(I left my laptop in Maryland on Sunday, and as I wait for its return, am somewhat hampered in composing and posting Water Daily. Please forgive the delay...)
This Thursday is Ascension Day, one of the church's major feast days - one often ignored by most churches, unless they are named Ascension. So I intend to spend the week, and Sunday, on this story.
Maybe this holiday is overlooked because it is such an odd one. We don't know what to make of this dramatic departure of the already quite dramatically risen Christ. It's hard to imagine such a bizarre event, which only Luke records in any detail, in both his gospel and in Acts. Yet it is the final scene in the incarnate life of the Son of God, and tells us how he gets back to the place our story tells us he started from: the heavenly precincts, where from now on he will be seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, which strikes me as a somewhat sedentary eternity for one who moved around so much. (Not to mention the vexing question a child once asked me, "Who is on the left side of God?")
This story mirrors the whirlwind final act of Elijah's story, and it set up the expectation early Christians held that Christ, when he comes again in glory, will come back in the same way he left. "Lo, he comes with clouds descending..." as the hymn goes.
What does it mean for us that Christ ascended bodily into heaven? What does it mean for us to know he dwells with the Father, not embodied in this world? And what does it mean that he is present through the Holy Spirit?
Those are just a few of the questions that Ascension raises for me. How about you?
One way the church has seen Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father is as an intercessor, bringing our prayers into the center of the Godhead. Jesus becomes our "inside man," as it were.
So what would you like to ask him to do for you today?
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