More recently I posted about Holy Saturday. Now that we come to Ascension Day, we need a reminder of everything that plays into Jesus' kingly rule.
For that, the words of Kenneth Tanner, pastor of Holy Redeemer Church in Rochester Hills, Michigan, are especially helpful and timely. Kenneth graciously allowed me to take these words of his Facebook post this morning and re-post them here. He also served on staff of Touchstone magazine, so he is quite the wordsmith. I hope you will be blessed by his words as I was.
"For Ascension:
Against our attempts to make the resurrection a ghost party, like a wisp of fog on hot tea, Jesus appears among us forever with 'real wounds', shows us that resurrection is a matter of flesh and bones, of broiled fish and honeycomb. Christ reveals that his resurrection (and ours) is culinary and involves eating.
His wounded body, a body that yet eats, a body of flesh and bones--flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone--ascends to what it means to be God in eternity, forever taking with his embodied self all the good and hard memories of what it means to be human.
He remembers comfort from the injuries of childhood in the arms of his mother, the ecstatic gladness of meals with friends, the anxiety of facing torture, that odd mixture of cold and thirst in the desert night, and intense heartache at the tomb of his friend. All of this ascends with Christ.
We worship a God who remembers what it is like to die a human death, whose wounded and resurrected body is the antidote to death. As the human who exists beyond the touch of death, this one who remembers all our faces can keep his promises--promises he makes as the new human and as God.
And it is this wounded God with human memories whose rule of resurrection overcomes death, whose rule of forgiveness overcomes sin, whose rule of welcome overcomes estrangement. Now and forever no other human except Jesus Christ governs this wide globe, no matter how certain their control may seem.
Jesus Christ is (in all these ways and countless others) Lord."
