At the site of Jesus’ ascension just outside Jerusalem, guides point out a rock with two side-by-side, indented swirls that one can imagine look like footprints. When I saw the rock, I remembered I had read about it as a child and accepted as real that Jesus would leave his footprints in a rock when he returned to God.
As an adult, I realize feet can’t leave an imprint in rock. Did I think Jesus blasted off with foot rockets to leave such molten footprints? Until the early teen years, all of us have only concrete brain operations. We can only take stories literally. We wonder, for example, what kind of car God used to drive Adam and Eve out of paradise.
To express who the risen Jesus is, Luke draws on how people saw the world in his time. In ancient Mesopotamia people imagined God lived in the heavens, commanding storms and hosts of heavenly beings, a divine army. God reigned in a heavenly court. The Canaanites described their god, Baal, as Cloud Rider, who brought rain and fertility.
At the making of the covenant in the book of Exodus, the people experience God’s presence in storms and lighting that cover Mt. Sinai. God leads the people through the desert in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
When Elijah returns to this holy mountain five centuries later, he no longer finds God in the wind, storm, and lightning but in the still silence after the storm. He moves from an external, physical image of God to a sense of an invisible, spiritual voice that speaks in silence. Our own faith develops in a similar way from literal to spiritual understandings.
The ascension is the hinge event between Jesus’ resurrection and his sending of the Spirit. Luke’s gospel ends with Jesus’ ascension and the Acts of the Apostles begins with the same scene. Luke draws on the familiar imagery of God’s heavenly court to picture Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, returning to reign with God, to take his place at God’s right hand. As God’s incarnate Son, human and divine, Jesus is the firstborn of a new creation—the promise of who we are to become.
Luke addresses the Acts of the Apostles as he did his gospel to Theophilus. The name means friend of God. In other words Luke addresses all of us in his parallel accounts of Jesus and the birth of the church.
You will receive power.
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
When they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or season which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.”
When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While they were gazing into heaven as he went, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “People of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
Acts 1.1-11
- What are you looking to heaven for that you should be doing on Earth?