One of the many reasons I enjoy reading the story of the ascension of Christ is because the disciples were clueless. After years of living with Jesus, they still didn’t understand why he came to earth in the first place, or what would come next. Some days I can derive a tremendous amount of solidarity from that one, tiny detail because some days I feel as clueless as they were.
There they were, standing on a hillside, talking to a man who was supposed to be dead, who was dead for 36 hours, who had been tortured and executed by the Roman empire until all of the blood had been drained out of his body. People don’t recover from those kinds of injuries. And yet, there he was, living and breathing in a way that seemed even more alive than he was the first time!
If Christ would have made only one appearance after being raised from the dead, even if he were to show himself to every one of his followers at once, they might have dismissed the experience. It could have been labeled as a mass hallucination, or merely a vision. But Jesus made more than a dozen appearances during the six weeks that passed between his resurrection and his ascension.
He surprises one of his most devoted disciples, a woman named Mary, while she is frantically looking for the person responsible for raiding his tomb and stealing his corpse.
He appears out of thin air to a bunch of terrified disciples who were hiding behind locked windows and doors, hoping to avoid being captured and killed by the same people who killed Jesus.
He shows up in a crowd of five hundred people, many of them his friends and family members, as if nothing had changed, even though everything had changed.
He even holds a fish barbecue on the beach for a few of the disciples who were in the middle of an attempt to return to their pre-Jesus vocation: fishing.
And yet, after dedicating his ministry to the disenfranchised, to the “worthless” people, after allowing himself to be subjected to countless injustices with no complaining, after blatantly displaying his lack of earthly authority, they were still wondering when Jesus would overthrow the Roman rule of Israel and take the kingship for himself.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Letters From Candies Creek to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.