He Withdrew From Them
He Withdrew From Them
Luke 24:50-53
So, last week we ended with a question: how does the grand finale’ end? When it comes to my favorite fireworks show, in Ely, Minnesota, I told you about the build up to the show, itself, how the pickup trucks descend on the site and people are armed to the teeth with completely illegal explosives. Soon, fireworks are flying every which way until the firefighters, sequestered away in their safe zone, fire off the first real salvo of the night. Talk about “Bombs bursting in air!” Suddenly, everything that had seemed so huge now seems entirely small. With one flash and a gigantic bang that follows two dramatic seconds later, the real show begins.
After an array of colors and sparkles and bangs and booms that defy the size of the town and the size of the fire department, the grand finale’ unfolds. As it does, joy bubbles up in everyone. You start chuckling. You lay back and marvel at the colors. Involuntarily, you begin to narrate what you see: “Oh my gosh! That’s my favorite! No…hold it, I loved that one even better.” It’s the blue that captures your imagination as well as the spider-like gold cascades of sparks that fire once, then fire again, then fire a third time. The Roman candles begin to kick in and your sense of smell joins in the overload—sulfur is everywhere. Then, sound and light and smell crescendo. Finally, there is a pause… “Is that it?” “Is that all?” “Is it done?” Your heart overflows. You look at the people around you and you just smile from ear to ear. Then, just as you relax, there is one final flash, followed a second or two later by the biggest boom of the night. All that’s left is a cloud of smoke…and you declare for all to hear that you can’t wait for next year!
We got into this whole fireworks discussion because I was making the case that the 24th chapter of Luke is the grand finale’ of the gospel. Easter morning announces, like that first rocket from the fire department, that everything has changed. By Easter evening, the risen Jesus is among the disciples, forgiving them and reminding them of all that the Scriptures had said. This is the grand finale’. In the final notes of this moment, Jesus reminds them that they are the witnesses. Finally, he promises that something else is yet to come: they are to wait in Jerusalem until they have been, “clothed with power.” This is the final bang: there is more to come!
Like the smoke that lingers after the last blast, Jesus walks them out to Bethany. He lifts up his hands and blesses them. Even as Jesus is blessing them, Jesus withdraws from their presence. This is where things get interesting. Our translation reads: “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried into heaven. This is known as the Ascension. The idea is that when Jesus was done he went…up…because up had been closer to God ever since Moses climbed the mountain and came down with the Ten Commandments. Heaven is up. Hell is down. This makes sense in an ancient word where what was up was genuinely a mystery and what was down inside the earth was just as mysterious in the end.
Sitting with this text this week made me remember a story that I had heard about Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin was a Soviet Cosmonaut and was the first man in space. The story that is told is that on that first flight, Gagarin paused as he looked out into space and said, “I don’t see any God here.” Interestingly, in the official transcripts of the flight that were revealed after the Soviet Union fell, Gagarin never said this. It appears that this was an add-on from the anti-religious wing of the communist party.
Still, though, for many people, when space flight became possible there were a lot of conflicts that arose because all of a sudden we were going “up there” and “up there” was, in their minds, where God lived. How could we fly up into the heavens and not somehow disturb heaven? I have to admit that this “up and down” cosmology has never really spoken to me.
Here’s the interesting thing. There are several ancient translations which do not include this phrase at all. Instead, they read, “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Instead of Jesus being carried up into heaven and us being required to buy into both up and heaven, Jesus is just no longer there. He’s gone. The sound dies down. The flash is over. The smoke dissipates. And the disciples are left with a smile on their faces and joy in their hearts and lingering questions, “What just happened?” and “What’s next?”
Now, if you want to do “up and heaven,” that’s fine. However, if that’s a stumbling block for you, come with me and let me tell you a little about how this makes sense to me…
The case I want to make is that if you have ever had a serious loss in your life—if your heart has been broken by grief—there is an experiential connection to make to this whole chapter of Luke. Grief leaves us struggling with a lot of things right away. We have regrets—things we wish we would have said or done, things we wish we could take back. We struggle with the shear, stunning finality of death. How can this be? If our loss was wrapped in tragedy, then there are even more layers of trauma that get laid on top of everything else.
In other words, if you have ever had your heart broken, I think there are so many connections to make to the disciples’ failures and to the women’s powerlessness. Sometimes, our attention gets so focused on Jesus, who transcends our broken humanity, that we forget to see that the people whom he loves who are trying to love him are broken by grief just like us. They are not broken as in, “They are evil!” but broken as in “Life has torn them apart!” They are going through the chaotic cascade that comes with the kind of loss with which many of us are far too familiar.
Like the women, we are awash in death and loss and just trying to do the last respectful thing. Then, a caring funeral home director asks us to put the pen down on the table and set the paper work aside and tell them about the person whom we loved. Or, someone whom we never knew but who knew the person we loved shows up and tells us about the child they knew years ago. Or, late at night, we sit with others we’ve known forever and begin to remember this person together. We tell the stories to each other and we realize that we had been looking for the living among the dead, just like those women.
Or, perhaps like those two people on the road to Emmaus, people who sort of knew the person whom we loved come running to tell us about some amazing experience they had—how they were sharing memories and it felt like the person you loved was right there with them. In my experience, this is often the person who comes to a heartbroken soul and says, “I had the most amazing dream about your loved one” Or, they pause and say, “Do you remember how much they loved cardinals? I had a cardinal that just sat with me for the longest time the other day.” Someone else has a mysterious or even mystical experience of connection to the one whom you loved—something that you cannot explain. The thing is, though, that you don’t want an explanation for their experience. Rather, what you want explained is why that special dream or that experience with the cardinal wasn’t yours. If the one I loved is showing up, then why aren’t they showing up directly to me? Can you feel the connection to the disciples?
As someone who walks through grief with lots of people, I have come to believe that such experiences happen first with those who were close to that person but not the folks who were closest because the folks who are closest aren’t ready yet. Maybe they’re so heartbroken that they are not yet available. Maybe the grief is just screaming too loudly to hear anything else.
Finally, one way or another, those who were closest do have moments of profound connection. I remember a host of folks who have dreamed of the one whom they loved and lost who told me how incredibly vivid those dreams were and of how much they wanted to just stay in that dream: “For a minute, they were right next to me again!” These are the dreams that leave a person crying. Still though, they leave you with a sense of that person’s presence, too. Or, you have waking experiences that are linked for you to that person. It’s a feather sighting. It’s your own spirit animal moment. It’s a song on the radio that the two of you adored. After days of being awash in grief and death, suddenly, you find yourself feeling joy in the whispers and clues that appear which point to the nearly unspeakable feeling that your beloved person is right there with you.
Then, after a while, in some way, it just dawns on you that they are no longer here in the same way. A lot of people talk about how the person has moved from out there—in the dream, in the animal, in the song—to being present in the deepest things you feel in your heart and in the cherished act of remembering. Something has changed though. It’s like they have moved on and moved in.
This is the organic, built-in, shared rhythm of immediate grief in the lives of so many people who have trusted me enough to share their experiences. It has also been my own experience. You are blinded by grief. Other people approach you with their experiences of something other than just death, with living experiences of connection. Then, for a little while, you discover those experiences yourself. Yet, at some point, it dawns on you that this person is no longer with you in the same way. You point to your chest and say, “Now they are here but they are no longer out there.” And you cry and you simile as you say it.
That’s where the disciples finally arrive. For me, if Jesus is carried “up into heaven,” then I imagine the disciples standing with their mouths agape, staring at the sky. That’s not the picture that Luke paints, though. Instead he tells us that they finally get it. They worship Jesus. They do exactly what he told them to do and head to Jerusalem and do so with great joy. And, the same men who had cowered in fear before are now fearless. They go to the temple and bless God at the top of their lungs.
That’s the final point of connection to our own grief. What mattered about Jesus was not that he died or where he went. What mattered was that he loved and was loved and that he is somehow still present. And in ways that were impossible to explain, this left the disciples feeling joy and praising God. And in ways that are equally difficult for us to explain, we can do similar things when we feel the lingering and changing presence of those we have loved.
However, there is that one other thing… Jesus told them that there is more to come, that they will “be clothed in power.” In the language of the Gospel of John, there is the “one who will come after him.” This is, of course, what every grand finale’ leaves us waiting for…the next great fireworks show—right? (Want a hint? Think Pentecost!)
In the meantime, our world is changed. Loss and death are more real but so are mystery, and majesty, and unspeakable meaning, too. So, we live. We watch. We wonder what’s next.