Feast of the Ascension Year A

[SPEAKER_00]: A reading from the Acts of the Apostles, in my earlier work, Theophilus, I dealt with everything Jesus had done and taught from the beginning, until the day he gave his instructions to the Apostles he had chosen through the Holy Spirit and was taken up into heaven.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had shown himself alive to them after his passion by many demonstrations.

[SPEAKER_00]: For 40 days, he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: When he had been at the table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for what the father had promised.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is, he had said, what you have heard me speak about.

[SPEAKER_00]: John baptized with water, but you, not many days from now, will be baptized with the Holy

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, having met together, they asked him, Lord, has a time come?

[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel?

[SPEAKER_00]: He replied, It is not for you to know the times or dates that the Father has decided by his own authority.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and then you will be my witnesses.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not only in Jerusalem, but throughout Judea and Samaria, and indeed to the ends of the earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: As he said this, he was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud took them from his from their side.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were still staring into this guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: One suddenly, two men in white were standing near them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, why are you men from Galilee staring here looking into this guy?

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus, who was being taken up from you into heaven, this same Jesus will come back in the same way as you have seen him go there.

[SPEAKER_00]: The word of the Lord, the responses

[SPEAKER_00]: God mounts his throne to Shouts of Joy, a Blair of Trumpets for the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: All peoples, clap your hands, cry to God with Shouts of Joy.

[SPEAKER_00]: For the Lord the most high we must fit, great king over all the earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: God goes up with Shouts of Joy, the Lord goes up with Trumpet Blast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sing praise for God, sing praise, sing praise to our king, sing praise.

[SPEAKER_00]: God is king of all the earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sing praise with all your skill.

[SPEAKER_00]: God is king over all the nations.

[SPEAKER_00]: God reigns on his toholy throne.

[SPEAKER_00]: A reading from the letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians.

[SPEAKER_00]: May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and perception of what is revealed to you, to bring full knowledge of Him.

[SPEAKER_00]: May He enlighten the eyes of your mind so that you can see what hope His cool holds for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: What rich glory is He has promised the saints, will inherit, and how infinitely great is the power that He

[SPEAKER_00]: This, you can tell from the strength of his power at the work in Christ, when he used it to raise him from the dead and to make him sit at his right hand in heaven, far away from every sovereignty, authority, power, or domination, or any other name that can be named.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not only in this age, but also in the age to come.

[SPEAKER_00]: He has put all things under his feet.

[SPEAKER_00]: and made him the ruler of everything, the head of the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills the whole creation.

[SPEAKER_01]: The word of the Lord A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.

[SPEAKER_01]: The 11 disciples set out for Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them.

[SPEAKER_01]: When they saw him, they fell down before him, though some hesitated.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus came up and spoke to them.

[SPEAKER_01]: He said, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.

[SPEAKER_01]: Go therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptise them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I

[SPEAKER_01]: And know that I'm with you always, yes, to the end of time.

[SPEAKER_01]: The gospel of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_01]: on the face of the ascension, our first reading is from the Acts of the Apostles, and as you might know, Acts was written by Luke, and it's a continuation, essentially the second part of Luke's Gospel.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the reason that I raised this is because today we are reading Matthew's Gospel, but if we had Luke's Gospel, we would have noticed the difference immediately, because you would have had the Gospel, and you would have had the account in Acts to compare immediately.

[SPEAKER_01]: In Luke's Gospel, he treats the ascension as happening on the same day as Easter Day.

[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, the day of the resurrection when Jesus rose from the dead, where is in Acts, which we read today, he dates the ascension 40 days after the resurrection.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, it's obvious that Luke as the writer of both books is not concerned with the actual date of the ascension.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's not trying to write a historical book here, just that it happened as a fact.

[SPEAKER_01]: So each of the two different passages, the one in Luke and the one in Acts is concerned with its own sort of theological message.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Gospel of Luke ends with Jesus' priestly blessing as He ascends in Luke 24.

[SPEAKER_01]: In Acts today, it compares the ascension to how Jesus will return one day from heaven.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we move on to looking at our gospel and we take a look at the text a little bit closer, this appearance of the risen Jesus on the mountain in Galilee is a very important scene in the gospel of Matthew, you know, we know that the mountain was always a symbol of meeting with God, a place of meeting with God and Galilee is also a key place of revelation, obviously

[SPEAKER_01]: And so from Moses to the apostles, we see this connection between the mountain and Galilee.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we notice that the text says 11 disciples.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it was the 12 disciples minus Judas, because this was before the apostles had chosen Matthias to replace Judas.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then in verse 17, it said that when the disciples saw Jesus, they fell down before Him.

[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, they worshiped Him, and the text says, though some hesitated.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's easy for us to judge the disciples from our position, but there are any number of reasons for that hesitation.

[SPEAKER_01]: This at all happens so quickly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus' condemned He dies, there's the resurrection, and now all of a sudden they've faced with the ascension.

[SPEAKER_01]: The hesitation might be that they may have doubted that this experience, which was something they had never ever happened to them before, was real, maybe they were dreaming, or another explanation could be, remember, they had been Jews until five minutes ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: and then worshiped Yahweh their whole lives.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so you've got this feeling of the propriety, all the, the rightness of where the worshiping Jesus, who was a man, yes, he was a God man, but he was a man and they had gotten to know him over the past few years.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they were only now coming to fully understand him as God.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, is it right for them to worship him?

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's, there's a hesitation there.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, like imagine if one of your friends or your family became Prime Minister of the country, you know, and you'd want to respect the office and respect them in front of other people and you might address them as Prime Minister, but it would feel awkward at first because you've known them for so many years.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now take that awkwardness and times it by ten.

[SPEAKER_01]: We then have, at the end of the Gospel, the great commission, which Jesus says go and make disciples of all the nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you can see summarized in this commission, there's three major themes of Matthew's Gospel.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first is that you have the supreme universal authority that has been given to Jesus by his Heavenly Father.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then secondly, the disciples ought to share their discipleship and hand on the teachings of Jesus with all the people, not just their fellow Jesus, all nations.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's quite striking that this is included, and you might say, well, why, you know, in preaching before, I've mentioned that Luke wrote for the Gentiles.

[SPEAKER_01]: And yes, that's right.

[SPEAKER_01]: But hang on, we're not reading from Luke today.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're reading from Matthew.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Matthew was writing primarily for the Jews.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we see that even Matthew knew that his communities, the Jews, needed a kick-up of the, well, needed some encouragement, should we say, to share their faith with non-Jews.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in the third theme is this promise of Jesus' continuing presence with the disciples and their successes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And here, I mean, we've had Jesus as death and his resurrection, but now this is it.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's going away.

[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, he's ascending to the Father.

[SPEAKER_01]: He will no longer be physically here.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's done.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at these last moments of His life on earth, we see that we have come full circle.

[SPEAKER_01]: What was the name given to Jesus when he first came to Earth as a baby at his conception in the very first chapter of the Gospel in Matthew 1, 23?

[SPEAKER_01]: What was that name?

[SPEAKER_01]: Emmanuel.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we see the full form of that name here, Emmanuel, which means,

[SPEAKER_01]: God is with us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Jesus says in our gospel today that He is with us until the end of time.

[SPEAKER_01]: We are not alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we are to tell others and show others that they are not alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: That is the great commission.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'd just like to finish by letting us reflect on the weight of this for a moment, humanly speaking.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it is true that when Jesus was teaching, he was aware, and now we, from our vantage point, we were aware that he was not just speaking to the immediate audience, but that his teachings were for the whole Christian community across time.

[SPEAKER_01]: But in doing that, we can lose sight of the personal side of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the Bible is the Word of God and it's an account of salvation history.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is all that.

[SPEAKER_01]: but it is also a story about someone who loved deeply and was deeply loved by his brothers and sisters in return.

[SPEAKER_01]: When we read, for example, this great commission, Jesus giving instructions to Jesus' disciples, go there for, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you and know that I am with you always, yes, to the end of time.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we read that as a run-on line, it is an instruction.

[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a full stop.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what if we read it like that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Go there for, make disciples of all the nations baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you.

[SPEAKER_01]: And know that I am with you always.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, to the end of time.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is not just an instruction, but a poignant, it's a personal farewell.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus wasn't just speaking to the future.

[SPEAKER_01]: He was saying goodbye to His disciples.

[SPEAKER_01]: These words weren't said to a stadium.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were speaking to His closest friends.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, He knew that He would see them again, but the separation would still hurt.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you go and see somebody offered the airport for an extended period, we know that if all things go well,

[SPEAKER_01]: And so it is up to us to bring Jesus now to the world, to make him present where he is not present in the world, and making present in the lives of those that we encounter, because where he is not there, there will always be hurt and suffering.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you can bring people food and clothes, and we can help them psychologically, but most importantly, we need to bring those who are suffering

[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.