples, and all these centuries later to also us, to do this on his behalf?

What does the ascension of Jesus say about Christianity? That's actually a bigger question than we can answer this morning--probably, it's a bigger question than I could ever answer. But maybe part of the answer lies in the notion that ascending quietly into heaven some forty days after his resurrection is just so like the Jesus we know and love. All along in his life and ministry Jesus took the road less traveled. He preferred the margins of society over the citadels of power and influence. He kept company with beggars and stragglers more often than with movers and shakers. He spoke in parables that teased people into seeing the truth rather than grab a bullhorn and bellow at people from street corners.

Had there been newspapers back then, Jesus would seldom have appeared anywhere in the paper, much less in the headlines. While the newshounds wrote about the political intrigue in Herod's court and the fashion writers scrutinized the hemlines on the dresses worn by Pontius Pilate's wife, Jesus would be off in some hamlet telling a prostitute her sins were forgiven and healing some anonymous fellow's dropsy. In fact, when you think about it, just about every single person whom Jesus ever healed or to whom Jesus ever spoke words of forgiveness disappear from Scripture's pages, never to be heard from again. They didn't go on to write tell-all books about "My Encounter with Jesus" nor did they do some ancient equivalent of going on "Larry King Live" to broadcast their stories to the world.

You see, all along Jesus had been all about love and compassion, about drawing people in with cords of kindness and proclaiming a kingdom that had more in common with mustard seeds and yeast than it did with military brawn and influence pedaling. So how unlike Jesus it would have been to become some brash braggart, swaggering his power before the world in a kind of bravado that he had never displayed prior to his humble and humiliating death. Pouring his gospel treasure into earthen vessels, into cracked pots, like Peter and Andrew, like you and me, is perhaps the only way Jesus could ensure that not only the content of the gospel was preserved but the very tone of that message as well.

Once the Catechism wraps up its somewhat ponderous efforts to figure out how to keep Jesus' divinity and humanity together, Q&A 49 asks how Jesus' ascension benefits us. The three items listed are all very true, assuring us of our own bodily future in God's kingdom even as we can take comfort in knowing that the Jesus who saved us and who knows every one of our names is even now preparing a place for us. The third item talks about the Holy Spirit in our hearts and how this shifts our focus from earthly things to heavenly ones. But on that last point I'd like to make a little bit of a nuance to say that the only way we can do Jesus any good in our lives for now is precisely if we witness to him on this earth in ways that are consistent with the Jesus we see in the heavenly places.

Yes, the fact that Jesus is now the cosmic King of kings and Lord of lords is a proper focus for us. But the fact that he exercises that rule in invisible ways reminds us that our daily witness to this invisible reality needs to be Christ-like in every way. Since Jesus is physically absent from this world, today if the marginalized, the poor, the guilt-ridden, the addicted, the homeless, and the suffering of the earth are going to be lifted up and given good news, it is we who must do this on Jesus' behalf. We cannot go on and on, as the Catechism does, in trying to nail down just how it is that Jesus is truly with us unless we then take the next step of letting this same Jesus act and speak through us.

When Jesus gives the Great Commission, he begins grandly by saying, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." A huge claim! If any human being other than Jesus of Nazareth ever really believed that he or she had all the cosmic marbles, it would be a pretty good bet that this person would use this unlimited power in self-aggrandizing ways. But not Jesus. He goes from that statement of universal authority to the surprise commissioning of those knock-kneed, feet-of-clay disciples as his earthly representatives. He gives them word, water, and the Triune formula of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, telling them to tell others about him precisely because he would not be around to put his own name out there.

The ascension of our Lord into heaven is a grand, capping event in the life of Jesus. But it ends up having almost as much to do with us as it does with Jesus himself. Could that also be part of the reason why even we church-going folks seem to prefer Easter over Ascension Day? Do even we sense the burden that the ascension places on us in ways that make us shy away? I hope that is not so. Maybe we do simply prefer Easter's "Hello" over Ascension Day's "Goodbye." But here's the thing: if we understand the nature of this particular "Goodbye," then we know that our main task is now to say "Hello" to all of this world's last, least, lonely, and lost people. That is very simply what it means to be people of the ascension. The Catechism wonders how the ascension benefits us. Jesus wonders how we can make it benefit everyone else. Amen.