[AI translation] This feast, the feast of the Ascension of Christ, is a modest one in our calendar. It is slowly losing its festive character, even though it is a moment of great importance in the history of salvation. I, for my part, love it very much, because it is a day that always confronts us with a great mystery that cannot be pondered and spoken about enough. And that mystery is the mystery of heaven, the mystery of the afterlife, the mystery of heaven. And how great the significance of heaven is for life on earth, how much faith in the afterlife can influence the practice of life in this world: I experienced this again recently in connection with a new Hungarian film. There is a scene in the film The Spiral Staircase when a girl is involved in a sinful affair with a married man and suddenly she almost screams out the scream of the 'man inside': "The afterlife has been taken away from me, what's to keep me?" The film rolls on. Most viewers fail to notice the great Christian truth of this sentence, even though it says that the belief in eternal life has a life-forming, moral significance in one's life: so if I believe that there is an invisible world, a heaven: then I live my life on earth differently in this belief than if I do not believe in it. Well: this feast, wrongly called Holy Thursday, directs our gaze to heaven, in order to live differently here on earth!The change that Christ's ascension brought to the lives of the disciples is described in our Word: they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Hitherto hesitant, fearful and pessimistic, the disciples now return with great joy to the very place they would have preferred to flee from, where they had felt as if danger was lurking around every corner. And later on, whatever happens to them, this remains the keynote of their lives, of their individuality: joy, even great joy! The joy they felt on the Mount of Olives when Jesus was separated from them! By human logic, this is totally incomprehensible: what is there to rejoice about "Jesus being taken away from them and taken up into heaven"? (Blessed are they that see not, and believe.) For the followers of Christ must henceforth live in this world as those who have no tangible proof of the truth of their faith, and who can see nothing of the greatness and power of Him in whom they believe with their eyes. Since the ascension, we can no longer simply go to Jesus with our questions and problems and ask Him for answers as the disciples did before. Since the Ascension, we are always at a loss again when a fellow human being suffers a great loss and wants to know from us, as believers in Christ, what the meaning of his suffering is. Since the Ascension, we cannot hide from the dangers and threats of life in the embracing arms of Jesus, like a child in its mother's arms, but must walk our way in terror and fear, seemingly all alone. Since the Ascension, we, the Church of Christ, have been a defenceless little group of people, sometimes suspected, accused, persecuted by the world, sometimes for good reason, sometimes for no reason, because we do not want to and cannot fit into the order and pattern of the world, and who, when called to account, can only refer to our Lord, the Lord who lived among us two thousand years ago and then suddenly disappeared forever. Isn't it strange that the Church is the people of an invisible King, the army of a Leader whom no one living today has ever seen?! What then is joyful in the fact of the ascension? What is the secret of these people who return here to Jerusalem after the farewell with such great joy?!
I could summarize in three points from the Scriptures what Jesus' followers gain from His ascension! Those disciples there, when they looked for Jesus who had disappeared from their sight, sensed something of the mystery that had been made complete in them after Pentecost, that Jesus was now closer to them than He had been before! Yes: that is the first benefit of His ascension, that He is now closer to us than He was when He was on earth. He is closer because He is now in heaven. And the invisible world we call heaven has the characteristic not of being far away from us, but of being invisible to us. "A cloud caught their eyes," the description says quite accurately. Between them and Christ there was a cloud. I could say that between the visible world, the material, the tangible, the material world and Christ. This is the cloud that now hides Jesus from us, from our eyes used to seeing the material world. It is not because of the distance between heaven and earth that we do not see Jesus now, but because of the essential difference between heaven and earth. That cloud does not separate Christ from the faithful, but obscures him; that farewell reception there on the Mount of Olives does not separate Jesus from his brothers and sisters - like a train moving off from those who remain in the station - but makes him invisible. Heaven is another way of being, a higher quality of life, one that excludes the possibility of any technical, logical or chemical research. Neither microscope nor telescope can reveal even the smallest detail of it, but it can only be known by revelation from there. Heaven, therefore, is not a certain place in this world, in outer space or beyond, but another world, another form of life, an existence whose essence no one can describe. Precisely because it is quite different from this life form and this world in which we live.
What happened there, on the Mount of Olives, was not a change of place, but a change of being: that is, Jesus moved from a state of being bound by the laws of the earth to a state of being in the omnipotence and omnipresence of God. This means, in effect, that the heavenly Jesus can be met where the earthly Jesus never was! The apostle Paul met Him on the road to Damascus. And for me, He appeared to me for the first time in my life on the Dutch coast. So the Ascension does not mean that heaven has closed and Jesus is now enthroned behind closed doors in some nice golden throne room where human thought and prayer cannot follow. Jesus has not gone! He will still teach, speak, heal, help, comfort, meet with His own, love, guide, just as before, but invisibly! Jesus is closer to you, even at this moment, than the one sitting next to you. Luther once said, "The Lord is closer to you than your shirt. Is the nearness of Christ to us as much a joy as it was for the disciples, or is it perhaps the terror that we have a Lord from whom we cannot escape, from whom we cannot hide, from whom we cannot shake off, from whom we cannot escape? Yes: is it joy or terror to you? Is it a reassurance or a threat?
For the disciples, it was perhaps also a joy because they also felt that there was now more opportunity than before to realise the beauty and fullness of the Christian life. And this is the second benefit of the ascension for us too, that is, that through faith in the ascended Christ we live more fully the reality of the Christian life. How? We read in our Word, "He lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, that while he blessed them, he separated himself from them, and took them up into heaven." The gesture we see a person make at the moment of their farewell: their smile or their tears or their last words are deeply engraved in our memories and will always remain so. The last image of Jesus is always of him raising his hands in blessing. In this way he was invisible to the eyes of his brothers and sisters.
And this is how we must always see him before our eyes in faith: as one who blesses! Today we hardly know what blessing means. Perhaps a father or mother at the moment of death has laid his hands on someone's head in blessing. Often one feels the power of such a blessing for a lifetime. A parent's blessing may keep a child from doing something wrong, or it may help to carry a burden when it becomes too heavy for us. Blessing is something invisible and immeasurable, but it is something that is real, something that can make a big difference in one's life and can be sorely missed if it is not there... How about the blessing of Christ! The last earthly image of Jesus left to us by witnesses: the blessing Christ with uplifted hands. It was a blessed hand. May not only Thomas, but the whole world and all generations see once more, for the last time, the redeeming wounds of His hand. In these wounds he died, and this death became our redemption! Jesus' last movement on earth was a demonstration of His redeeming grace and mercy! Let this last film frame of the drama of redemption be indelibly etched in our souls: such is our Christ in heaven! So Jesus does not leave us with a sigh of relief, but remains united with us and we with Him. His hand of blessing unites us to Himself, the downward pull of sin is broken by His upward pull. His hand of blessing over us is a real communication of power: it is a blessing that encourages, heals, comforts, truly keeps us from sin, helps us to do good, lightens our burdens. Under this blessing, man can face and overcome anything here and now. Under this blessed hand, even in the midst of a decaying world order, the Christian man is not pessimistic, for he has fellowship with the ultimate life, and nothing can discourage or intimidate him any more. By the power of this blessing we ourselves can become a blessing in the world. Were not the disciples right when, with the memory of such a sight, with the certainty of Christ's blessing on their lives in their hearts, they rejoiced, returning to Jerusalem with great joy! Whoever lives and arranges his life under the blessed hand of Christ: may rejoice today always!
Finally, the disciples also rejoiced because, at that glorious moment of ascension, they had experienced something of the majestic power and glory into which Jesus had been exalted after His humiliation on earth. In the ascension, the hidden divinity of Jesus, the power of God, is revealed to the disciples: behold, the earth can no longer carry him away, the weight of his divine glory is pulling him up into heaven! Now was revealed to them in reality: who was He who had walked among them! Now they had glimpsed something of the power that Jesus Christ represents! Not the kind of power, authority, dignity that we humans know, or that any of us can have, but, as He said, all authority in heaven and earth is His. He has all the power of the Creator of heaven and earth, the only, ultimate, all-embracing power. A power from which there is no escape, from which no one can escape, before which one must bow down and worship!
Yes, that is what the disciples did, so the report says: "And they worshipped Him...". This is the first time that the disciples "worshiped" Jesus. Up to now, it was always a matter of admiring Him, admiring Him, looking up to Him in awe, but now, and from now on, people "worship" Him! And it is written that the time is coming when every knee will bow at the name of Jesus, of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth! Some will do so rejoicing, others in fear, but all will bow the knee! Everyone! Even those who think they will never bow to him. Today many are smiling at those who are already bowing their knees to Jesus. And most of the time it is those who are kneeling before other powers, the powers of money, of passion, of the gun, who are smiling. One day they too will be forced to come to Christ! Which group do we belong to: those who will bow the knee to Christ in glory and joy on that day, or those who will do the same with gnashing of teeth and fear? We must choose now. Or, more correctly, we can choose now!
Of the disciples we read that, worshipping Him, they returned with great joy to Jerusalem, to the place where their Lord had been crucified. To go to Jerusalem for them was to enter into struggle, suffering, and incomprehension. And behold: they go with great joy! I think that this is what we should do on this feast day: to ask for and draw strength to go back with renewed joy to our "Jerusalem", to the place where we have to work, struggle, walk, live - live - day after day!
Amen
Date: 15 May 1958, Holy Thursday afternoon.