Ascended, but near [Ascension; St. Mark 16:14-20]

Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!

Who speaks into your physical ears, this evening saying:

“So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.”

You may be saying to yourself, “After Good Friday and Easter and the post-Easter appearances of Jesus in the flesh to everyone, what more could possibly be worthy of note in holy Scripture?

You may also be thinking of great burdens being placed upon you now that Jesus has apparently left the building. So now it is all up to you. If the poor aren’t being fed its your fault. Jesus did His part, now its your turn and if you fail to do it, Jesus is absent and the church fails.

Because you can not see God, you naturally assume that through you, through your hands, God works in the world. And you wouldn’t be wrong, but you wouldn’t be right either. On the one hand, God does work through means and men. It has been so since Adam inherited the entire world.

On the other hand, if you weren’t here, God could and would still do His work. You can not use your work and your feelings to create the righteousness of God. You certainly do the work God has given you to do, but Jesus is not revealed in such things. Just because you do the works Jesus commanded, does not mean you are converting souls for Christ!

What the Ascension of Jesus is NOT about is God going away and leaving you in charge. The Lord is not about to let the important work of salvation fall into the hands of wayward and straying sheep.

How soon and quickly we forget our own reflection in the mirror, when at the start of Lent we heard the words, “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” Is the Lord just singing into the wind? Does He talk just to hear Himself?

The natural way of man is to return to the dust of the ground. The natural way of man is to fall under the curse of the Law. The natural way of man is to be natural, not supernatural. In fact, the natural is extremely afraid of the supernatural.

This is because the natural has become unnatural, sidling up to things such as sin, death, and the devil. When confronted with righteousness, sin is aggravated. When confronted with life, death is incensed. When confronted with forgiveness, the devil is a rabid, foaming beast.

You have become unnatural in your sin, trading the natural (communion with God) for the unnatural.

Dear Christians, Who exactly is it that the Lord is talking to in Psalm 110 when He says, “Sit thou at my right hand”? It is the Son of David Who is also the Son of God. But Who is the Son of God? He is both God and man. In Him is found both the unnatural and the natural on the cross, for God has taken on our unnatural state for us.

What exactly, then, are we seeing and hearing about on the Ascension of Jesus? Jesus is not just rising up to show off. He is not simply taking to the skies because that ‘s where all heavenly things belong. His sole purpose in Ascending is to take our nature into the supernatural.

Now a man sits at the right hand of God. Now a human is in control of the entire universe. Now, a body is not only containing all the glory of God, but is everywhere present, for you.

This supernatural exit is now the natural, even for us. As St. John Chrysostom says: “The exaltation of Christ referred only to His humanity. As God, He already possessed all earthly happiness and needed no further exaltation.” And St. Cyprian confirms him when he says that it was not the Almighty but the humanity of the Almighty which was exalted.

Jesus says: “Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel,

who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb;

⁴even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you.

I have made, and I will bear; I will make you ascend and will save you.” (Is. 46:3-4)

Just as the Lord kept His promise on Easter Sunday, so also He continues to keep the promise of raising our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body. Though in our un-nature we are senseless and ungrateful, foolish, duller than the stones, base and unworthy, yet this most miserable nature, more senseless than all other creatures, is this day raised above every created being.

This day the angels and archangels behold that which they had so long desired to see. This day they behold our nature upon the royal throne, shining in immortal beauty and glory.

The Ascension of Jesus is your ascension. We are not just celebrating some stepping stone on your path to divine power to do good works, we are celebrating the work of Salvation that Christ purchased and won upon the cross.

Once again, the Holy Spirit is speaking to us and causing us to remember the past, for it is not just any Christ that is ascending, but it is the Crucified Christ. The Body that ascends today carries the marks of the nails and the wound of the spear.

It is the wounded, suffering, and crucified Christ that enters into the glory of the Father with our nature. Even though we are 40 days after Easter and even though Easter is the chief festival of the Church, She always looks back to the cross, for on it our unnatural nature is killed and buried.

For we share in this death of Jesus. We are stripped of our mortal, sinful nature as we are doused with the holy waters of baptism and brought out with a clean heart and a right Spirit. The death of Jesus is now ours, where we die to sin. The resurrection of Jesus is now ours, where we live towards God in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness forever.

The Ascension of Jesus in now ours in that we are united with Christ, Body and Blood. We are so close to God that at this moment His Word is echoing in our brains, His Spirit is filling our souls, and His Body and Blood course though our own. Thus, the life Jesus receives is the life we all receive at His very hand in the Divine Service, for free.