Acts 1:1-11. "Why Did Jesus Ascend Into Heaven?"

In this episode Tim discusses the various encounters Jesus had, while highlighting his refusal to fulfill selfish desires in encouragement of spiritual growth. After his resurrection, Jesus spends time with his disciples, explaining Scripture and explains his ongoing presence despite his future physical absence.

Jesus' voluntary human life and his role in salvation, stresses the importance of having dependence on God. Jesus' ascension presents well-being reasoning for spiritual maturity while still providing our needs through the church.

This Sunday sermon, based on Acts 1 verses 1-11, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on May 12, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)        

Transcript

“God reigns over the nations; God is seated on his holy throne.” Amen.

One day, people came to listen to Jesus. They stayed way into the evening. He knew they hadn’t packed food, so he took a boy’s sack lunch, had his disciples pass it around, and fed a crowd of five thousand men plus women and children with the food. The people decided they would make him their bread king! No one would need to pack lunch ever again!

Another time, Jesus was teaching, and a man in the crowd suddenly yelled out and interrupted him. “Hey, Jesus, my brother needs to split our inheritance with me! Make him do it!” 

Yet another occasion: Jesus’ own disciples came to him and wanted him to settle an argument. “Which of us is the greatest?”

No one needed those things from Jesus. So Jesus did not deliver on them. He fed those people who had followed him to hear him preach, but he did not provide miraculous lunch the next day, and he didn’t let them make him “bread king.” He did not offer up a judgment for the man negotiating the family dispute. He did not pick one disciple as the greatest among them.

After his resurrection, Jesus spent forty days with the disciples. On the very first evening of his return to life, he met two of them walking on a country road. They didn’t recognize him. They were sad. They had heard that some of the women had seen angels proclaiming he was alive, that his tomb was somehow empty! But they didn’t know what to think. What they needed, at that moment, was to know that Jesus was alive.

Jesus did not immediately tell them that he was Jesus, alive and in the flesh. Instead, he started talking about the Bible with them. He went into the Old Testament (which was the entire Bible for them at the time) and he showed them, on the basis of one passage after another, why the Messiah - God’s chosen Servant, the Savior - had to die, but then also had to rise! And once they had realized this, and then realized that it was Jesus telling them these things, he vanished. Disappeared. They didn’t need him there anymore.

He showed up later that evening, though, when those two disciples had run back to tell the others about their stroll with Jesus. Jesus appeared there, in the house where that larger group had gathered, and that’s what we heard about in our Gospel reading today. Jesus showed up that evening, late on Easter Sunday, and explained to the whole group how the Bible had always taught that he would die and rise. From that reading: “He said to them, ‘This is what I told you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.’ Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.’”

After that evening, he spends the next forty days with them. But he’s not there consistently. He disappears at times. He eats meals with them, talks with them, teaches as he did before; then he’s gone for periods of time. He’s not a ghost, or a vision. He’s a flesh and blood being, who eats and drinks with them and lets them feel the scars left from the nails at his crucifixion. But he’s also able to appear and depart immediately, at will. 

We might mistakenly conclude that something fundamentally changed in Jesus after his resurrection; that he received new power, new authority. This is a misunderstanding. Jesus has always existed as the Son of God, true God from true God. During his life on earth, he retained the power and ability which was always his, as true God. But during his life, for the time between his conception in Mary’s womb and his death on the cross, he voluntarily gave up the full use of his divine prerogatives. God, who feeds all things, hungered and thirsted. God, who never sleeps, got tired. God, who holds the universe in the palm of his hand, nursed at his mother’s breast. This was not because Jesus lost powers when he was born, then regained powers after his resurrection. Jesus Christ voluntarily, freely, readily, took up life as human beings experience life. He depended, as a human being, on God and on God’s goodness, rather than relying on himself.

That is the fundamental distinction between God and everything he has created. Creation depends. God does not depend. Firstly, creation depends on God. Creation - by that I mean, the whole universe, everything that exists - would not exist had God not created.

Secondly, creation depends on creation. God has created a world which is beautifully, wonderfully intertwined. My kids and I watched a bumblebee buzzing from flower to flower the other day while we waited for the school bus. God created these two things to work together, having the bee participate in the pollinating act as it gathers materials to make its food. God brings about new human life as man and woman come together.

Behind all of those natural processes, still, God is at work. The Bible very clearly teaches this. God did not create a clockwork world, which he admires from a distance. The Bible says that he is involved in all aspects of his creation. He knits together new human life inside the womb, Psalm one thirty-nine. He sends forth the rain and the snow, Psalm one thirty-five. He clothes the flowers of the field in their brilliant colors, Matthew six. 

When Jesus lived in our world, he needed rain to fall so that food could grow so that his parents could feed him. He voluntarily did this. He could, at any moment, simply have chosen to stop. He could have ended his need to eat and sleep. He could have stopped walking everywhere and simply appeared where he wanted to be. But he did not. He experienced life as you and I experience, it so that he could live life perfectly as you and I cannot. 

This was crucial to the plan of salvation. Jesus’ death is not the only event which was part of our salvation. If his death was all that we needed to be reconciled to God, Jesus could have appeared as a full-grown man, compelled some soldiers to nail him up and let him die, and that would have been it. But Jesus’ life itself was a part of God’s plan for our salvation. 

Through Jesus’ death, God punished our sin. Through Jesus’ life, God credits us with lives of perfect love. The infinitely valuable death of Jesus covers over all guilt. The infinite humility of Jesus’ life - the eternal Son, true God from true God, living as a human being - that humility is credited to us, to our account, by God. God looks at us, because of what Jesus has done, and he sees us as perfectly innocent - guilt removed - and perfectly loving, toward him and toward our neighbors. God sees us that way because Jesus lived life that way and because God has united us to Jesus. 

Our union with Jesus takes place when God creates faith in our hearts. God does that through his Word, as Paul teaches in Romans chapter ten: “Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” We call the message about what Jesus has done - his perfect life and innocent death, both carried out on our behalf - we call that message the Gospel, which means “the good news.” God’s power is active in that message. The Gospel is not merely words. The Gospel, God promises, has his power working behind it. Just as we see God’s hand at work behind rain clouds and blooming flowers, so we also hear him speaking behind the Gospel message. No matter where or how the Gospel is presented - from a pulpit, over a cup of coffee, in a book - God is behind it.

This is underscored for us when we hear Paul tell us that Jesus, when he ascended to heaven, sent down gifts in the form of particular people. Paul names these categories: “The apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers.” “The apostles” - that would be the eleven men who were directly called by Jesus as the leaders of his people, plus Matthias, whom they added after Judas killed himself, and lastly Paul, whom Jesus himself added to the group years later. “The prophets” - Paul has in mind here those who served Jesus’ church in the Old Testament era, before Jesus was born, people who were directly called by God to share messages with his people. 

Then we have three further categories - “the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers.” Those who belong to these categories are not chosen directly by Jesus. They are chosen indirectly, through the church itself. “Evangelists” are specifically those who share the Gospel, the good news with people who don’t yet know it. The Greek word there, evangel, is the word for “Gospel, good news.” The “pastors” is the Greek word poimen, “shepherd.” These are those who care for the congregations. They comfort them when they face hardship, they confront them when they are sinning. We sometimes call this office the office of “elder.” Then finally, the “teachers.” Teachers take other believers deeper into God’s Word. The pastor, the shepherd, does so while addressing specific issues. The teacher does so more generally, not to address a particular problem. In our modern churches, the people we call “pastor” are often asked to wear all three hats; to be the main evangelist toward outsiders, to shepherd the members as individuals, and to teach the group as a whole.

Christ’s own work covered the responsibilities of all of those offices. He did what the prophets did as he shared God’s Word with people and pointed them ahead to his own cross. He did what the apostles did. For those forty days after his resurrection, he was an apostle to the apostles. He pointed back to his cross and explained to them what had taken place. He was a pastor as he dealt with individuals; we think of his calling Peter back into the church after Peter denied him. This was a pastoral action. He was an evangelist. We look at his interactions with the Samaritan woman at the well, or the many Gentiles of Galilee. He was a teacher. We look at his Sermon on the Mount, where he gives a great multitude of people a grand explanation of sin, grace, faith, and love. Christ could very well himself serve as prophet, as apostle, as evangelist, as pastor, as teacher. He’d do it better than anyone else!

But he does not intend to do so.

Why did Jesus ascend to heaven? Why didn’t he stick around on earth past those forty days? Why isn’t he still here? The answer sounds a little rude, but it’s what we hear the apostle Paul tell us. He left so that we can grow up.

Paul says, from our second reading, verse eleven, “Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants.” 

What does it mean to be an infant? An infant is dependent on its parents, and on its parents alone. What does it mean to grow up? Growing up does not simply mean becoming more independent. It means developing dependence on something other than simply mother and father. An adult is not truly an independent being. Only God is an independent being. An adult simply manages more complex dependencies. An adult depends on their car to get to work. An adult depends on an employer to pay them, or on customers to purchase from them. An adult depends on their spouse to assist them in raising their children. As much as we want to look at ourselves as becoming more and more independent as we grow up, from God’s point of view, we grow up as we better manage our nature as dependent beings.

So Jesus, in the church, gives us people to depend on. Pastors, teachers, elders. He does not lead us directly. He is still involved in it all. Just as he is the one behind the rain and behind the food on our table, so too he is the one behind those who serve us in the church. This is what Paul means when he says that Christ “ascended higher than all the heavens in order to fill the whole universe.” The words “whole universe” there don’t quite reflect Paul’s words in Greek, although it’s not a bad way to render what Paul says. Literally, Paul says that Christ ascended to fill “the-things all-things.” The best English word might be “everything.” Jesus fills everything from his throne in heaven. He’s behind the breakfast you ate this morning and behind the gas you put into your car last week. He’s behind the employer who signs your checks and the teacher who showed you that one plus one equals two. He’s behind the pastor teaching you and the friendly faces who’ll greet you over coffee downstairs. He fills all things to make sure we have what we need.

There’s another part of growing up. We learn to distinguish our needs from our wants. A child wants ice cream for breakfast, but they’ll tell you they need it. The people wanted Jesus to be their bread king. The man wanted Jesus to arbitrate his dispute with his brother. The disciples wanted Jesus to name a top dog among them. None of them needed these things. Children can’t distinguish between what they need and what they want. Adults learn to do so.

So what do we need? We need our daily bread. We need community with other humans. We need Law and Gospel preached to us. Jesus, from where he now sits on heaven’s throne, makes sure that we are provided with all those things. But because he does so from heaven - not standing himself in front of us - he gives us the opportunity to grow up as we receive these gifts from him through other people. 

We receive our life as a gift from him through our mothers - appropriate to remember them today, as we celebrate Jesus’ ascension. Our mothers and our fathers feed us, change us, teach us to speak. Then we meet teachers, through whom Jesus blesses us with new knowledge and skills. Jesus provides us with our daily bread through these people. 

We need community with others. Our parents are also Jesus’ first answer to that need. Then we meet others; siblings, friends, coworkers, all of whom Jesus uses to answer our need for community. Eventually, we take up the role of providing others with community, if God blesses us with children, or with younger coworkers to mentor.

And we need Law and Gospel, the Word of God. So Jesus gives pastors, teachers, evangelists, to share that Word with us. He also gives parents the responsibility of being the first pastors, teachers, evangelists, to their children. Jesus makes sure that happens through those people.

Jesus ascended to heaven so that he could provide us with all that we need in a way that leads us to grow up in faith and in love. And one day - just as the angels promised to those disciples, standing there on the mountain - one day he will return, and he will greet us face to face. Until that day, dear friends, let us love and support one another, as the body of Christ, built up through our connection to the Head. God grant it for Jesus’ sake, Amen.