May 29, 2022
“Father, what we do not know, teach us; What we have not; give us, What we are not, kindly make us. For Your Son’s sake. Amen.”
I don’t know about you, but I get excited when I hear a movie, I liked will be getting a sequel.
The original story continues, where most film stories come to an end.
Film sequels were rare previous to the 1970s.
That is if you don’t count film series such as Blondie, the Bowery Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and some others, we might have seen on Channel 48.
When I was in 6th grade, as part of our Bible History education,
Sr Mary Natalie introduced us to the idea of a biblical sequel.
St. Luke, one of the four Gospel evangelist also wrote the Acts of the Apostles.
It picks up where his Gospel ended.
Today, we heard both the ending of Luke’s Gospel, and the beginning of Acts. We get to see how they fit together.
And the common jumping off and jumping on point is Jesus Ascension into Heaven.
The apostles must have been astonished at what they just saw.
I wonder how long they continued to gaze into the sky before the angel came and told them what it was that they just witnessed.
I love it how angels rarely give any extra information.
They operate on a strictly need-to-know basis.
It had been a mere 6 weeks since Jesus died and rose again.
They thought they he was dead,
then he appeared to them, and they must have been relieved that they didn’t lose him.
Now it seemed they lost him again. A roller coaster of emotions.
They must have discussed among themselves, just what did Jesus say before he left them.
Something about being his witnesses in Jerusalem, all of Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the Earth?
And he was going to send them someone to help them.
They were to stay put in Jerusalem, until that helper arrives.
Power from on high.
They will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.
What did it all mean?
Jesus’ disciples were still focused on the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel.
“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.
They still weren’t getting the big picture.
If there had been social media in the first century, there may have been Facebook pages and YouTube videos devoted to the Luke films, touting all the connections between them, and leaked events to occur in the second film were not expected by fans of the first.
Film critics and fan boys and girls watching the beginning of Luke’s sequel, may have been thinking,
“We didn’t see this coming,”
but true fans of Luke’s Gospel would be smiling to themselves because they remembered Jesus saying his kingdom was not of this world, in the first film.
There would be controversy between the camps –
those who were that was expecting Jesus to return Israel to its former glory,
while others would claim that idea had been refuted repeatedly in the first by Jesus himself.
But all would be surprised in the change in the rag tagged group of fishermen, and tax collectors when the Holy Spirit, who had been hinted about in the first film descended on them on Pentecost.
The budget of post editing for CGI alone would have been larger than the cost of the rest of the film.
Jesus’ ascension is as important belief as Jesus’ resurrection.
We express this every Sunday when we recite the Creed.
While doing some research for this homily,
I learned that there are some theologians who think it is problematic in our time,
That with what we know from science,
Heaven is not in the sky above the clouds.
One source states:
The cosmology of the author of Luke-Acts reflects the beliefs of his age, which envisioned a three-part cosmos with the heavens above, an Earth centered on Jerusalem in the middle, and the underworld below. Heaven was separated from the Earth by the firmament, the visible sky, a solid inverted bowl where God’s palace sat on pillars in the celestial sea.
Humans looking up from Earth saw the floor of Heaven, as was God’s throne.
The source continues,
“the typical mind-set and worldview of the time conditioned what was actually seen and how the recording of such seeings was conceptualized, and departure into heaven could only be conceived in terms of ‘being taken up ‘, a literal ascension.”
My theory, and it is just my theory is that Jesus actually was lifted up physically, as depicted in the beautiful stained glass window behind the Altar and then changed.
Not because heaven was above the sky as was thought in those days,
but because that is what where his followers thought it was.
What made Jesus such a great teacher, and how he kept the disciple interest was his use of parables.
He was able to keep his listeners attention while revealing deeper truths about His Father, or how we need to love one another, or God’s idea on justice.
Optics were a part of his teaching gift as well
If Jesus just left to go to the Father in Heaven, that is, if he just disappeared, or dissolved as if he was being beamed up to the starship Enterprise, how would Luke describe Jesus’ ascension.
It couldn’t have ended with Jesus’ disappearing.
I believe Jesus thought it important that his disciples knew where he went and could bear witness to that fact.
They could say they saw him physically ascend.
Just as they could truthfully report they saw him after he rose from the dead.
And after all that, it doesn’t matter so much the how, but more on the what.
Jesus was no longer physically on Earth, but had returned, body, mind, and spirit to his Father in Heaven.
What is the message to us today?
Christians believe in the resurrection of their physical bodies.
And they too will ascend to Heaven, body mind and spirit as Jesus had.
Our bodies won’t break down, nor will we get sick or die.
Jesus gives us some hints, during his forty days after his resurrection of what it might be like.
While his body still bore the scars from his crucifixion,
he wasn’t bound physically to the limitations we are.
He could just appear in a room where the doors had been locked.
An Irish cousin of mine, Emily had suffered for many years with Multiple Sclerosis.
She described her view of Heaven to me once as running in the fields back in County Down.
To someone who had been confined to a wheelchair for much of her adult life, running in a field would be Heaven, as would seeing departed loved ones again.
I think it boils down to God is faithful to his promises to us.
He always is. Even when we think he has abandoned us
And for all of us, it will be one sequel, the sequel to our life on Earth, that will be so much greater than the original.