Ascension Day can be seen as the other half of Christmas … at Christmas Christ comes down; at Ascension, Christ goes up. Christmas centres humankind, because it shows us that God’s attention focuses on earth. But Ascension also de-centres humankind, by showing us that the dwelling place of God, the place we will dwell with Christ forever, is ultimately not here.
Forty-two days ago, the disciples suffered a shocking, sudden, and traumatic bereavement. Jesus – their friend, teacher, the one who had called them into something new – had been brutally executed. Then, forty days ago, the disciples experienced a sudden and shocking joy. Jesus was risen. He was there. He was with them. And for forty days he stayed with them – still himself, but unpredictable enough that they couldn’t assume things could return to how they had been. And during those forty days with them, he taught, and led, and called, and healed them. Above all, he healed the pain that his death, and the events around it had caused them.
Traumatic events such as those the disciples lived through, can take months, years, even a lifetime, to be processed, for healing to take place, and wholeness to be restored. Many of us will have experienced events in life that have needed time, and care, and love, and perhaps professional help for us to begin to feel like life can continue in a positive way.
Not always, but sometimes, people who have had deeply traumatic experiences find themselves changed. Not broken, or not only broken, but reshaped, even for the better; a phenomenon psychologists call ‘post-traumatic growth’. This is a process that takes time and space, resources and support, and we see all of these being offered to the disciples in the forty days of Easter, through Jesus’ time with his disciples. Days in which Jesus guided them from trauma towards growth.
So the disciples who accompany Jesus to the mountaintop, who today stand looking up to heaven, are different people from the disciples who fled rather than accompany Jesus to the cross. They have been broken, and they have been healed, and in the breaking and the healing they have also been reshaped: into people who are ready for the Spirit, who can cope with the presence of God in a more abstract way, who can do God’s will without Jesus being there with them. Nonetheless, I wonder if they experienced mixed and sometimes painful feelings. They have grown, and they have changed. They have been healed and reshaped, but I wonder how ready they felt to be sent out to do God’s will without Jesus with them. Did they wish it could all go back to how it had always been? Did they just want Jesus back?
We read in Acts that they stood gazing up to heaven. Imagining them there, brought to my mind those tender moments when a funeral service has ended, and, whilst we know it is necessary to move on, to leave the graveside or the place where ashes have been interred, the desire to remain just a bit longer is strong. It is always hard to take the first steps of that journey into the rest of life.
Perhaps some of the disciples took a little longer than others to return to Jerusalem with great joy. Perhaps some of them needed time to mourn this second loss. Perhaps the brokenness that had reshaped them during those forty days of encounter with the risen Christ always ached a bit, even though it was healed; like an old wound that sometimes causes discomfort.
Jesus’ very final physical act was an act of love. He blesses his disciples. And then, somewhat suddenly it feels, he is gone. But there is also something about it that speaks of God’s faith in all followers of Christ. This feast of the Ascension is an astonishing moment that demonstrates the absolute confidence Jesus had in his disciples, because he left them. And it is this same confidence that he has in us who are his church today, if we can only believe it.
Ascension tells us, who believe in Jesus, that God truly believes in us.
Amen