Our lives revolve around clocks and calendars. Keeping track of what we have to do next is a major concern and sometimes a problem for us. Knowing what happened in the past is a matter of keeping straight what happened when, and to whom.
The trouble is when we apply this approach to understanding the Scriptures it doesn’t work very well. They are full of historical inaccuracies, and downright contradictions. How can we trust any of it if we can’t get the “facts” straight. This challenge is particularly severe when we look at the period following Jesus’ death and resurrection. And since this is the period when the church was coming into existence it seems like this is when, more than any other time, we need to be clear exactly what happened – everything we do and believe now is based on what those people believed and passed on to us.
Our faith is indeed based on what the first disciples understood and believed. If they didn’t pass certain information on to us it’s because they didn’t think it was important, it wasn’t central to their belief. That may well be very frustrating for us but there is no way round it. John actually makes this point explicit at the end of his Gospel when he says: Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
As far as the Ascension is concerned we get a very clear account from Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. John on the other hand doesn’t make any mention of anything like this. John has the disciples hiding away in a locked room after the resurrection until Jesus passes on the Holy Spirit to them. Luke has the disciples joyfully praying at the Temple. Matthew has the disciples go off to Galilee rather than stay in Jerusalem and has no account of the Ascension or receiving the Holy Spirit. Mark gives us the pared down version we get in our readings today: the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.
Paul summarizes it in a similar way when writing to the church in Ephesus: I pray that God … may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of him.… that you may know … what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe. God did this by his great might, which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens. No further details provided.
So what are we to make of this. What did happen? What are we supposed to believe?
The key is the second of those questions – and despite what we are conditioned to think it doesn’t depend on an answer to the first. We are dependent on a “a spirit of wisdom and revelation“, not on a history book full of facts and figures. What we believe is that Jesus is a position of power – “at the right hand of God”, as a society used to thinking in terms of kings and emperors would express it. And the consequence is that we have a job to do. This is the point all the gospel accounts emphasize – the disciples had to go out, everywhere, and tell people this fact – that the most significant power in the world was Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
There is no point us looking up in the sky wondering what happened. The first disciples didn’t understand what had happened in that sense. They understood they had been given power by Jesus and the Holy Spirit, power to live their lives differently, and the responsibility to go tell the world about it. We are never going to be able to fill out the diary for what happened in those days after Jesus died and rose – who went where, when, and did what. God isn’t covered by the Freedom of Information Act! But we have been told everything we need to know. As Luke has Jesus say:
“It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established … But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth.”