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When Jesus had said these things, as they were looking on, He was lifted up, and a cloud took them out of His sight. You may be seated. Christ is risen. He has risen indeed, hallelujah.
Risen and ascended in all for us, that’s what we delight in tonight, dear saints, on the 1,991st anniversary of the Ascension. But, I think that the important thing of the Ascension, and this is really my goal, I’ve been saying for months, maybe for years, that the Ascension of our Lord is the third most important feast in the church year, perhaps the third – well, no – the third most important event that happened in history. My goal tonight is to convince you of that.
And I want to start by considering that of the eleven things that the Apostles’ Creed confesses, the eleven works of our Lord Jesus Christ, nine of them are finished. One of them is in the future, but one of them, and only one of them, defines how things are right now: that He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father. That is what governs our lives. It’s what shapes our thoughts and our prayers, our hopes and our dreams. It’s what gives us confidence to live in this fallen world, that Jesus ascended into heaven and sits at the Father’s right hand.
Now, to understand the mystery of the Ascension, at least to begin to think about the mystery of the Ascension, we have to think about the mystery first of the incarnation, that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and man in the flesh. Because when we talk about the incarnation, we talk about the two different states, the humiliation of Jesus and the exaltation of Jesus, and the Ascension of Jesus marks the end of His humiliation.
So I want you to think about it in this way. Could you imagine that you have a piece of paper and you draw a line down the middle, and you have two columns? And on the one hand, maybe let’s put it on the left, you have a list of things that God does. And then on the right, you have a list of things that man does. So on that list of things that God does, you have a lot of things like never begins, never ends, holy, perfect, powerful, rules all things, lives in glory. And on the other side, the list of things that man does, you have things like has a birthday, has a death day, has a grave, gets tired and hungry, sick. In fact, there on that list is suffers for sin. Now these are two very different lists.
The life that God lives is very different than the life that man lives. But the incarnation of Jesus means that those two titles of the list are swapped. And the humiliation is that the things that man does now belong to God. God has a birthday. God gets hungry and thirsty. God has a body of flesh and blood. God suffers. God bleeds. God dies. In fact, God suffers for human sin. The astonishing thing of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is not that a man is crucified, but that God is crucified. This is the humiliation of Jesus, where God the Son takes upon Himself our humanity, the fullness of our fallen life, so that He can suffer in our place, be our substitute, and die to forgive our sins, but then enters into the state of glory, where not only is God above the life of man, but now man is above the list of things that God does.
Now a man is eternal. A man lives forever. A man is in every place. A man has all power. A man sits on the throne of God in heaven and rules and reigns all things for us, that God has sunk Himself into our human nature, and then He’s taken that human nature and carried it with Him into glory as the firstfruits of them that rise from the dead, which means that it is for you and for me to follow. If we’re astonished that God is crucified, we’re equally astonished that man is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity.
So the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ means that our life of weakness and even of sin belongs to God, and God’s life of joy and life and peace belongs to us. This is what the Scriptures mean when they say God so loves the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but live forever. It’s God who lives forever, but now He’s given you that life, that perfection, that holiness.
So we sit here with amazement, rejoicing in this great mystery that a man named Jesus Christ sits on the throne of the universe and rules there, and reigns there, and all of that for you. When He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, He brought you with Him.
So that Ephesians 2 says that we now are already seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You say, Pastor, that does not make any sense. I’m seated in the pews at St. Paul Lutheran Church. But where Jesus is, you are. The things that He wins, He wins for you. He has grabbed you so closely that the things that belong to Him are now yours, just like Luther loves to preach it like this: like a husband and wife, that what belongs to the one belongs to the other. They share the same name, the same life, the same hope, the same future, the same family, so you are wedded to Christ and you share the same life and joy and peace and forgiveness and holiness because He’s risen from the dead and ascended into heaven.
Now, I had a friend, Pastor Graff, I still have him I suppose, who said this to me one time, and this is where I started to pay attention to the Ascension in the Scriptures, and I hope you’ll do the same. I hope that while you’re reading through the New Testament this year, you’ll notice all the times that Paul and Peter and John talk about the Ascension of Christ. You start to see it on every page of the New Testament. When I started to pay attention is when he told me this. He said, every error, every false doctrine, and every bad practice in the church grows out of a denial or a forgetting of the Ascension of Jesus.
That we forget that Jesus sits on the throne, that He rules and reigns all things, that He is above all powers and dominions and authorities, that Jesus is in charge, that you have a friend in a high place who loves to hear your prayers and governs all things for the sake of His beloved church. It’s easy to forget, I mean, especially when we’re in the midst of trouble and affliction and it seems like Jesus has taken a break or He’s forgotten about us or something like that.
But we remember tonight and we impress it into our minds and into our hearts that Christ is risen and that Christ is ascended. That the hands that control the universe are the same hands that were nailed to the cross for your life and salvation. Behold these and rejoice. Jesus, who was born for you, who lived and suffered and died for you, who rose from the dead for you, ascended to sit at the Father’s right hand for you.
And this is our life in peace, our confidence, and our hope, in life and in death. Amen. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Now the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
