So when they had come together, they asked [Jesus], “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
(Acts 1:6-11, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)
As Acts begins, Luke revisits the final scene of his own gospel—Jesus’s ascension into heaven—adding new details. The gospel makes it seem like Jesus appeared before his apostles after his crucifixion, gave them some final wisdom, then walked with them to the nearby town of Bethany where he bid them adieu, all in one day. Acts stretches their time with the resurrected Christ to forty days, nearly a month and a half of reinforcing all he had taught them.
And yet the apostles still didn’t quite get it.
Acts doesn’t specify that Jesus took the apostles out to Bethany, though Lazarus’s hometown ought to have held strong meaning for them. It should have underscored the miracle of resurrection, the cosmic scope of the kingdom he’d been telling them about. But they had trouble thinking past their immediate, earthly concerns. “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” they asked him.
Old dreams die hard, I suppose. When Jesus and his core team arrived in Jerusalem just before Passover, many of his followers had convinced themselves he had come to liberate them from the Roman Empire in a material, political sense. Jesus made it clear, however, that he had no interest in realpolitik, that the world should not regard the kingdom of God in such terms. Even if he had come to Jerusalem to start a revolution, his death at the hands of the Romans squelched most of whatever enthusiasm people might have had for the Jesus movement.
Most, but not all: The crew that accompanied him on this final walk consisted of the truest believers, and he invited them to look past short-term political goals and embrace a larger mandate. They should go back to Jerusalem, where the Holy Spirit would soon baptize them. Filled with that divine power, they would bear witness to what Jesus had shared with them not just in Jerusalem, but all over the world. With these last instructions, Jesus disappeared.
I imagine the apostles freaked out right about then.
We read “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight,” and we might picture the apostles watching Jesus float away like an escaping balloon. But Peter, John, and James had an earlier mystical experience in the company of Jesus, when they saw him transfigured in the company of Moses and Elijah. A cloud had appeared on that day as well, a bright cloud that enveloped them, cutting off their vision. As they stood in that cloud, they heard a voice: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
“In those days,” Luke’s gospel tells us, “they told no one any of the things they had seen.” Can you blame them? Think about how our society treats people who come forward with stories of contact with angels and otherworldly beings. People who knew the trio may already have judged them for abandoning their family fishing boats to wander the desert following an itinerant preacher. “Well, he took us up a mountain and we heard God” might not feel like an effective comeback under the circumstances.
Think about what the apostles had been through in the last six or seven weeks. Jesus took them to Jerusalem at a time of massive unrest, knowing that local religious authorities wanted him dead. Those authorities had him seized from a private garden in what we might call an act of extraordinary rendition and handed him over to the Romans. As the apostles became targets of a broadening crackdown on dissidents, forcing them to go into hiding, Jesus was tortured, publicly executed, and hastily entombed. Then, as the apostles struggled to come to terms with their teacher’s death, Jesus came back, and he had more to teach them! But now he had left again, as abruptly as he had reappeared.
I’d start looking frantically to heaven for answers at this point, too.
The apostles stood frozen in confusion and anxiety—and probably a bit of terror. Suddenly, two men in white robes appeared, asking why they kept looking up at the sky as if Jesus might come back at any moment. Didn’t he just get through telling them they couldn’t comprehend God’s full agenda? Didn’t he leave them with clear instructions? What more did they need?
We’ll talk about this more next week, when we discuss Pentecost. For now, though, consider how George Fox and other early Friends might have read this scene. And consider how it might land for you, as you await the call of one, Christ-centered or otherwise, who could speak to your condition.
Interesting story of one of many prophets and his followers from an era full of them. And so much for looking up to see heavens that don’t exist, unless metaphorically, which this all is. Stories, like poems, up to the interpretation of the reader. What speaks to my condition is the still small voice of a community trying to do right, be better, share love.