Jesus Forgot His Ascension Listicle

Looks like Ascension Day is coming up this very week. Which is a nice time to question again the sanity of Jesus, bothering to come at all, and then going away just when we all thought it was going to get really good.

If Jesus had gotten his act together the way modern Christians have, he would have stuck around to ensure the success of his satellite campuses. Barring that possibility–I mean, there were really good reasons for him to go…interceding for us, sitting down at the right hand of the Father, sending the Holy Spirit–he could have at least left a lot of lists laid out in nice files, or written up on clever chalkboards with emojis. He wouldn’t have just said, “It is not for you to know the times of seasons that the Father set by his own authority.”

That’s unhelpful. He should have left clear directions, in the form of lists, lots and lots of lists–Ten Ways to Survive the Next 2000 Years, Three Ways To Evangelize To The Ends Of The Earth, 10,000 Ways To Live Out Your Biblical Gender Identity, 20 Ways To Know I Am With You Always.

Power, after all, lies in knowing what to do and how to do it. As long as you have enough knowledge and know which direction in which to march that knowledge up and down, especially over the lives of other people, the more power you will have to enact the work of the kingdom of God here on earth. Get your head straight, and your list straight, and everything will be preachy, I mean peachy.

The problem with Jesus (and the Father and the Spirit) is that there’s so little you can do, and most of the time it feels completely disorganized. The weakness of the human person, thrashing around in the shallows of a spiritual life, is truly, not just metaphorically, miserably ineffectual. The human spirit is tangled up with grief and sin, with ignorance and blindness, with a lot of bad ideas, with selfishness and pride. The little bit that you can see that’s wrong with the world is a drop in the ocean compared with what is really wrong with you. You might be able to see something, and try to do something about it, but you won’t get very far, not in the whole scheme of things.

Those people standing up there on that hill, watching opened mouthed as, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” did not have any power. But Jesus, as his last parting word, said they would have power, not from within, not by marshaling all their resources and getting their lives together, but from “on high.”

Which means that the human experience of weakness, failure, and incompetence doesn’t actually go away. It abides, like faith, hope, and even charity, like the branches on the vine. It persists, terribly, long past the moment you think it should have gone away and been replaced with holiness, energy, order, knowledge, and, my favorite, deep feelings of happiness. Give me the list and I will not only have power, but the power will make me happy.

But there was never going to be a listicle. The jumbled pages of the Bible, one word rolling over into the next one, one strange flash of light troubling the conscience and the soul after another, each weak person laid bare page after page, are not the thing I wanted. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. But the only thing I’m told is to “obey,” and, “abide,” which is some kind of torturously exhausting way of living.

Those guys on that hill stand there in trauma as Jesus disappears and then those other guys, probably from the tomb, arrive and ask the foolish question. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” The disciples don’t have anything to say. There’s no good answer. So, patiently, and without a wiff of exasperation, they are angelisplained, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

The disciples trundle alone down the mountain, annoyed probably, to keep praying and sitting around until the day of Pentecost. All that time they have to eat regular meals and go to sleep and wake up again. And then, when the Holy Spirit finally does come and whips them out into the street, there’s still no visible Jesus, no palpable sense of power and glory and victory. They go out into Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the world in weakness, poverty, desperation, loneliness, and peril. Paul says of himself that he despaired utterly, that he felt he was being delivered over to death. Even he, given the opportunity to provide a single listicle, just piles up mounds of impossible virtues that only manifest themselves in the gritty failures of the Christian life.

There is power. It’s just not yours. It is from on high. It is inexorable. It is enough. It is sufficient. But you mostly can’t see or feel it while it’s working its way out towards eternity. Because it is God himself, tethering you to his throne of mercy…while he sits. Take heart, you’ll sit one day too, and it won’t even be to look over your list again.