“Four parting gifts”
Meditation – Thursday, May 29, 2025
Luke 24: 44-53 (Forward, p. 31) CEV p. 1098
If some highly respected religious leader, say the pope or some other much beloved bishop, was greeting his people for the very last time, his audience would certainly remember and treasure his parting words and actions. How much more this should be the case with our Lord! In His final time with the disciples, just prior to His ascension, He leaves them (and us) with four parting gifts:
His Scriptures, His written word: furthermore, even up unto the end,
He spends time in instructing His disciples to their meaning, helping
them to understand those Scriptures. How much more can we
expect Him to do the same, even though He is no longer physically
with us!
His commission: He leaves us with a job to do, to share His message
with the entire world. So, He doesn’t leave them, or us, just to sit
around and ‘twiddle our thumbs.’ We have a job to do.
His promise of the Holy Spirit: He promises to equip us for this task,
to give us power, strength, direction, and ability far beyond our own.
His blessing, His hands raised in blessing: what a wonderful and
lasting gift, that He wants to bless us in what we are and what we do.
And so He makes His departure, but not without giving us a job to do and all the resources we need in order to do it. And so there’s no time to waste, and no time to sit around and do nothing. No, it is ‘en-avant’, ever forward—with each other, and with Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Forward notes: “Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven” (verses 50-51).
Commemoration: The Ascension
“From our modern perspective, the Ascension is one of the weirder events in Christ’s life. On a surface level, it is kind of odd. Depictions of the event in art are even more bizarre. Some paintings and statues of the Ascension of our Lord are downright hilarious, showing only the feet of Jesus as he rises to heaven.
“But the very strangeness of this event can pull us out of our usual way of looking at the world and remind us that in Jesus everything has changed. At Christmas, we celebrate God joining us in our humanity. With the Ascension, God in Christ takes that humanity back to God. Jesus does not return to where he came from on his own. God in Christ did not descend and take on our humanity simply to be with us—as extraordinarily world-altering as that act is—but to drag us back up with him into the very heart of God so that we might dwell there forever.”
Moving Forward: “Research different images of the Ascension. Which ones resonate with you? Which ones provoke deeper reflection?”