We may struggle a little with the story of the Ascension (Acts 1:1-11). Our first reaction might be to wonder, ok, what actually happened? Jesus disappears up into the sky, then what?
This is probably the wrong question to be asking – wrong in the sense that we’re not going to get a useful answer. The story of Jesus rising through the air and disappearing behind a cloud, familiar as it may be from countless medieval paintings, is only found in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. In his Gospel Luke has a quite different version of events after the resurrection, and at the end says only “He was taken up to heaven”. This is the same formulation as Mark uses. The other two Gospels say nothing about an ascension of any sort.
This challenge to our desire to know “what happened” is not unique to the Ascension, it applies to pretty much everything that occurred after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts of this period are wildly different. And in some cases it seems like the story just gets cut off, and in some there is more than one ending (like different drafts of a screen play got glued together).
But sticking with just the Ascension, what can we make of it? An alternative to the question “what happened” is: what does it mean? What did it mean for Luke; what did it mean for the early Christians who heard his words; what does it mean to us?
It may be easiest to answer starting with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that Jesus disappeared off to some other place, separated from us, hidden away until he reappears. Matthew is the one who chooses to make this point most strongly – the last words of his Gospel are “behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:16-20). Luke finishes his Gospel (Lk 24:50-53) with Jesus parting from the disciples and them being filled with joy – clearly they didn’t feel left alone or abandoned at this point. John has pages, before Jesus death, devoted to explaining how he’s not really leaving them and how he will remain with them, even when no one can see him any longer.
So the story of the Ascension is not the story of a departure, it’s the story of a shift in a relationship, a shift from fear to hope, from sadness to joy, from dependence to independence. The last point is the key element of how Luke uses the story in the Acts of the Apostles. Don’t stand there looking upwards (or backwards), move forward, get on with what you know you need to do.
This provides a clear point of connection for us. We all experience times when we become fixated on what has been, what we’ve lost, fearful of what comes next, feeling alone or abandoned. The disciples clearly felt those things. But whatever exactly happened in that period after Jesus’ death that wasn’t where the story ended. Our story doesn’t end either. There is always a next, there is always something that follows on. If we acknowledge Jesus‘ Ascension then he is still with us, he is part of the next chapter, however much it may be different from what went before. He is with us always.