Luke 24:44-51

I enjoy watching science fiction. Through all the technology and otherworldliness, science fiction is at its very heart about asking the big questions. Questions of  mortality, eternity, morality, and responsibility. As I was reflecting on the strangeness of the Ascension, I remembered a story from my favorite sci-fi show, Doctor Who.

It’s a classic British television series complete with aliens and time travel and paradoxes. In one episode we learn about a device called a Chronolock, which appears as a tattoo of a number which counts down to the time of the victim’s inevitable death. It was a form of punishment inflicted by the mayor of the town, and only she had the ability to free the victim from the curse of the Chronolock.

When the Doctor and his companion, Clara, arrive to the town, the mayor swears an oath to protect them. They are on a mission to figure out the mysterious tattoo that has appeared on their friend’s neck. It’s been counting down by the minute, and there’s less than an hour left to save him.

Believing that the mayor’s oath will protect her, Clara devises a scheme to take the Chronolock for herself. She agrees and the tattoo transfers to her, but when the mayor realizes what Clara had done, her face drops. According to the conditions of the Chronolock, the victim could pass it on or have it removed by the mayor, but not both. You can’t cheat the Chronolock. In the final moments, Clara faces down her own death and gives up the ghost. It’s inescapable. Her fate had been sealed. There was no way out. “You can pass it on, but you can’t cheat it altogether”.

On the surface, the Ascension story feels a bit like this to me. We’re following along with God’s great plan to save humanity through Jesus. He’s gone into the depths of hell and back for us, appearing to cheat death entirely. He’s been raised up from the dead. The stone is rolled away, and he is reunited with the disciples once again.

Jesus has taken away the seal of our death by taking on death for Himself and destroying it by resurrection. He has the protection, the authority from God to do so. And so, it would appear, death was cheated at Easter. This would seem to be the natural end of the story. But it’s not.

Here we are, about 40 days later. 40 days later Jesus blessed them and withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.

Think about the span of time between Easter and today. That’s the amount of time that the disciples spent with the Jesus after He survived death. That’s the amount of time they had to process their grief and understand the power of new life before Jesus was taken away again. And it feels to me almost like a second death.

On the surface, it’s an anticlimax. A Chronolock. An inevitability. “You can pass death on, but you can’t cheat it altogether”. Forty days of denying the truth that everything that has come from God is going to God, and we can only hang on so long before our loved ones– including Jesus– must depart from us.

But something else is happening here. Jesus is entering the heavens, not to die, but to be the firstborn into eternal life, the promise of God for all. The One who had descended from the heavens and took this mortal life was ascending, raising this mortal life to immortality.

Christ has not cheated death. He has destroyed it forever. The second death was the entry into abundant and everlasting life. The first death was accompanied with tears. The second with worshipping and great joy. The first with sorrow, the second with a renewed hope. The second death is the hope and promise of eternal life.

Jesus used the word “fulfilled”. For the gospel story, the incarnation and the ascension are bookends of the brief life of Jesus here on Earth.

But the Ascension is not only about heavenly things. Jesus didn’t depart from this Earth to abandon it but to lift it up.

It is precisely in the going away that Jesus’ mission transforms to commission. Jesus has opened the disciples’ minds, He has taught them and shown them the power of God repeatedly. He has made known the promises of God in the scriptures. But this final commission to the disciples passes the torch in a real way: we are called to be God’s witnesses. To share the story of Jesus, to call ourselves and others to awareness of another way of living, the way of forgiveness, returning to Our Creator who gives us life.

Jesus told His disciples “See, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high”.

Like trying to understand the keys on a piano without ever hearing it played, these words are quite strange without the Festival of Pentecost. Next Sunday, we will celebrate the sending of God’s spirit on the disciples and out into the whole world. By God’s Spirit, we are clothed with power from on high– power to love, serve, and forgive. Power to receive new life and be transformed. This whole world is lifted up.

The disciples went out with joy because they trusted that even when Jesus ascended in body His Spirit would never depart from them. Jesus said “I am always with you, to the end of the age”.

And Christ is with us. Jesus’ prayer for us in the gospel of John reads nearly as a poem:

I made known to them your name
and I will make it known,
that the love with which you loved me
may be in them and I in them.

The love of God is within us as a sign of God’s love for us in Christ and Christ’s presence among us. This is the foundational promise of the church. It is not we alone who act, but we are called and empowered by God the Holy Parent, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit to love one another, family, friend, neighbor, and stranger.

Teresa of Avila, a nun and mystic of the sixteenth century, understood the Ascension to mean Christ had entrusted us with the responsibility to be the body of Christ in the church. She wrote this:

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Friends, we should not be discouraged by the weight of this responsibility. We are called to be the body of Christ, The one who has called us will empower us for this task. The Spirit is on Her way, guiding us and surprising us anew each day. May our hearts and minds be open to the Spirit’s movement in the season of Pentecost. Amen.