A Quick Stop
But It's Also Eternal
All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. (John 17:10)
Imagine a cross country drive. You’re enjoying South Dakota’s 80 mph freedom as you scud along I-90, seeing no other cars to the horizons (that really happens here, fwiw).
Then you need gas. Or nature calls. Or both. Praise God! There’s a sign for Pukwana, population 237, and you find what you need (it’s all there in the picture above.)
A teeny tiny stop on a great journey.
Between Christ’s Ascension into heaven (40 days after Easter) and the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the Church at Pentecost (50 days after Easter), there is only one Sunday “stop” in Ascensiontide.
A teeny tiny stop on a great journey. We experience this journey in our mortal way, chronologically. God made good stuff, people did bad stuff. Jesus did good stuff, saving us from our bad stuff. The Holy Spirit is coming to help us do good stuff, too, until Jesus returns to take us beyond stuff to eternal life with God.
But while we perceive the Lord and his work chronologically, his great love for us is not contained by the puniness of time. In the Gospel assigned for the Sunday after the Ascension, Jesus prays in a way that defies clocks and calendars.
In John 17, we are blessed to hear Jesus offering prayer for his first Apostles, and, through them, for the Church across time and place. Praying before his Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit, Jesus prays as though it’s already happened,
All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them. (verse 10)
Jesus says that the Apostles are his, even though in our mortal chronology one of them is about the betray him, another will deny knowing him and the rest will run away when he is arrested.
Not only does he call them God’s own in the present, he states that he is glorified in them, even though they have not yet witnessed his Resurrection and Ascension and they have not yet received the Holy Spirit to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8)
While we perceive ourselves to be waiting for glory, The Father’s love for us in The Son and our transformation by the Holy Spirit already are in God’s “time.”
Peter wrote to convey this to early Christians waiting out the world’s hostility,
If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. (1 Peter 4:14)
The Apostle Paul wrote it to Christians enduring false and confusing preachers,
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)
We journey and wait and wait and journey in our mortal sense of time, but as Jesus reveals in his prayer for us, we are already participants in eternal life, because God has purposed to share it with us from before time,
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (John 17:1-5)
Or in the eloquent affirmation of The Letter to the Hebrews,
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (13:8)
Which means for us what Paul expresses in 1 Corinthians 3:21-23,
For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.
So enjoy Pukwana. However you perceive the journey, know the one who has completed it for you and, by his work of mercy and love, with you. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen.
Here is what Oswald Chambers had to say about this little stop between the Ascension and Pentecost:
We have no corresponding experience to the events in Our Lord’s life after the Transfiguration. From then onwards Our Lord’s life was altogether vicarious. Up to the time of the Transfiguration He had exhibited the normal perfect life of a man; from the Transfiguration onwards — Gethsemane, the Cross, the Resurrection — everything is unfamiliar to us. His Cross is the door by which every member of the human race can enter into the life of God; by His Resurrection He has the right to give eternal life to any man, and by His Ascension Our Lord enters heaven and keeps the door open for humanity.
On the Mount of Ascension the Transfiguration is completed. If Jesus had gone to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration, He would have gone alone; He would have been nothing more to us than a glorious Figure. But He turned His back on the glory, and came down from the Mount to identify Himself with fallen humanity.
The Ascension is the consummation of the Transfiguration. Our Lord does now go back into His primal glory; but He does not go back simply as Son of God; He goes back to God as Son of Man as well as Son of God. There is now freedom of access for anyone straight to the very throne of God by the Ascension of the Son of Man. As Son of Man Jesus Christ deliberately limited omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience in Himself. Now they are His in absolute full power. As Son of Man Jesus Christ has all power at the throne of God. He is King of kings and Lord of lords from the day of His Ascension until now.