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No true cessationist
A reflection on signs and wonders in the present and why it is that I’ve yet to find a real-life, flesh-and-blood cessationist willing to defend the doctrine.
I’ve never in my life knowingly met a bona fide cessationist. Cessationism, recall, is the doctrine that the signs and wonders performed by the Holy Spirit through baptized believers in the first century ceased with the passing of the apostles (whether gradually or abruptly, either way they stopped). So that, from about the year 100 to the present, the supernatural gifts of the Spirit—his charismata bestowed upon the faithful—no longer occur and/or have not occurred. These include:
Healings of the sick (through inexplicable, divinely wrought means)
Exorcisms (casting out demons from those possessed by them)
Dreams/visions from God (e.g., Saint Paul’s vision of the Macedonian man)
Foretellings of the future (whether prophecies, “words,” images, visions, or dreams)
Ecstatic heavenly rapture (e.g., Paul’s experience in the “third heaven”)
Suspension of natural laws (e.g., walking on water; levitation)
Spectacular miracles (e.g., feeding the five thousand; blood spilling from a consecrated host)
Relics of saints/martyrs charged with spiritual power (e.g., Paul in Ephesus)
Communication with or visions of the dead (e.g., Samuel and the witch of Endor; the souls of the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation)
That’s far from an authoritative list; I can imagine alternative taxonomies. The point is that none of them are “natural” occurrences; all of them are “supernatural” happenings. The biblical point is that they are the work of God; that God’s word attests them; that no Christian disputes their occurrence in the first century; and that some or all of them were understood to be special gifts of the Holy Spirit, “signs and wonders” performed by him through the baptized as evidence of the power of Christ and the truth of the gospel.
Testimony of such “signs and wonders” continues throughout the church’s history. So far as I can tell, nobody disputes this either (with the possible exception of tongues). The question is whether the testimony is true.
As I understand it, cessationism rose to modest prominence in and after the Protestant Reformation and has been a durable minority strand of Christian teaching and practice since then, particularly in the last two or three centuries—before Pentecostalism, as a check on Roman superstition; after Pentecostalism, as an additional brake on charismatic enthusiasm run rampant.
Here’s the thing. I grew up in a (sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly) cessationist tradition. I know plenty of others who have similar experiences. I’m well aware that I can Google “arguments for cessationism” or “are tongues still spoken” and find plenty of websites and writers selling me on the doctrine.
And yet. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: a flesh-and-blood cessationist. By which I mean, a Christian who is willing and able to defend actual cessationism as a principled and consistent doctrine.
Sure, I know plenty of folks who are put off by glossolalia, not to mention the peculiarities and sometime abuses of hyper-charismatic or fraudulent or prosperity preachers. But the moment I ask about the other nine signs and wonders listed above, they quickly fall into one of the following seven categories:
“Sure, I may not attend a charismatic church, but obviously some/all of those things have happened since the apostles’ passing and/or still happen today.”
“Well, I’ve not personally experienced/witnessed such things, but I don’t doubt they still happen.”
“Granted, I have trouble believing such things, but I’ll also admit that I have good friends whom I would trust with my life who swear that they have seen/experienced such things, and I can’t deny their credibility or honesty.”
“For myself, I’m extremely wary of any and all claims regarding miracles and supernatural happenings, and I take for granted that many (perhaps most) claims about them are false … but if I’m honest, since I believe they happened in the Bible, and the same God alive then is alive now, then yes, sometimes they really do happen here and now.”
“I’m a functioning cessationist, but I don’t actually have very good reasons to support it besides my own skepticism and disenchantment; in other words, I realize how weak my grounds are for disbelieving in any signs and wonders whatsoever performed through special gifts of the Spirit in the last two millennia—so I basically shrug my shoulders and admit that I’m probably wrong, though I wish I wasn’t and live that way too.”
“God is God and I am not; who am I to tell him that he’s not allowed to work wonders since the apostles? or that I know without a doubt that he hasn’t? or that it’s impossible?”
“You’d think I’m a cessationist, and yeah, I attend a cessationist church, and sure, I’m not evangelistic about this, but … [begins to whisper] … I’ve never told anyone this … [whispering quickens] … I’ve actually [seen/experienced/performed] a miracle, and I’ll go to my grave knowing in my bones that [X supernatural event] happened; you could never convince me otherwise.”
I’m not exaggerating when I say I have never encountered another type of response from a purported cessationist, at least not “in real life.” I’ve also known plenty of non-cessationists—there are a lot of Pentecostals and Catholics in the world!—and it’s a given that their response to this conversation is one long eye-roll.
So where are they hiding? Or why does it seem like once you start poking and prodding, the cessationist shell is hiding an inner charismatic—or, to be more precise, a thoughtful Christian unwilling to deny either charismatic gifts or signs and wonders in the present? I’ve speculated elsewhere that this is part of a broader American evangelical loosening. I’ve also seen, more and more, both pastors and normies falling back on one of four things:
awareness of miracles in Christian history;
awareness of miracles in the contemporary global south;
awareness of the paucity of biblical arguments for hard cessationism;
a profound respect for divine power and freedom.
Put those together, and they form a strong allergy to anything like doctrinaire denial of signs and wonders. And in the decline or absence of thick denominational identity with recognized teachers who authoritatively denounce charismatic belief, you can see why cessationism would be on the wane—if it is.
An atonement typology
This post grew out of a brief handout I drew up quickly for a class I was teaching on the atonement, which I then shared on Twitter. I thought I would expand it here with some initial definition and reflections.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
Let me note two things at the outset. First, I took initial inspiration from Ben Myers' lovely patristic-flavored post on atonement theories from a few years back. Second, it seems to me that atonement is a particularly resonant English word that is very nearly interchangeable with salvation. To ask what atonement consists in, it seems to me, is to ask how Jesus saves. Or at least so I have assumed in what follows. Third, atonement is not one of my pet doctrines; I haven't read widely and deeply in it the way some of my friends and colleagues have. I'm sure that, somewhere below, I have left something out or inexpertly explained this or that theory. Pardons in advance.
Without further ado, my sixfold (really, 6 x 5) typology of the atonement.
_________________________________
I. Royal Conquest
1. Ransom
Through the death of Jesus, the Messiah, God "ransoms" or buys back his elect people from their slavery to sin and death; this is the new and final Exodus, in which the Lord once and for all delivers his people from the Pharaoh-like Satan.
2. Christus victor
Jesus submits to death, the wages of sinful humanity, and in doing so puts death to death and triumphs over it in his resurrection from the dead, now eternally free from death in the life of God, never to die again.
3. Harrowing of hell
Jesus the King descends to the realm of the dead and claims what is his own: all the saints of old, awaiting the proclamation of good news to those who died in hope of his coming. The gates of hell tremble at the sound of his feet, and crack open as he takes his own with him into everlasting life: he, the Living One, in whose hands are now the keys to Death and Hades (Rev 1:18).
4. Exaltation
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead: and not only risen, but raised to glory eternal, the glory he had with the Father before the ages. Only now, it is in and as the human nature he assumed in Mary's womb that he is raised, glorified, ascended, enthroned at the right hand of the Father in the power of the Spirit, whence he rules and judges the affairs of earth until he returns again.
5. Citizenship
Having inaugurated his reign over creation, Christ extends the gift of heavenly citizenship to all who accept his rule. To live subject to the wise, just, and merciful kingship of Christ in between his two advents means to anticipate, even now, the glories of the kingdom of heaven that will be made manifest at his appearing, though they remain hidden as the church sojourns in the world.
II. Holy Justice
1. Suffering
This one little word, "suffered," serves in the New Testament as a euphemism or précis for the whole work of Christ. Why is that? "Christ also suffered for sins once for all" (1 Pet 3:18); "Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood" (Heb 13:12): we could multiply examples. There is a mystery here. First, Jesus shares in the human condition, under the weight of sin, evil, and death. His solidarity is complete. "For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted" (Heb 2:18). Moreover, his suffering is salvific: the victim bleeds, the substitute is scourged, the one pronounced guilty is mocked and spat upon. We see, we feel, we intuit the depths of the mystery here—even if we cannot finds words adequate to it—that the eternal and impassible One has willed to undergo this passion simply because "he loved me" (Gal 2:20). It was necessary that the Lord's servant suffer rejection at the hands of both those under and those outside the Law: this very thing happened in our midst, for us and for our salvation.
2. Sacrifice
God is holy, and wills that his people be holy likewise. In old Israel, God graciously provided for the people to be cleansed of their sins through the shedding of blood, that is, through ritual sacrifices that sanctified them, in love, so that they might worship the Lord in his presence with a pure body and a clean conscience. Jesus Christ is the final sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, that to which all prior sacrifices pointed and in which they participated (and, mutatis mutandis, so ever since, whether in praise, in illness, in martyrdom, or in the Eucharist). Jesus, the spotless victim, without blemish, offered himself upon the cross, a perfect and pleasing sacrifice to the God of Israel, thus cleansing, purifying, and sanctifying his beloved people, and effecting, once and for all, the forgiveness of sins.
3. Justification
God is righteous and just, the only good and wise Judge. Human righteousness consists in obedience to his commands, which is to live in accordance with the divine will. Humans, though, individually and collectively, are law-breakers, transgressors, guilty before the court of divine justice. We deserve condemnation, and indeed, guilty of sin and subject to death, we stand condemned, dead in our trespasses. But God in his mercy justifies the ungodly, offering pardon in the name of Christ to all who cast themselves in faith on him, the Crucified. He, the righteous one, stands in the dock, and our sentence becomes his—do not Pilate and the people sentence Jesus to a death reserved for the guilty?—while his status—do not Pilate and the Centurion recognize Jesus's just innocence?—becomes ours. Barabbas figures the believer who, through no merit of his own, is released, while Jesus does not resist taking his place. In short, the triune God delivers the final verdict, and though we have broken God's law, we are absolved, pardoned, pronounced innocent for the sake of Christ. Now therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1).
4. Substitution
Jesus Christ, the one true and fully human man, takes our place. He lives and dies for us, on our behalf, for our sake. He is utterly and without reservation pro nobis, and he stands in our stead, so that we might stand in his. What was due us, comes to him; what is due him, comes to us. What is ours becomes his, and what is his becomes ours. All that he does, he does with us in mind, for our benefit. Whatever justice demands, he, the God-man, both exacts and accepts it. In him, we see our fate overturned, not by a miscarriage of justice, but by the mercy of the Just One offering himself in our place.
5. Satisfaction
What does humanity owe God our creator? Everything, as it turns out. It is a debt we owe simply in virtue of being the creatures we are, made from nothing and sustained in existence for no good reason other than the divine good pleasure. But we do not give God what is his due. We do not render obedience. We do not love him with our whole hearts; we do not love our neighbor as ourselves (as he commands). We do not live in constant, grateful dependence upon him. If we are to be restored to fellowship with the God who alone is just, good, and right, how are we to rectify the relationship we have broken (from our side)? Not by our own efforts, themselves already corrupt and corrupting. Only the offering of a fully human life perfect from start to finish could be thus acceptable. Thus does Jesus, the God-man, offer his own life to make satisfaction for all humanity, to "pay the debt we could not pay." By his death, he gives infinitely beyond what we ever could, and in rising from the dead and pouring out his Spirit, he gives with abandon what he does not need and what was always already his by nature, not only making restitution but gratuitously sharing gifts both beyond nature and beyond measure.
III. Israel's Fulfillment
1. Abraham's seed
The promise of the Lord to Abraham was that his seed would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, and that in his seed all the nations would be blessed (Gen 12:1-3; 22:17). Thus the New Testament begins by telling us that Jesus is the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1), and Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians that the seed (singular, not plural) of which the Lord spoke was Christ himself (3:16)—through him the nations have come to the Lord for blessing, by the selfsame faith with which Abraham believed the Lord's promise (Rom 4:23-25).
2. Torah's telos
The Law of Moses was a gracious provision for God's people Israel, to set them apart from the nations, to sanctify them as his treasured possession, to render them fit to be his servant, the light to the nations. It was, in this sense, a means to an end. And as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, "Christ is the end of the law" (10:4), which is to say, the telos of the Torah is the Messiah. Moses had a target, an aim, a goal, and it is fulfilled in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Both the work he accomplishes—sanctifying Israel, effecting forgiveness of sins, bringing near the reign of God—and the perfect obedience he offers—obedience to the Torah's literal commands but also to its heart, which is the revealed heart of the Lord God—bring to glorious fulfillment the purpose and meaning of Moses's Law: the law of love, the law of Christ.
3. Shekinah embodied
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us—but the Lord's presence in, with, among, and to Israel is not a novelty. Israel's scriptures are nothing but one long story of the Lord's passionate will to be present to and for his people: wrestling with Jacob, the fire by night and cloud by day, the tabernacle, the ark, the temple. The God of Israel is an indwelling God, a particular God (not deity in general) of a particular land and people (Abraham's children) who can be found, in Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod's memorable phrase, at One Temple Avenue, Jerusalem. But these are the foretaste and promise, not the reality or fulfillment. That came in the person of Mary's son, who took on flesh in her womb and was born and lived a man, that is, a fully human life lived by YHWH. He, Yeshua bar-Yehosef, is the Shekinah enfleshed, the fullness of the Godhead dwelling bodily amidst his people. And so he will dwell, forever, when heaven comes to earth on the last day.
4. Priesthood
The work of the priest is to stand between God and the people, mediating in both directions: representing God to the people, and representing the people to God. In love, the Lord established the priesthood in Israel through Aaron's line and the tribe of Levi. The principal work of the priest was to offer sacrifices before the Lord. Jesus was not a Levite, but he was a priest (according to the book of Hebrews) in the order of Melchizedek. Not only a priest, he is "a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God" (2:17), who offered once and for all his own life as a sacrifice for all the people—a perfect offering, because he, a priest without sin, offered not for himself but for others what they, not he, needed. And so this eternal priest makes offering in the heavenly sanctuary not made with human hands, Jesus the mediator between God and man, interceding for us before God the Father, an advocate and aid to all who seek the help of heaven.
5. Ingrafting
The seed of Abraham is the chosen people of God, and as Paul writes, the root of the tree of Israel is irreducibly and immutably Jewish (Rom 11:16-18). But the miraculous and unexpected work of the Messiah is so to accomplish salvation "apart from law"—"although the law and the prophets bear witness to it" (3:21)—that it applies not only to Jews, branches of Israel's tree by nature, but also to gentiles, a wild olive shoot ("contrary to nature" [11:24]). So that, through baptism and faith in the Messiah, both the natural and the wild branches belong to one and the same tree, the latter grafted in through the gracious hands of the Lord, who is God not only of the Jews but also of the gentiles (3:29).
IV. Natural Restoration
1. Knowledge
Humanity was created to know God, and in disobeying the command of God by seeking after forbidden knowledge, humanity fell away from the knowledge of God. Through Christ, however, the knowledge of God is restored, both in his own person, as a fully human being, and in those united to him by faith through baptism. As Colossians 3:9-10 states, believers have put off the old, fallen nature and been clothed in the new, regenerate nature—redeemed and remade in Christ—"which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator." Moreover, Christ came teaching, and in the Spirit and through Scripture, he remains our teacher, drawing us into true and saving knowledge of the Father.
2. Image
Humanity was and is created in the image of God, but through the Fall that image is tarnished, damaged, neither whole nor expressive, as it ought to be, of who human beings are and what they were made to be within the wider created order. Christ, though, as God from God and Light from Light, is neither made nor "in" the image of God: he is the image itself, from everlasting to everlasting. And so, in becoming human, he restores the imago Dei in human nature; all those in him share in that restored image, which will be theirs in full upon his return in glory—at which point they will finally take up their calling as image-bearing creatures among and for the sake of all other creatures.
3. Second Adam
Adam, the first man, fell; and in him all humanity fell, too. That is to say, all human beings share in the condition of our first parents: we are all "in Adam." But Jesus Christ is the new man, the Second Adam, and to be "in" Christ is to be incorporated into the life and body of this sinless one triumphant over death. Our sin died with him on the cross, and in his resurrection, he lives to God the super-abundant life of the Spirit, whom, in pouring him out on the church, he makes available to all those who draw near to him in faith. And in the End, when God is all in all, this Adam will not, can never fall; and the same is true of those he brings with him.
4. Healing
Fallenness means sickness, sickness of the soul and of the body. Christ is our healer, the great physician. He came healing, and those who asked him to be made whole had their petitions granted: "If you will... I will" (Mark 1:40-41). He also sent his disciples out with the same charge, and they healed in his name both before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. Never has a generation passed since then when some number of those who have asked him or his servants for healing have not borne witness to the Lord's healing in their mortal bodies. But no healing lasts in this life; the final healing will come with his second coming, when no disease or sickness will outlast his cleansing presence.
5. Life-giver
To be a creature is to be given existence, and to be created human is to be given the unsurpassably beautiful gift of life: the breath of life in our lungs, breathed in us by God himself (Gen 2:7). Death is the final enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), and as the wages of sin, death is bound up with opposition to God's good will for living creatures. By contrast, Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6); indeed, he is "the resurrection and the life" (11:25). He comes to bring us death-bound creatures life abundant (10:10), and from his heart rivers of life spring forth to nourish us (7:38). Even now, through his Spirit, we have a taste of "the eternal life which was with the Father" (1 John 1:2), the fullness of which will arrive at his appearing.
V. Perfected Relationship
1. Slavery
The Lord Jesus is the great deliverer, liberating his people from the chains of slavery: first from Egypt and the power of Pharaoh, finally from sin, death, and the power of Satan. Thus he assumed our nature that "through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb 2:14-15). But as both Exodus and Romans testify, those once enslaved are not set free "for" anything at all; they are set free to be servants and worshipers of God. There is, in this sense, a transfer of masters, not a denial of life under lordship: though, in this case, a transfer not in degree but in kind—from the cruelty of unjust fellow creatures to the blessing of the only just and sovereign Master. And so, in this sense, what Jesus accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection is the liberation of all peoples from servitude and subjection to any and all worldly masters, making us instead "slaves of righteousness" (Rom 6:8), that is to say, "slaves of Christ" (1 Cor 7:22).
2. Friendship
Having said that, we turn to 1 John: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (4:18). Indeed, as Jesus says in his final words to the disciples in the Gospel of John, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You are my friends if you do what I command you" (15:15, 14). Thus, although it is proper to say that we are slaves of Christ, at least here below, this claim is subordinate and secondary to the theologically primary claim, that in the incarnation God befriends us, elevating us to friendship with himself. The work of Christ, simply put, is to make us his friends. And so he has, because his word and his life are true and efficacious. Nothing is so beautiful to imagine as beatitude experienced as everlasting friendship with the Holy Trinity.
3. Covenant Membership
There is no relationship with the God of Israel outside of covenant; YHWH is the God of covenant. Covenant is the gracious means by which the Lord establishes relations—saving, loving, lasting—with human women and men. It is, furthermore, the means by which he establishes them as more than isolated individuals or tribal clans or nations at odds, but as a community, a single people defined by relationship with God, the creator of all. Thus, Jesus saves not individuals but a people, the covenant people of God. But in doing so he fulfills the old covenant by creating a new covenant in his blood, sealed on the cross. To be redeemed, to be touched by the atoning love of Christ, is nothing other than to be included in this covenant, to be made a member of God's covenant family. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: indeed, for outside the church there is no covenant, and to belong to the covenant is to belong to Christ himself, our savior, redeemer, and friend.
4. Feast
God saves by feeding; his salvation is a feast. The Passover meal, the manna and quail in the wilderness, the feasts and festivals at the temple: bread and meat to eat and wine and water to drink are the telltale signs of the Lord at work to deliver from bondage and atone for sin. So in the ministry of Jesus, whose first sign changes water to wine at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11) and whose reputation for partying was so renowned that he was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matt 11:19)! No surprise, then, that the central practice of the church instituted by Jesus himself is a meal of bread and wine—elements that signify and mediate the bodily presence of the risen and ascended Lord himself—which meal itself figures the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-10). The heavenly banquet is prepared, and Christ invites us now, even as he did on earth, to partake of this saving food and drink, that is, his own body and blood (John 6:53-58).
5. Marriage
As Israel is the bride of YHWH, so the church is the bride of the Messiah. "'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph 5:31-21). This is true at the communal as well as the individual level, since Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that, just as a united to a woman become one flesh with her, so a person "united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him" (6:16-17). In the end, when God creates new heavens and new earth, the marriage of the Lord and his covenant people will be consummated, and God and Abraham's children will be eternally one, for God is one, and he will be all in all (15:28).
VI. Supernatural Elevation
1. Forerunner
Christ not only takes our place and lives a truly human life on our behalf. He blazes the trail of salvation, in whose wake we have but to follow. He charts the path to God, a path from conception and birth through growth and life to death, descent, resurrection, and ascension. Our lives are but imitations of his, the journey of the One who went before, the forerunner, the archegos (Heb 12:2). Where our nature has gone with him, so we will and may go—including into heaven (Eph 2:5-6), before the presence of God almighty. And along the way, all of Christ's action is our instruction (an axiom of St. Thomas Aquinas). We are followers in the Way and learners in his school, until we see him face to face.
2. Adoption
Jesus Christ is the eternal, unique, only-begotten Son of God, incarnate in and as a human being. But precisely in his becoming flesh and blood, existing in every way like us apart from sin, he extends his Sonship to us through baptism in his Spirit, the Spirit of Sonship, which is to say, the Spirit of adoption (Rom 8:15, 23). We thus become the sisters and brothers of Christ, and therefore, one and all, the children of God by adoption. Just as gentiles are adopted through Abraham's seed to be, by faith, the children of Abraham, so both Jews and gentiles are adopted through God's only Son to be, through the gift of the Spirit in baptism, the sons and daughters of God.
3. Spirit-sender
The external operations of the Holy Trinity are indivisible, both in creation and in salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are alike and equally Creator and Savior. Thus the Spirit is present and active at every moment of the incarnation and career and saving work of the Son. Jesus is conceived by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit, drawn by the Spirit, nourished by the Spirit, raised in the power of the Spirit—and when he ascends to heaven, Jesus pours our the Spirit he bore in his earthly life upon the apostles and, through them, all the baptized henceforth and forevermore. In sending the Spirit he sent the church, not alone, but filled by his presence, that is, the Spirit who makes him present in power, love, and peace. The Spirit gives life, and Jesus breathes the Spirit on us with unstinting grace (John 20:22).
4. Great exchange
Jesus not only substitutes himself as a man in our place; in his very being, in the hypostatic union that constitutes the eternal Son to be a man—perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity—he enacts the great, the beautiful, the happy exchange: he takes on our nature that he might gives us his. He assumes finitude, creatureliness, mortality; we receive the fullness of what it means to be the Spirit-filled Son of God the Father. The realities and shortcomings of humanity are his; the benefits and blessings of divinity are ours. The exchange happens in his own person, in the communication of properties between his two natures; and what happens there, in that one man, redounds to all women and men who share his human nature.
5. Theosis
Truly, in Christ, we "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). In the words of St. Athanasius, he became human that we might become divine. Or in C. S. Lewis's phrasing, the final end of the work of Christ is to make little Christs of all of us. And if Christ is God, then we are gods. Not, that is, that our nature is changed from human to divine. We remain human, as Christ remains human. Rather, our humanity is divinized, saturated with the divine glory and presence and consequently elevated to fellowship in the eternal communion of love that is the inexhaustible life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Spirit inserts us through the human nature of the glorified Son, Jesus, into this perfect circle of giving, sharing, and endless, enraptured happiness. We will see God, in the last, and to see God is to be conformed to himself, that is, to his image. And so we are, and so we will be. Soli Deo gloria.
New article published: “The Church and the Spirit in Robert Jenson's Theology of Scripture" in Pro Ecclesia
I have an article in a two-part symposium in Pro Ecclesia commemorating the life and thought of Robert Jenson, and though the issues are not yet published, my article is available in an early, online-first capacity. Here's the abstract:
In the last two decades of Robert Jenson’s career, he turned his attention to the doctrine of Scripture and its theological interpretation. This article explores the dogmatic structure and reasoning that underlie Jenson’s thought on this topic. After summarizing his theology of Scripture as the great drama of the Trinity in saving relation to creation, the article unpacks the doctrinal loci that materially inform Jenson’s account of the Bible and its role in the church. Ecclesiology and pneumatology emerge as the dominant doctrines; these in turn raise questions regarding Jenson’s treatment of the church’s defectability: that is, whether and how, if at all, the church may fail in its teaching and thus in its reading of Scripture.
Check out the whole thing here.
The Lord Reigns: A Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension
A sermon preached at the Round Rock Church of Christ, Sunday, 6 May 2018.
Opening reading
Hear this word from the book of Acts, chapter 1, verses 1-12:
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Then they returned to Jerusalem…
Prayer
Almighty God,
whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above the heavens
that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that,
according to his promise,
he abides with his Church on earth,
even to the end of the ages;
and now, by your grace,
pour through me the gift of preaching,
that what is heard this day through human lips
might be the word of God for the people of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Introduction
I’m not sure if you know this, but in four days there is a special day on the Christian calendar.
It isn’t Easter, which was only last month. It isn’t Christmas, which is still a long ways away. It isn’t one of those days or seasons you might have heard about but never celebrated, like Advent or Lent or Ash Wednesday, or for the especially church-nerdy, the Feast of the Annunciation.
No, this Thursday is Ascension Day. It is the day on the church calendar when, for millennia, Christians have remembered and celebrated the ascension of the risen Jesus to heaven. You may have already put together why it is celebrated on a Thursday: because, as Acts tells us, Jesus appeared to the apostles over a 40-day period, at the end of which Jesus was taken from their sight. And this Thursday marks 40 days since Easter Sunday. In the same way, Pentecost Sunday is two weeks from today, since Pentecost is a Jewish festival of 50 days following Passover—and Pentecost is the time when Jesus, having ascended to heaven, poured out the Holy Spirit on his disciples.
So when I was asked to preach this Sunday, I looked at the calendar and realized I had to preach about the Ascension. Not only because of the timing, between Passover, Easter, and Pentecost, but also because—when was the last time you heard a sermon on the Ascension
Now the Ascension doesn’t always play the most prominent role in our retellings of the work of Christ. When we summarize the gospel, we say, “Jesus is risen,” not “Jesus is ascended.” Or when we stretch it out, we say, “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” Or we say that Christ died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, not that he ascended to heaven for our salvation. And that’s perfectly fine: the New Testament certainly emphasizes the cross and the resurrection as the fundamental focal points for understanding the significance of what Jesus has done for us.
But what I want to talk about this morning is how pivotal, in fact, the Ascension is to the gospel story. If you leave it out, the story remains incomplete. And not only does the New Testament not leave it out; once you’re on the lookout for it, you realize it’s everywhere. Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians that, if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are still in our sins, and our faith is in vain—the same applies here: if Christ did not ascend to heaven, the gospel is no good news at all, and we of all people are to be pitied. Why is that?
Well, here’s a question to ask yourself. Where is Jesus, and why is he there? Hold that thought.
Where Jesus is
As many of y’all know, I have two boys. And when you have a theologian for a dad, conversations about God can get really interesting, really fast.
Now Sam and Rowan have a very strict three-tiered understanding of reality. First, there is our world. Second, there is God’s world. Third, there is Pretend World. Pretend World is where they assign anything and everything that isn’t real, or doesn’t really happen in our world. So they regularly ask me, “Is that in our world? Or Pretend World?” Unfortunately for all of us, Captain America and Luke Skywalker and Scooby-Doo are all part of Pretend World. Pretty much anything we read about in a book or watch in a movie is a part of Pretend World, even if it’s real people acting as if something Pretend is real.
So one day we were reading a children’s Bible together, a story about David. And Sam casually referred to David as belonging to Pretend World. I looked at him, and said, “Sam, David isn’t in Pretend World.” He looked back at me as only an all-knowing five-year old can, and said, “Dad, he’s in the Bible. That’s Pretend World.”
At which point I questioned everything I’d ever said or taught about God and the Bible.
And I said, “Sam, everything in the Bible is in our world. It’s not Pretend World, it’s real!” His and Rowan’s eyes got bigger and bigger as I explained to them that, not only were David and Elijah and Jesus and Peter all not pretend, but I’ve been to where they lived. Israel is a place just like Austin and Abilene are places. Now, David died a long time ago, but he lived in the very same world that we live in. The same for everyone else in the Bible.
Having blown their minds, and corrected for all my fatherly shortcomings, I thought my work was done. But then Sam said, “Okay, but since they died, they’re in heaven with God, so now they’re not in our world, they’re in God’s world.” Yes, correct. “Then where is Jesus?” Remember, Sam, he went to heaven after he rose from the dead, so he’s in heaven with God, too. “But Dad, didn’t you also tell us that, just like God, Jesus is everywhere—even in this room with us? But if Jesus is in heaven with God, how can he be here with us too? Is Jesus in God’s world, or is he in our world?”
To which I said, with rich paternal wisdom and years of deep theological training: Time for bed.
Where is Jesus?
Let me back up and situate the Ascension in the broader context of the gospel story.
In his great love, God sends his Son into the world, to become a human being. Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s kingdom in Israel, teaching and healing and caring for those overlooked by society. He is a prophet mighty in word and deed, bringing judgment and repentance and promise of healing to God’s people. He is a king, the son of David, anointed by the Spirit as the long-awaited Messiah. He is a priest, who through the offering of himself on the cross, makes atonement for sins, and through his resurrection triumphs over the power of death once and for all.
He appears to his disciples, and once they realize they don’t have anything to fear from him—they did abandon him after all—they finally, finally realize who he is and what he has done. So naturally, they ask him if what’s next is what they imagined all along: Kick out the pagan occupiers, mop up the godless nations, and restore the glory to Israel, God’s chosen people of old.
And it is at this point that there is a second twist in the story.
The first twist was that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering servant, yielding to the sword rather than wielding it. The second twist is that, after his victory over sin and death, he still doesn’t take up the sword to decimate the evil powers of the world—not least Rome, which crucified him. Instead, the risen Jesus says to his disciples: “It is not for you to know when the final victory will come. But wait for the Holy Spirit, who will make you witnesses about me to the ends of the earth.” And he was taken from them.
So the Ascension continues this pattern, so common in Scripture, of an unexpected turn in the narrative, yet one that, in retrospect, is perfectly fitting. It’s true that the Ascension answers a question: Where is Jesus? Sam was right about that. But that’s the least significant part of it. And even then, teaching about Jesus being in heaven can come to signify something entirely negative, or passive: the Ascension explains Jesus’s absence; his invisibility; his silence; even, perhaps, his impotence. It can make it sound as if God left us alone after saving us, and we’re stuck here, helpless, until he decides to show up again.
But that is not what Jesus says here, nor is it what the rest of the New Testament says. So why did Jesus go to heaven? What is the meaning of the Ascension? And why is it good news? I want to focus on six aspects of the Ascension that help to answer these questions, and most of all why it is central to the gospel story.
1-2: Spirit & Presence
Back to Acts 1.
Jesus directs our attention to two consequences of the Ascension: the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the mission of the church. These are intertwined; you don’t get one without the other. The ascended Christ will pour out the Spirit of God on the disciples, and filled with that Spirit, they will be Christ’s witnesses not only in Jerusalem and Judea, not only in Samaria, but in every direction: south to Africa, east to India and China, north to Turkey and Russia, west to Greece and Rome—and, centuries later, the Americas.
So why does Jesus return to heaven?
First, so that the Holy Spirit might be poured out on all flesh. This is the promised gift of God, long prophesied in the Old Testament. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the apostles, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (16:7)
Why is it better for Jesus to go than to stay? Because for Jesus to go means the coming of the Spirit. And what does that mean? It means God himself abiding in us, both together as a community and in each and every one of the baptized. Once God took up residence in a temple, a house made by human hands; now God takes up residence in the hearts of the faithful, temples made of flesh and bone, created in the image of God himself. The Spirit of God convicts, gives life, and liberates; where the Spirit is, there is life and power: life from the dead and power to live free from sin. The Spirit directs us in the way we should go; the Spirit holds us in the mercy and grace of God; the Spirit gives us words to pray and makes the Father of Jesus our Father—through the Spirit we are sisters and brothers of Jesus and therefore sisters and brothers of one another. The Spirit is the power of God for salvation, the unconquerable divine love who puts fire in our bones to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. The Spirit makes us holy as God is holy.
The Spirit, in short, is the very presence of the living God—and though he is a consuming fire, he does not burn us to a crisp, but like the leaves of the burning bush, like the flesh of Jesus on whom the Spirit descended like a dove—the Spirit’s presence purifies and remakes us, but does not undo us.
This is the second aspect of the Ascension. Even after the resurrection, Jesus was embodied; Christians confess the resurrection of the body, including the body of Jesus. The thing about bodies is that they are located in one place. Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, Emmaus, and Jerusalem. He didn’t appear in Rome or Nairobi or Moscow. What Luke reveals to us in Acts is that Jesus’s Ascension, far from initiating Jesus’s absence from the world, is the beginning of a far more radical and intimate presence to the world. When I teach Acts to students, I do a kind of call-and-response about this to drill this into their heads. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence.
That is the essential thing. The Holy Spirit is the means by which Jesus Christ, risen in glory in heaven with God the Father, is present in grace and power at all times, in all places, to everyone who believes. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, there he is with them—because of the Ascension. Because of the Ascension, through Jesus’s own Spirit, he is present to you and to me, to each and every one of us: speaking, guiding, convicting, calling, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying. Sam asked me how Jesus could be in heaven with God and everywhere else at the same time, including here with us now. The answer is Pentecost. The answer is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, who has been shed abroad in our hearts, through faith. The answer is the Ascension.
3: Mission
The risen Jesus tells the disciples in Acts 1 that they will be his witnesses to and among the nations. The third aspect of the Ascension, therefore, is mission. For what does the outpouring of the Spirit create? The church of Jesus Christ. What is the church’s primary purpose? To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the triune name and teaching them all that Christ commanded.
Had Jesus restored the kingdom at a moment’s notice, only days after the resurrection, guess who wouldn’t be included? You and me. As the apostles slowly came to understand, partly through the ascended Jesus’s special calling of Paul to be the apostle to the gentiles, Jesus goes away not only to become near to all who believe through the Spirit; more specifically, it creates a new time in the world’s history—the time of mission, of witness, of the church. And that time is, as Paul puts it in Romans 11, the time for the gentiles to come into the people of God.
It turns out the good news of Israel’s Messiah wasn’t meant exclusively for Israel. It was meant for the whole world.
The Ascension of Jesus creates the time necessary for the gospel to be proclaimed in every tongue and in every nation on this planet. The Ascension of Jesus is an act of extraordinary generosity on God’s part: it wasn’t time to wrap up the world’s history; it was time to get the news to every corner of the globe, and as time unfolded, to spread the word to each new generation as it arose.
If you aren’t a Jew, and if you weren’t born in the land of Israel in the first century—which means everyone in this room—then the Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. Let me say that again: The Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. God wanted to wait for all of us to have a share in the kingdom of his Son.
As 2 Peter 3 says, God isn’t delaying. What seems like Jesus taking a long time to return is actually a matter of divine patience. God has all the time in the world for us. He’s not going anywhere.
4-5: Exaltation & Reign
In the second chapter of Acts, after the Spirit has been poured out, Peter stands up and preaches to the crowd. Here is what he says at the end of his sermon: “God raised up [Jesus from the dead], and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies a stool for your feet.’” (2:32-35)
Just a few chapters later, Peter preaches again in Acts 5: “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (5:30-32)
In Philippians 2, Paul writes: “And being found in human form [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (2:9-11)
Finally in Hebrews, we read this: “When [Jesus] had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high… For a little while [he] was made lower than the angels, [but] now [is] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death…[and he is] exalted above the heavens…” (1:3; 2:9; 7:26)
Here is the fourth, and perhaps central, aspect of the Ascension: It is the exaltation of Jesus.
Above every name, above every power, far superior to angels, far more excellent than all the fathers and mothers and heroes in the faith who preceded him—far surpassing every measure of excellence and standard of beauty and seat of power we can imagine—above the heaven of heavens, there stands Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the slain Lamb, the author and perfecter of our faith, the Messiah of Israel, the eternal Word of God, the One with the keys of death and Hades in his hands—Jesus, son of Mary, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam, Son of God—there he stands, enthroned in heaven, bearing the name that is above every name, victor and vanquisher of sin and death, of the devil and all his works—the Holy One, Emmanuel, the Crucified, the Creator himself, our brother, Incarnate, the Alpha and Omega, the One who was and is and is to come, God blessed forever—him, that one, Jesus, he is exalted, raised not just from death to life but from earth to heaven, to the right hand of the Father, to reign forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That is what the Ascension means. That is why Jesus returned to his Father and ours. Because when death could not hold him, this universe itself could not hold him. He returned in glory to the Father’s side, now in the body he assumed for our sake, there to rule not just as God’s Son and Word, but as the Crucified and Risen One, the Messiah and Savior of the world.
To reign, to rule: that is the fifth aspect of his Ascension. Who reigns, who rules? Who is enthroned? Who stands at the head of a glorious procession of victory?
The king. Jesus is the king. The son of David is David’s Lord. Israel’s king reigns, now, over all the earth. He is king of Israel, king of the cosmos, king of heaven. Not for nothing did Paul’s opponents in Thessalonica in Acts 17 accuse Christians before the authorities of “all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” (17:7) There is another king, and his name is Jesus!
The Roman Empire called Caesar “lord” and “savior” and “son of god.” So what titles did the early Christians confess of Jesus? Lord! Savior! Son of God! Why were believers persecuted so often? Because they constituted a threat to the powers that be. Why were believers so willing to suffer and die for the faith? Because they knew who was in charge—they knew the name of the one true King, and his name wasn’t Caesar.
The Ascension means that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King, and he reigns on high over the affairs of earth. Does that mean that life on earth, for believers or nonbelievers, is easy or painless? Not at all. What it means is this. At all times, in all circumstances, no matter how bad things are or how bad they appear to be—the Lord reigns; Jesus is in charge. The Lord Jesus reigns: He will be with you, because he is with us now, by his Spirit. No power or authority on this earth compares with his power and authority. Nor will any power that stands against him triumph. We know with whom, on whose side, heaven stands, because we know those with whom heaven’s king stood during his time on earth. He stood with the poor, the needy, the sick, the overlooked, the beaten-down, the downtrodden, the meek, the tax collectors and prostitutes and little ones whose weaknesses the powerful exploited. That’s where the king of the universe stands: with the least of these, the sisters and brothers of Jesus.
Which means that’s where we must stand, if we want to be where Jesus is.
6: Intercession
So—summing up so far: The exalted Jesus, reigning from God’s right hand, powerfully present by the Holy Spirit in and to his body, the church, as it continues its mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth—that, so far, is what the Ascension means, what it enables.
Remember that Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. We have seen how he rules as king and speaks as prophet, through the Spirit. The sixth and final aspect of the Ascension is Jesus’s intercession for us before God, as priest.
The book of Hebrews teaches us that Jesus is both priest and offering; the offering he made was himself, his own body and blood, a once-for-all sacrifice for sins. In chapter 7 we read this: “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.” (7:26)
Hebrews goes on to say that, as the one, final, permanent priest, Jesus “appears in the presence of God on our behalf,” for “he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” (9:24; 7:25)
Similarly Paul writes in Romans 8 that “it is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” (8:34)
Finally 1 John 2 says that, “if anyone sins, we have an advocate before the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (2:1-2)
What does this mean?
It does not mean that the Father is against us and the Son is for us, the one angry and the other merciful, as if one Person of the Trinity were divided against another. What it means is that Jesus, our mediator, at once both God and man, fully divine and fully human—Jesus is, now and forever, on our side. He is for us. He is for you. He is Immanuel, God with us. Only now he is human-with-God. On earth, God-with-humans. In heaven, human-with-God.
Our brother, the Galilean, he is in the highest of heavens, the unapproachable, ineffable sphere of beauty and blessedness—he is there, he has as it were taken us with him there, and from everlasting to everlasting he has our best interests at heart.
What sins we commit in the meantime, though we should repent of them swiftly and sincerely, they should not trouble or grieve us, they need not weigh us down: for we have an infinitely patient, infinitely merciful, infinitely willing advocate and priest at God’s side, one who, as Hebrews puts it, “became like his sisters and brothers in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God. And because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” (2:17-18)
Jesus ascended to the right hand of God in order to serve, eternally, as our advocate, priest, and intercessor. Your brother Jesus is not just there with you in the dock; he has the ear of the judge. Now and forever, the verdict is Not Guilty.
Conclusion
After the Ascension, Acts tells us that two angels appear, who say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” In other words: Jesus will return as he left, coming on the clouds of heaven. So long as the earth and the church’s mission on it endure, we wait for our royal priest, Israel’s Messiah and heaven’s King, to appear, once and for all. The Ascension inaugurates the time of hope, of faith’s patient waiting for the final fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom to come at last, for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven like a bride adorned for her groom.
Until then, I can do no better than to conclude by quoting Paul in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 1:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Col 3:1-4)
“[This is] the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:15-23)
The church’s head is the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus is Lord, and the Lord reigns from heaven. Thanks be to God.
Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
You reign from heaven
With your Father and Spirit.
We beg you, by your grace,
To strengthen us in faith, hope, and love,
That you would raise the eyes of our hearts
To you, glorious in power and love,
Ruling on high with mercy and justice.
Rule us, too, as your body,
As we proclaim your kingdom here on earth,
Awaiting with patience your heavenly appearing,
When the will of your Father will at last be done
Here, in the new creation of your marvelous work,
Where peace will dwell forever.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: Amen.
Opening reading
Hear this word from the book of Acts, chapter 1, verses 1-12:
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Then they returned to Jerusalem…
Prayer
Almighty God,
whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above the heavens
that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that,
according to his promise,
he abides with his Church on earth,
even to the end of the ages;
and now, by your grace,
pour through me the gift of preaching,
that what is heard this day through human lips
might be the word of God for the people of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Introduction
I’m not sure if you know this, but in four days there is a special day on the Christian calendar.
It isn’t Easter, which was only last month. It isn’t Christmas, which is still a long ways away. It isn’t one of those days or seasons you might have heard about but never celebrated, like Advent or Lent or Ash Wednesday, or for the especially church-nerdy, the Feast of the Annunciation.
No, this Thursday is Ascension Day. It is the day on the church calendar when, for millennia, Christians have remembered and celebrated the ascension of the risen Jesus to heaven. You may have already put together why it is celebrated on a Thursday: because, as Acts tells us, Jesus appeared to the apostles over a 40-day period, at the end of which Jesus was taken from their sight. And this Thursday marks 40 days since Easter Sunday. In the same way, Pentecost Sunday is two weeks from today, since Pentecost is a Jewish festival of 50 days following Passover—and Pentecost is the time when Jesus, having ascended to heaven, poured out the Holy Spirit on his disciples.
So when I was asked to preach this Sunday, I looked at the calendar and realized I had to preach about the Ascension. Not only because of the timing, between Passover, Easter, and Pentecost, but also because—when was the last time you heard a sermon on the Ascension
Now the Ascension doesn’t always play the most prominent role in our retellings of the work of Christ. When we summarize the gospel, we say, “Jesus is risen,” not “Jesus is ascended.” Or when we stretch it out, we say, “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” Or we say that Christ died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, not that he ascended to heaven for our salvation. And that’s perfectly fine: the New Testament certainly emphasizes the cross and the resurrection as the fundamental focal points for understanding the significance of what Jesus has done for us.
But what I want to talk about this morning is how pivotal, in fact, the Ascension is to the gospel story. If you leave it out, the story remains incomplete. And not only does the New Testament not leave it out; once you’re on the lookout for it, you realize it’s everywhere. Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians that, if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are still in our sins, and our faith is in vain—the same applies here: if Christ did not ascend to heaven, the gospel is no good news at all, and we of all people are to be pitied. Why is that?
Well, here’s a question to ask yourself. Where is Jesus, and why is he there? Hold that thought.
Where Jesus is
As many of y’all know, I have two boys. And when you have a theologian for a dad, conversations about God can get really interesting, really fast.
Now Sam and Rowan have a very strict three-tiered understanding of reality. First, there is our world. Second, there is God’s world. Third, there is Pretend World. Pretend World is where they assign anything and everything that isn’t real, or doesn’t really happen in our world. So they regularly ask me, “Is that in our world? Or Pretend World?” Unfortunately for all of us, Captain America and Luke Skywalker and Scooby-Doo are all part of Pretend World. Pretty much anything we read about in a book or watch in a movie is a part of Pretend World, even if it’s real people acting as if something Pretend is real.
So one day we were reading a children’s Bible together, a story about David. And Sam casually referred to David as belonging to Pretend World. I looked at him, and said, “Sam, David isn’t in Pretend World.” He looked back at me as only an all-knowing five-year old can, and said, “Dad, he’s in the Bible. That’s Pretend World.”
At which point I questioned everything I’d ever said or taught about God and the Bible.
And I said, “Sam, everything in the Bible is in our world. It’s not Pretend World, it’s real!” His and Rowan’s eyes got bigger and bigger as I explained to them that, not only were David and Elijah and Jesus and Peter all not pretend, but I’ve been to where they lived. Israel is a place just like Austin and Abilene are places. Now, David died a long time ago, but he lived in the very same world that we live in. The same for everyone else in the Bible.
Having blown their minds, and corrected for all my fatherly shortcomings, I thought my work was done. But then Sam said, “Okay, but since they died, they’re in heaven with God, so now they’re not in our world, they’re in God’s world.” Yes, correct. “Then where is Jesus?” Remember, Sam, he went to heaven after he rose from the dead, so he’s in heaven with God, too. “But Dad, didn’t you also tell us that, just like God, Jesus is everywhere—even in this room with us? But if Jesus is in heaven with God, how can he be here with us too? Is Jesus in God’s world, or is he in our world?”
To which I said, with rich paternal wisdom and years of deep theological training: Time for bed.
Where is Jesus?
Let me back up and situate the Ascension in the broader context of the gospel story.
In his great love, God sends his Son into the world, to become a human being. Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s kingdom in Israel, teaching and healing and caring for those overlooked by society. He is a prophet mighty in word and deed, bringing judgment and repentance and promise of healing to God’s people. He is a king, the son of David, anointed by the Spirit as the long-awaited Messiah. He is a priest, who through the offering of himself on the cross, makes atonement for sins, and through his resurrection triumphs over the power of death once and for all.
He appears to his disciples, and once they realize they don’t have anything to fear from him—they did abandon him after all—they finally, finally realize who he is and what he has done. So naturally, they ask him if what’s next is what they imagined all along: Kick out the pagan occupiers, mop up the godless nations, and restore the glory to Israel, God’s chosen people of old.
And it is at this point that there is a second twist in the story.
The first twist was that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering servant, yielding to the sword rather than wielding it. The second twist is that, after his victory over sin and death, he still doesn’t take up the sword to decimate the evil powers of the world—not least Rome, which crucified him. Instead, the risen Jesus says to his disciples: “It is not for you to know when the final victory will come. But wait for the Holy Spirit, who will make you witnesses about me to the ends of the earth.” And he was taken from them.
So the Ascension continues this pattern, so common in Scripture, of an unexpected turn in the narrative, yet one that, in retrospect, is perfectly fitting. It’s true that the Ascension answers a question: Where is Jesus? Sam was right about that. But that’s the least significant part of it. And even then, teaching about Jesus being in heaven can come to signify something entirely negative, or passive: the Ascension explains Jesus’s absence; his invisibility; his silence; even, perhaps, his impotence. It can make it sound as if God left us alone after saving us, and we’re stuck here, helpless, until he decides to show up again.
But that is not what Jesus says here, nor is it what the rest of the New Testament says. So why did Jesus go to heaven? What is the meaning of the Ascension? And why is it good news? I want to focus on six aspects of the Ascension that help to answer these questions, and most of all why it is central to the gospel story.
1-2: Spirit & Presence
Back to Acts 1.
Jesus directs our attention to two consequences of the Ascension: the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the mission of the church. These are intertwined; you don’t get one without the other. The ascended Christ will pour out the Spirit of God on the disciples, and filled with that Spirit, they will be Christ’s witnesses not only in Jerusalem and Judea, not only in Samaria, but in every direction: south to Africa, east to India and China, north to Turkey and Russia, west to Greece and Rome—and, centuries later, the Americas.
So why does Jesus return to heaven?
First, so that the Holy Spirit might be poured out on all flesh. This is the promised gift of God, long prophesied in the Old Testament. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the apostles, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (16:7)
Why is it better for Jesus to go than to stay? Because for Jesus to go means the coming of the Spirit. And what does that mean? It means God himself abiding in us, both together as a community and in each and every one of the baptized. Once God took up residence in a temple, a house made by human hands; now God takes up residence in the hearts of the faithful, temples made of flesh and bone, created in the image of God himself. The Spirit of God convicts, gives life, and liberates; where the Spirit is, there is life and power: life from the dead and power to live free from sin. The Spirit directs us in the way we should go; the Spirit holds us in the mercy and grace of God; the Spirit gives us words to pray and makes the Father of Jesus our Father—through the Spirit we are sisters and brothers of Jesus and therefore sisters and brothers of one another. The Spirit is the power of God for salvation, the unconquerable divine love who puts fire in our bones to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. The Spirit makes us holy as God is holy.
The Spirit, in short, is the very presence of the living God—and though he is a consuming fire, he does not burn us to a crisp, but like the leaves of the burning bush, like the flesh of Jesus on whom the Spirit descended like a dove—the Spirit’s presence purifies and remakes us, but does not undo us.
This is the second aspect of the Ascension. Even after the resurrection, Jesus was embodied; Christians confess the resurrection of the body, including the body of Jesus. The thing about bodies is that they are located in one place. Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, Emmaus, and Jerusalem. He didn’t appear in Rome or Nairobi or Moscow. What Luke reveals to us in Acts is that Jesus’s Ascension, far from initiating Jesus’s absence from the world, is the beginning of a far more radical and intimate presence to the world. When I teach Acts to students, I do a kind of call-and-response about this to drill this into their heads. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence.
That is the essential thing. The Holy Spirit is the means by which Jesus Christ, risen in glory in heaven with God the Father, is present in grace and power at all times, in all places, to everyone who believes. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, there he is with them—because of the Ascension. Because of the Ascension, through Jesus’s own Spirit, he is present to you and to me, to each and every one of us: speaking, guiding, convicting, calling, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying. Sam asked me how Jesus could be in heaven with God and everywhere else at the same time, including here with us now. The answer is Pentecost. The answer is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, who has been shed abroad in our hearts, through faith. The answer is the Ascension.
3: Mission
The risen Jesus tells the disciples in Acts 1 that they will be his witnesses to and among the nations. The third aspect of the Ascension, therefore, is mission. For what does the outpouring of the Spirit create? The church of Jesus Christ. What is the church’s primary purpose? To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the triune name and teaching them all that Christ commanded.
Had Jesus restored the kingdom at a moment’s notice, only days after the resurrection, guess who wouldn’t be included? You and me. As the apostles slowly came to understand, partly through the ascended Jesus’s special calling of Paul to be the apostle to the gentiles, Jesus goes away not only to become near to all who believe through the Spirit; more specifically, it creates a new time in the world’s history—the time of mission, of witness, of the church. And that time is, as Paul puts it in Romans 11, the time for the gentiles to come into the people of God.
It turns out the good news of Israel’s Messiah wasn’t meant exclusively for Israel. It was meant for the whole world.
The Ascension of Jesus creates the time necessary for the gospel to be proclaimed in every tongue and in every nation on this planet. The Ascension of Jesus is an act of extraordinary generosity on God’s part: it wasn’t time to wrap up the world’s history; it was time to get the news to every corner of the globe, and as time unfolded, to spread the word to each new generation as it arose.
If you aren’t a Jew, and if you weren’t born in the land of Israel in the first century—which means everyone in this room—then the Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. Let me say that again: The Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. God wanted to wait for all of us to have a share in the kingdom of his Son.
As 2 Peter 3 says, God isn’t delaying. What seems like Jesus taking a long time to return is actually a matter of divine patience. God has all the time in the world for us. He’s not going anywhere.
4-5: Exaltation & Reign
In the second chapter of Acts, after the Spirit has been poured out, Peter stands up and preaches to the crowd. Here is what he says at the end of his sermon: “God raised up [Jesus from the dead], and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies a stool for your feet.’” (2:32-35)
Just a few chapters later, Peter preaches again in Acts 5: “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (5:30-32)
In Philippians 2, Paul writes: “And being found in human form [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (2:9-11)
Finally in Hebrews, we read this: “When [Jesus] had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high… For a little while [he] was made lower than the angels, [but] now [is] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death…[and he is] exalted above the heavens…” (1:3; 2:9; 7:26)
Here is the fourth, and perhaps central, aspect of the Ascension: It is the exaltation of Jesus.
Above every name, above every power, far superior to angels, far more excellent than all the fathers and mothers and heroes in the faith who preceded him—far surpassing every measure of excellence and standard of beauty and seat of power we can imagine—above the heaven of heavens, there stands Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the slain Lamb, the author and perfecter of our faith, the Messiah of Israel, the eternal Word of God, the One with the keys of death and Hades in his hands—Jesus, son of Mary, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam, Son of God—there he stands, enthroned in heaven, bearing the name that is above every name, victor and vanquisher of sin and death, of the devil and all his works—the Holy One, Emmanuel, the Crucified, the Creator himself, our brother, Incarnate, the Alpha and Omega, the One who was and is and is to come, God blessed forever—him, that one, Jesus, he is exalted, raised not just from death to life but from earth to heaven, to the right hand of the Father, to reign forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That is what the Ascension means. That is why Jesus returned to his Father and ours. Because when death could not hold him, this universe itself could not hold him. He returned in glory to the Father’s side, now in the body he assumed for our sake, there to rule not just as God’s Son and Word, but as the Crucified and Risen One, the Messiah and Savior of the world.
To reign, to rule: that is the fifth aspect of his Ascension. Who reigns, who rules? Who is enthroned? Who stands at the head of a glorious procession of victory?
The king. Jesus is the king. The son of David is David’s Lord. Israel’s king reigns, now, over all the earth. He is king of Israel, king of the cosmos, king of heaven. Not for nothing did Paul’s opponents in Thessalonica in Acts 17 accuse Christians before the authorities of “all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” (17:7) There is another king, and his name is Jesus!
The Roman Empire called Caesar “lord” and “savior” and “son of god.” So what titles did the early Christians confess of Jesus? Lord! Savior! Son of God! Why were believers persecuted so often? Because they constituted a threat to the powers that be. Why were believers so willing to suffer and die for the faith? Because they knew who was in charge—they knew the name of the one true King, and his name wasn’t Caesar.
The Ascension means that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King, and he reigns on high over the affairs of earth. Does that mean that life on earth, for believers or nonbelievers, is easy or painless? Not at all. What it means is this. At all times, in all circumstances, no matter how bad things are or how bad they appear to be—the Lord reigns; Jesus is in charge. The Lord Jesus reigns: He will be with you, because he is with us now, by his Spirit. No power or authority on this earth compares with his power and authority. Nor will any power that stands against him triumph. We know with whom, on whose side, heaven stands, because we know those with whom heaven’s king stood during his time on earth. He stood with the poor, the needy, the sick, the overlooked, the beaten-down, the downtrodden, the meek, the tax collectors and prostitutes and little ones whose weaknesses the powerful exploited. That’s where the king of the universe stands: with the least of these, the sisters and brothers of Jesus.
Which means that’s where we must stand, if we want to be where Jesus is.
6: Intercession
So—summing up so far: The exalted Jesus, reigning from God’s right hand, powerfully present by the Holy Spirit in and to his body, the church, as it continues its mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth—that, so far, is what the Ascension means, what it enables.
Remember that Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. We have seen how he rules as king and speaks as prophet, through the Spirit. The sixth and final aspect of the Ascension is Jesus’s intercession for us before God, as priest.
The book of Hebrews teaches us that Jesus is both priest and offering; the offering he made was himself, his own body and blood, a once-for-all sacrifice for sins. In chapter 7 we read this: “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.” (7:26)
Hebrews goes on to say that, as the one, final, permanent priest, Jesus “appears in the presence of God on our behalf,” for “he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” (9:24; 7:25)
Similarly Paul writes in Romans 8 that “it is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” (8:34)
Finally 1 John 2 says that, “if anyone sins, we have an advocate before the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (2:1-2)
What does this mean?
It does not mean that the Father is against us and the Son is for us, the one angry and the other merciful, as if one Person of the Trinity were divided against another. What it means is that Jesus, our mediator, at once both God and man, fully divine and fully human—Jesus is, now and forever, on our side. He is for us. He is for you. He is Immanuel, God with us. Only now he is human-with-God. On earth, God-with-humans. In heaven, human-with-God.
Our brother, the Galilean, he is in the highest of heavens, the unapproachable, ineffable sphere of beauty and blessedness—he is there, he has as it were taken us with him there, and from everlasting to everlasting he has our best interests at heart.
What sins we commit in the meantime, though we should repent of them swiftly and sincerely, they should not trouble or grieve us, they need not weigh us down: for we have an infinitely patient, infinitely merciful, infinitely willing advocate and priest at God’s side, one who, as Hebrews puts it, “became like his sisters and brothers in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God. And because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” (2:17-18)
Jesus ascended to the right hand of God in order to serve, eternally, as our advocate, priest, and intercessor. Your brother Jesus is not just there with you in the dock; he has the ear of the judge. Now and forever, the verdict is Not Guilty.
Conclusion
After the Ascension, Acts tells us that two angels appear, who say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” In other words: Jesus will return as he left, coming on the clouds of heaven. So long as the earth and the church’s mission on it endure, we wait for our royal priest, Israel’s Messiah and heaven’s King, to appear, once and for all. The Ascension inaugurates the time of hope, of faith’s patient waiting for the final fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom to come at last, for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven like a bride adorned for her groom.
Until then, I can do no better than to conclude by quoting Paul in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 1:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Col 3:1-4)
“[This is] the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:15-23)
The church’s head is the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus is Lord, and the Lord reigns from heaven. Thanks be to God.
Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
You reign from heaven
With your Father and Spirit.
We beg you, by your grace,
To strengthen us in faith, hope, and love,
That you would raise the eyes of our hearts
To you, glorious in power and love,
Ruling on high with mercy and justice.
Rule us, too, as your body,
As we proclaim your kingdom here on earth,
Awaiting with patience your heavenly appearing,
When the will of your Father will at last be done
Here, in the new creation of your marvelous work,
Where peace will dwell forever.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: Amen.
"Speak a language, speak a people": Willie Jennings on Pentecost
"God has come to them, on them, with them. This moment echoes Mary's intimate moment. The Holy Spirit again overshadows. However this similar holy action creates something different, something startling. The Spirit creates joining. The followers of Jesus are now being connected in a way that joins them to people in the most intimate space—of voice, memory, sound, body, land, and place. It is language that runs through all these matters. It is the sinew of existence of a people. My people, our language: to speak a language is to speak a people. Speaking announces familiarity, connection, and relationality. But these people are already connected, aren't they? They are 'devout Jews from every nation under heaven' (andres eulabeis apo pantos ethnous, v. 5). They share the same story and the same faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They share the same hopes of Israel's restoration, even its expansion into the world freed from oppression and domination. They are diaspora, and diaspora life is already a shared obligation and hope.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.
"God has, however, now revealed a mighty hand and an outstretched arm reaching deeply into the lives of the Son's co-travelers and pressed them along a new road into the places God seeks to be fully known. This is first a miracle of hearing. . . .
"The miracles are not merely in ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer, is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, 'Step this way and now this direction.' The gesture of speaking another language is born not of the desire of the disciples but of God, and it signifies all that is essential to learning a language. It bears repeating: this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit. To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even if in the person of a single teacher, the learner must submit to that single voice, learning what the words mean as they are bound to events, songs, sayings, jokes, everyday practices, habits of mind and body, all within a land and the journey of a people. Anyone who has learned a language other than their native tongues knows how humbling learning can actually be. An adult in the slow and often arduous efforts of pronunciation may be reduced to a child, and a child at home in that language may become the teacher of an adult. There comes a crucial moment in the learning of any language, if one wishes to reach fluency, that enunciation requirements and repetition must give way to sheer wanting. Some people learn a language out of gut-wrenching determination born of necessity. Most, however, who enter a lifetime of fluency, do so because at some point in time they learn to love it.
"They fall in love with the sounds. The language sounds beautiful to them. And if that love is complete, they fall in love with its original signifiers. They come to love the people—the food, the faces, the plans, the practices, the songs, the poetry, the happiness, the sadness, the ambiguity, the truth—and they love the place, that is, the circled earth those people call their land, their landscapes, their home. Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.
"Yet here we can begin to see even more clearly the ancient challenge and the modern problem. The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.
"Thankfully this is not the only story of Christianity in the colonial modern. There are also the quiet stories of some translators, and the peculiar few missionaries who from time to time and place to place showed something different. They joined. They, with or without 'natural language skill,' sought love and found it in another voice, another speech, another way of life. They showed something in their utter helplessness in the face of difference: they were there in a new land to be changed, not just change people into believers. they were there not just to make conquered Christians but truly and deeply make themselves Christian in a new space that would mean that their names would be changed. They would become the sound of another people, speaking the wonderful works of God. However these stories remain hidden in large measure from the history of Christianity that we know so well, which means we often know so little of Christianity."
—Willie Jame Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (2017), 28-31 (my emphasis). This work is extraordinary for its beauty, creativity, depth, and wonder; it reads as a series of kerygmatic riffs, ruminations, and exhortations on the words of Acts as they encounter the church today. Not every commentary can or should look like this, but it is nonetheless scriptural commentary at its best and most enriching.