Thursday
of the Sixth
Week
of Easter
Ascension
Day
May 20th
READING: Luke 24: 44-53
Then he said to them, ‘These
are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything
written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be
fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he
said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise
from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is
to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are
witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father
promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from
on high.’
Then he led them out as far as
Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing
them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped
him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the
temple blessing God.
~~~
New Revised Standard Version
Bible: Anglicised Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993, 1995 the Division
of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the
United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
John
did not set out to write his gospel-account as a sort of Da Vinci Code mystery
(nor did Dan Brown, incidentally, start out to write a book of either church
history or theology, but that’s another story). Nevertheless, in his tightly
woven narrative, John used the best weave he could manage to convey the complex
truth of the Gospel (John 21:25), building his interwoven motifs into a
carefully constructed pattern. Not a symmetrical pattern, and not a coded
pattern, but a pattern in which factors begin to add up and point to the vast
trinitarian mysteries, for which he had no words, but which interweave,
Creator, Son, and Paraclete-Spirit in co-equal, co-eternal (John 1:1)
interpenetrating relationship.
Luke on the other hand sets out primarily to anchor the events of the Christ-coming into the events of human, rather than cosmic history. God works to redeem humanity, to redeem creation, to redeem time. Theophilus (Luke 1:3, Acts 1:1) may or may not
have existed, but Luke bends over backwards as an author to give elements of
space and time in which the Jesus event and subsequent events are anchored: “In
the days of King Herod …” (Luke 1:5) … “to all nations” (Luke 24:47).
John
interweaves Hebrew Scriptural allusions into the events of Jesus’ life and
teachings. Luke uses a technique often referred to as “proof-texting,” by which
events in and around the life of Jesus are anchored retrospectively into the
ancient writings: “Thus it is written.” (Jewish theologians see some of those
writings quite differently, but our task in not to dissuade, for “God’s ancient
people” have every right to their texts of faith). Luke wants us to see that we
can access these texts and their God, too. To see that a New Testament and its
covenant spread out from Jerusalem, “and to the ends of the earth.”
John
and Luke wrote of the Spirit coming in different ways, too. Luke is far more
linear: “Stay here in the city until you
have been clothed with power.” Both speak of this overwhelming experience of
the Spirit coming and making all that Jesus was into all that Jesus is for us,
for ever. Luke writes Jesus disappearing upwards, then of an upper room experience; there the Tower of
Babel is revisited, reversed, and the new people of God speak with one voice.
John speaks of the Spirit who is truth (John 16:13) who comes to set us (and
others: John 20: 22-23) free from untruth (John 8:32). Luke and John alike
depict the departure of the Son, albeit in different ways, so that his
limitation in space and time (“do not hold on to me,” John 20:17) is eradicated
and we too can reach out and receive the living God in Word, sacrament, empowerment.
And we are to be the Spirit-enriched bearers of Jesus-news into the communities
into which we are called, even in the rapidly changing world that is 2020 and
beyond.interweavings
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