[When the feet of Jesus left the earth on the Mount of Olives, the disciples stood there, looking at the lovely figure of Christ, who was about to be seen for eternity, as if they were looking into the invisible world, into heaven. They were oblivious of everything around them, contemplating the apparent mystery of heaven, and the cloud drifted between them and the departing Jesus. So full were their souls of the glory and holiness of heaven opened and closed that they found it almost no surprise that two angelic beings should suddenly appear beside them. When one's heart and head are full of heavenly things, the sudden heavenly phenomenon seems almost natural. At this sublime moment of Jesus' glorification, supernatural phenomena seem almost natural.In this state of rapture, the angel's warning was sobering: 'Men of Galilee, what are you looking at in heaven?' It is as if the angel is saying: 'Men, do not waste time looking to heaven, you have other things to do, you must be witnesses of the Lord in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth! Behold, Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, is coming in the same way as you saw him taken up into heaven. Until then, the time is pressing, for until his coming the gospel must be preached to all nations! This is what I want to talk about in more detail!
1) First of all, let us understand that the disciples did not see in the heavenly message that they were looking into heaven, that they were searching the mysteries of heaven, but that this was a testimony to the fact that they were very close to Jesus in faith. The warning is only against looking up to heaven all the time, against standing too long on the Mount of Olives, and being absorbed in the invisible! Looking at heaven in its own time is very good and necessary. He who has once known God cannot live without looking up again and again, beyond the visible! For up there is the living Christ, the source not only of salvation, but also of all the power necessary for the faithful fulfilment of our earthly vocation to life here on earth and for our continuance in the faith. If we did not have such Mount Olivet hours in our lives, when we are strengthened again and again in communion with Christ, we would wither away. Every believer needs to go regularly to that particular Mount of Olives, to rise above the noise of earthly life and look into the heavenly world. For the Lord does not give us once and for all the strength to carry burdens, to fight battles, to overcome temptations for a lifetime, but always just enough to meet our needs at any given moment.
And in this respect it is not important what work we are called to do in this life. Not everyone is an apostle in the way that the first apostles were. In this world there is a need for a manual worker and a scholar and a merchant and a teacher, a housewife and a doctor, a poet and an artist, a miner and a clerk. The tasks are different, but the power to do them all for the glory of God and the good of men comes from above, and so it is essential for all of us to look to heaven and care for those above. This is also the church service we gather for on Sundays, where a piece of the heavenly world is revealed to us through the proclamation of the Word: such an hour on the Mount of Olives. The daily silence over the Bible, where you confess your sins to the Lord in private, where you ask for forgiveness, where you open the innermost secrets of your heart to Him: that is also such a heavenly look on the Mount of Olives, a strengthening. It is then that the heart becomes light, the gaze is cleansed, the conscience is quieted, the troubled face is smoothed out, the soul is filled with love, good intentions, and willingness. These are precious moments, hours when we stand in spirit on the Mount of Olives, looking up to heaven, where the living Jesus is! I could not live without this opportunity from God!
2) But: it is also possible to abuse this God-given opportunity. And this abuse consists in being so preoccupied with things above, with heavenly things, that one forgets all about earthly things. There is not only the man who is so preoccupied with earthly things, problems and worries that he forgets about heavenly things, but also, conversely, the man who is so enchanted by the beauty of heaven that he despises earthly things. This world, with its struggles and triumphs, its joys and sorrows, is to him a necessary evil. He would fain leave it if he could. He flees from it to his work, or to solitude, to his imagination - and the religious man to the church. Modern psychology calls this the phenomenon of the overstressed, driven soul seeking relaxation. This relaxation has its justification in certain circumstances, but anyone who comes to church to seek at least an hour's relaxation from the burdens, the duties, the circumstances of life on earth is doing it wrong! Because we are not here to relax from reality, from the world! The search for and the cultivation of our inner relationships with God is never a relaxation, but a right involvement in the problems of the world, in the work of our daily life. Whoever looks to heaven because he despises the earth and does not consider it worth while to give all his heart and all the strength of his hands to the work he has to do on earth, let him now hear the sobering warning of the angels in the Word: "Why stand ye here looking to heaven?"
If you are not here, if you are not reading the Bible, if you are not praying to prepare yourselves to do the daily things of life on earth with honour and profit, why are you here, and what are you doing with God? Spiritual pleasure? You get more of that in a theatre or a concert! Faith is not meant to make you an impractical dreamer, but precisely to make you a more human person. God has so artistically made our two hands, capable of all kinds of work, if it is done under the right direction! With it we take the pen or the hammer, with it we throw it on the horn of the plough, with it we scatter the seed in the earth, with it we throw the colours on the canvas, the shapeless block of marble is made alive under the working of the hand. With it we wipe away tears from a suffering face, with it we caress, give, bless, help - would the Creator have provided us with these two hands of many faculties just to have something to clasp together in prayer? God does not need praying hands that do not do their daily duty well! Prayer whose effect does not extend beyond the utterance of the word "amen" is worthless. It is not worth a look to heaven that does not clear and sharpen our vision to notice and take advantage of earthly opportunities. Faith is not worth anything if it does not always turn into good deeds!
Yes: looking to heaven and having the right orientation and useful orientation on earth are as much interrelated as faith and the good deeds that flow from it. But if I were to put it like this: faith and factory work, or faith and housework, or faith and a good school report, or faith and street sweeping, or faith and office work, or faith and shoe uppers - it is more difficult and more unusual! Yet this is how our faith and our good deeds are related, and in practice, most of the time. Because what is a good deed? It is not the extra, the obligation, the daily work that puts a halo around my head, but the fact that what I do, what I am doing, I do well. Not hating my work out of necessity, as a necessary evil because I have to make a living, but as an opportunity at my fingertips to make the tiny piece of the world I live in a better place! Not only the good deed I do for some charitable purpose with someone, which is specially thanked, which may touch people, which flashes some glory around me, but also any impersonal service in which there is sacrifice, there is loyalty, there is perhaps invisible love, which requires power asked and received from above to perform, and which I may no longer see the immediate fruit of, which does not involve the satisfaction of my own thirst for glory. We will one day be held as much responsible for the performance of our daily tasks as for the care of the needs of our souls.
"...what are you looking at in heaven?" It is good and necessary to look to heaven. Do not fail to do so under any circumstances. But it is precisely so that by it you may grasp the earthly work all the more vigorously and sacrificially. For the blessedness of the solemn minutes and hours spent on the spiritual Mount of Olives is precisely to make you a more faithful servant of the great King, Who comes back from the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead, to call to account the things seen and unseen.
So now, with a mind ready for our earthly tasks, let us look to heaven and pray together:
Teach us to believe, Lord, teach us to ask.
Jesus, you will come again: teach us to ask!
When you have mercy on my life:
Let me stand still. Teach me to believe!
(Canticle 479, verse 4)
Amen
Date: 22 May 1955.