Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
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In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love ever flowing.
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There is a moment in Luke's telling of the Ascension that I find quietly astonishing. Jesus leads his disciples out to Bethany, lifts his hands over them in blessing — and while he is still in the act of blessing, he is carried up into heaven. He does not finish and then depart. He departs in the blessing itself. The blessing does not end. It simply expands beyond their sight. As today’s collect puts plainly: he ascended “far above all heavens” — not to be removed from us, but precisely that he might fill all things.
That detail arrests me every time. Because it tells us something essential about what the Ascension actually is — and what it is not.
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It is not an ending. It is not Jesus leaving us. It is Jesus becoming, as Meshali Mitchell puts it*, "restored to full presence and access to all time and all space” and, I might add, beyond space-time. The one who was constrained by a single body in a single place at a single moment is now — by virtue of the Ascension — present everywhere, to everyone, always. The blessing that began in Bethany is still, right now, in motion.
This is why Luke tells us the disciples returned to Jerusalem not in grief but with great joy. That is a startling response to watching someone you love disappear into a cloud. But they understood, or were beginning to understand, that they had not lost him. They had gained something far wider. What they were being given, is faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth. The joy in their returning was not denial. It was the first fruit of that perceiving faith.
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But before the departure, Jesus does something equally remarkable. Luke tells us he "opened their minds to understand the scriptures." Notice that word: opened. And notice, too, that Luke uses the singular — not "their minds" in a diffuse, general sense, but one unified act of illumination, touching them together. Throughout the Gospel, it is the failure to understand that marks the disciples — they are confused at the transfiguration, bewildered at the passion, slow to believe the resurrection. Here, at the very threshold of his departure, the risen Jesus gives them the gift of comprehension.
What do they come to understand? That his life is not an interruption of history, but its fulfillment. That everything written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms — the whole long arc of God's covenant with humanity — was bending toward this. Jesus insists that his life and ministry is continuous with God's presence from the very beginning. He embodies God's deepest longing for us and for all creation. His ministry is not a new plan; it is the ancient covenant reaching its fullness.
This is a God, we might say, who allows the triumph of love to become clear through the life and ministry of a human being who is finally tortured and killed because of the way he loves — and whom he loves. Death does not have the last word. Death simply makes terribly, luminously plain how powerful God's love is.
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Luke also reaches back, as he does so often, to frame Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah. The image of Jesus raising his hands in blessing recalls Moses. The description of his being carried up into heaven recalls Elijah. And what those two figures have in common — beyond their appearance at the transfiguration, speaking of Jesus' "departure which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" — is this: at the end of their ministries, they each passed the mantle to the next generation. Moses to Joshua. Elijah to Elisha. Now Jesus, in the same gesture, passes his prophetic mantle to his disciples. To us.
The question the two men in white robes put to the disciples is therefore not a gentle rebuke. It is a commission: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" In other words — the baton has been placed in your hands. You know what you have witnessed. You know the scope of God's saving love. Now: go.
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At the close of his ministry on earth, Jesus is focused on helping believers understand his life and ministry, death and resurrection, and the scope of God's saving love. He is not focused on escape routes or end-time timetables. When the disciples ask, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" — fishing, perhaps, for a celestial schedule — he redirects them entirely. It is not for you to know the times or the periods. What you are to know is this: you will receive power, and you will be my witnesses — in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, to the ends of the earth.
That expansion — Jerusalem to the ends of the earth — mirrors the expansion of the Ascension itself. The particular becomes universal. The local becomes cosmic. And we are the instruments of that widening. This widening does not end — he abides with his Church on earth even to the end of the ages. We do not labor toward a distant God who has retreated beyond the clouds. We labor with one who has promised to remain.
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This lection today, puts me in mind of this prayer, commonly attributed to Teresa of Ávila:
God of love, help us to remember that Christ has no body now on earth but ours, no hands but ours, no feet but ours. Ours are the eyes to see the needs of the world. Ours are the hands with which to bless everyone now. Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
That prayer takes on new weight when we hold it alongside the Ascension. It is precisely because Jesus has ascended — precisely because he is no longer bounded by one body in one place — that his body is now ours to offer. The universal Christ works through particular hands. Our hands. In a climate-changed, war-torn, beauty-starved world that needs blessing now, today, in this moment.
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So we do not stand gazing up at heaven — not because heaven is unreal, but because heaven is already here, pressing into every atom, every quark, every suffering face we will meet this week. The Ascension does not remove Christ from the world. It releases him into all of it.
The blessing that began over Bethany is still extending. And according to his promise, the one who ascended far above all heavens abides still — with this Church, with every church, with every trembling heart that dares to believe — even to the end of the ages. We are living inside that promise.
May we have the courage — and the joy — to extend it further still.
Amen.
*Meshali Mitchell, an author, storyteller, and acclaimed photographer wrote that phrase in her debut b ook, “Restored: Partnering with God in Transforming Our Broken Places.”
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