We have all been trained, maybe not on purpose, it just happens, but we’ve all picked up an image of God that isn’t entirely correct. In fact, it might even be all wrong. It’s not so much our idea of what God looks like that’s wrong, but about where God is. The problem is that we hear people talk all the time about God “up there.” You know, “the big guy up there” and all that. Maybe it happens because we’ve all seen pictures of an ancient God the Father seated in a chair in the clouds, maybe it’s the paintings in the Sistine Chapel of God literally on the ceiling, looking down. And maybe that’s even a message that we get from this feast of the Ascension, when Jesus is described as disappearing into the sky, leaving the disciples for a second time, gone off to a place we can’t see because it’s way off somewhere we can’t even put into words. So “up there” is just going to have to do.
And yet, this is just all so wrong when it comes to what we’re actually supposed to believe about Jesus’s presence with us. I think one clue for us is the question that gets posed to the disciples by the mysterious bystanders as they are all standing looking up at the sky. These men ask them, why are you looking up there? On the one hand, of course it’s obvious why they are; we’d be looking up there, too. But on the other hand, these bystanders and divine messengers may be trying to remind the disciples that “up there” isn’t where Jesus is to be found. His power and his presence have not gone up there in order to go away from us. A new and better era has begun, just as he said it would. Jesus is now all-powerful both in heaven and on earth; we no longer see him here, but that does not mean that he is absent. In fact he is more powerful than he ever was before.
And frankly this is what might be harder for them and for all of us to grasp than anything having to do with the ascension. Jesus told the disciples that the time after his death and resurrection would actually be better than having him with them physically. This is not like a situation where a family or friends would be left abandoned to carry on as best they could without a beloved friend. Because they would not be without him. He would be really present, the resurrection and the ascension mean he has overcome every boundary that stands between him and us, he has overcome every limitation on his power and presence. We do not see him, but he is not at all distant.
That’s what our church’s emphasis on real presence in the eucharist means, his actual presence and power are here, not just a picture of them but really here. But the eucharist is the only place he is really present, he isn’t bound by that limitation either. He is present in this assembly now, as we are gathered together, he is present when we sit with him in prayer, wanting to have an individual relationship with us the same way he had an individual relationship with all those people in the gospels who came to him and needed him.
And next week at Pentecost we are reminded that his Spirit was given to us to enliven us and inspire us and change us and put us to work, not as a second-class substitute for his presence but as something more powerful than we usually imagine. It’s overwhelming to realize that it is possible for him to be not physically here but here in a way that makes physical presence almost inferior to it. But if we believe that the resurrection is as real as the disciples experienced it to be then we can believe that Jesus didn’t overcome death in order to go away from us a second time. He did it to be with us always.
But this is all theology, what does it actually mean for us? What now? One thing it means is that we need to live with some new kind of courage as if we know he is not absent, that he is still available to show us what to do and remind us how to go about it. He has made the transformation of the world our work; once it was the apostles’ turn, and now it’s our turn, and we are doing this work not without Jesus but with him. All those impossible tasks in the Sermon on the Mount, putting the poor first, forgiving at a level that seems unrealistic, he can still inspire us and show us how to do this. So he is not absent in the search for justice, he is not absent when we turn to him wondering what it looks like to put a shovel in the ground to start building a new kingdom and a more welcoming church.
So if we are only looking “up there” for Jesus, we are looking in the wrong place. Look around here today instead. Or look next to you when you are praying. Because he promised that his presence and his power would surround us, and that when we want to follow him we will find that we haven’t been left with a distant, absent God up in the sky but one that is closer than we can imagine.