Our man in heaven
Sunday 12th May 2024
While [Jesus] was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Luke 24:51
After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud him him from their sight. Acts 1:9 (NIV)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Our man in heaven
This Thursday was Ascension Day, when we remember Jesus ascending to his Father in heaven. It is perhaps one of the forgotten events of Jesus’ life, not helped by the fact that Ascension Day is always on a Thursday, forty days after Easter.
Jesus said repeatedly that he was returning to his Father. And that is what happened, as we read in Luke 24 and Acts 1. It is one thing, though, to know what happened; it is another to understand what it means. One crucial implication is that it means there is a man in heaven.
I was actually at theological college, training to be a minister, when this first really hit me. We were being taken through the 39 Articles of the Church of England. We got to Article 4, which says that “Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones … wherewith he ascended into Heaven…” That is, Jesus ascended to heaven with “his body, with flesh, bones…”
And then the speaker said something like this: “So, Jesus is still a man in heaven. You do know that, don’t you?” We all dutifully nodded, but I was thinking, “Am I the only one who didn’t know that?” I suppose I thought Jesus somehow stopped being a man when he went back to God, that he got rid of his body and went back to being God only.
The ascension of Jesus means that human beings, like you and me, can go to heaven when we die. It is true that we will need to wait until Christ returns to receive our new resurrected bodies, but that is our destiny if we belong to Christ: that people like us, with flesh and bones, and everything else that it means to be human, can be saved as human beings. We don’t have to become gods, or angels. We don’t have to throw away our bodies. The separation of our souls from our bodies will only be temporary. Our bodies matter, and God will save them too. All because we have a man in heaven.
Father, we praise you that your redemption is a full redemption and includes the redemption of our bodies, which will be transformed to be like Christ’s glorious body. Amen.
Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)