I am going to make an assumption this morning. If I am incorrect in this assumption, please let me know on your way out after the service. The assumption is this: I don’t think that any of you have read the entire manual that comes with your automobile when you buy it. I know the dealers always say it is in the glove box, you should read this so you know how to work your car but I would suggest that for most it remains an ornament from time-to-time rattling around in your glove box and nothing more – unless of course, you have an emergency.
It is one of those things in life that is there if you need it but rarely do you if ever consult it. It can of course be fraught with problems if you don’t read it. I had a delightful conversation with a person recently whose car had one of these new-fangled lane warning lights that comes on and when you go over your lane, it will beep at you and tell you that you are going away from your lane.
For about six months, this person was under the assumption that all that was there for was to tell her she was going too quickly. So every time it beeped she slowed down. She wondered why it drove all the people behind her crazy when it happened. Why is it these cars have an automatic warning when you go too quickly? she thought. That is when I suggested it was time to read the Owners’ Manual to find out a little bit more. It is fraught with problems when we don’t.
I also think it is fraught with problems when we don’t read the end of Luke’s Gospel, for in many ways that in and of itself is like an Owner’s Manual for Christians, a summary of all the things that are needed if we are to follow Jesus Christ faithfully in our lives. Luke 24 contains the final remarks, the concluding words of Jesus to his disciples. They are the conclusion, the summary, of everything they need to know before they embark upon their lives.
In many ways, these final words of Jesus in Luke express to them what life as a disciple will be and what they will need as they go forward in the future. It also expresses the power that they will need in the present to be able to exercise their ministry. It explains to them the past and what led up to the ministry of Jesus. This is a phenomenal passage, because it talks about the past and it talks about the present, and it talks about the future for the disciples. Jesus knew that he was leaving. He knew it was his final comment after all the Resurrection appearances and now he must leave them with an owners’ manual to help them understand what it means to be a disciple.
What better passage for us on a day like Father’s Day than for us to turn and find some inspiration from this? When we go back into the history of the Church, this phrase, this passage has held great sway and great importance. I was researching, and recently I found that one of the great historians, one of the great saints to the Church, the Venerable Bede – I love that name – who was born in the late six hundreds and ministered into the early seven hundreds in the northeast of England, a wonderful writer and great influence and source of inspiration for the Church in Britain for really fifteen hundred years, wrote this about Luke 24: “There was certainly a necessary sequence. First, Christ had to shed his blood for the redemption of the world. Then, through his Resurrection and Ascension, he opened to human beings the gate of the heavenly Kingdom. Last, he sent those who had preached to all nations throughout the world the Word of Life and administered the sacraments of the faith.”
What a summary of this passage of Jesus’ departure! Yet, it is not enough for us I think just simply to summarize and say, “Here are a few paragraphs for us to read when they are necessary.”
We need to go a little deeper into the text to find the richness of what Jesus was saying because he is suggesting in fact what he is giving the disciples is a testimony of their way forward in life. It is based on first of all the testimony of Scripture. Jesus suggests in Luke 24 that everything he is telling them is to fulfill what the Scriptures have said about him. When you look at the ministry of Jesus, at so many of the key moments, there is reference to the fact that he fulfilled the Scriptures.
The Scriptures of course to which he is referring are the Scriptures that he would have read and he would have grown up with, namely the Scriptures that had come from the Hebrew people. And so, Jesus suggests that his ministry fulfill that. Look at the language that he uses when he rode into Jerusalem: you notice that all the details on Palm Sunday were in order that Scripture might be fulfilled. When he was crucified, the whole preparation for the crucifixion, we are told, was that Scripture might be fulfilled. When he rose on the third day, it was that Scripture might be fulfilled. Jesus understood that his entire ministry was based on the fulfilling of the Scriptures. It was a testimony to the truth of what had been written before.
The Scriptures, in Jesus’ day, were classified in three forms. There were those that were deemed to be the Torah, the law. The Torah was basically how we should live in response to the commands of God. Then there were the prophets, and the prophets had written when we missed the mark to teach us the justice and the righteousness of God and getting what is expected of us in response to the call of God. And then, the writings, and they include the Psalms, and they are about repentance and lamentations and praise and hope and adoration. These are the psalms that lift up and exalt God, but remind humanity of its place within God’s reign and within God’s kingdom.
Jesus sees that his life is actually the fulfilment of all the things, both in fact the will of God for humanity, the prophetic statements that were made by him, but also the adoration and the praise and the glory and the fulfilment of the suffering servant. Jesus was then letting the disciples know that he is following up on what was in the Scriptures and law. He says, “I will then show you and I will reveal to you the meaning of that fulfilment.” In other words, it is not just an automatic understanding; Jesus wants to help the disciples understand the nature of that fulfilment.
That is why preceding this very story we have Jesus on the Emmaus road, and Jesus opening up Scripture to those who are on the Emmaus road. As the Risen Christ, he is letting them see Christ in The Old Testament and seeing The Old Testament paying witness to Christ. It is a powerful statement! I love what one of the great preachers in the United States, Joiner, said: “It is not as if somehow in Christ God just broke on to the scene as if God hadn’t been there. God had been there all along, and Christ was fulfilling what had actually been there.”
That shows us then the testimony of Scripture and Jesus finally saying, “I am fulfilling what was there.”
But that is not enough. There is also the testimony of the Apostles. Jesus says to the disciples, “You have been witnesses of everything that has taken place and now I am going to send you out there to let people know what you have seen. You have witnessed the Resurrection: that on the third day, the Messiah was raised from the dead. You have witnessed the Resurrection, and as witnesses of the Resurrection” and this is the first thing he mentions, “you are empowered to go out into the world because you have seen these things.” This suggests to me that the primary message that we have actually rests around the Resurrection. It is the Resurrection that shows the fulfillment. It is this that is the message that was the Good News right from the beginning.
It is also the Cross. The Cross is also the fulfillment: not only that on the third day the Son of God would rise from the dead, but that God would in fact bear the sins of the world. God would take it upon himself to be able to bear the sins of the world. This suggests that the Cross was not an accident. The Cross was not an emergency measure when all of Gods plans had somehow gone wrong. This was something that was deemed from the very beginning to happen: that God would intervene for us and that God would intervene for the world. The disciples had witnessed the Crucifixion, and they were to proclaim it, and pay testimony to it.
There is also a sense of urgency to it. Jesus wanted them to understand that there was a need to call on the world to repent and to change. They had to get out of their Upper Room; they had to get out of their comfortable life now that he was departing. They must take up the mantle of what had been passed on to them. There was urgency for them to go out and to proclaim the Good News and call on people to change.
What I love about the end of it is there is a sense in which the sorrow of the world, the day of sorrow and mourning is over. The day of worrying and anxiety is gone. Christ’s promises will be with them even though he has departed from them into heaven, still he is going to be with them and give them the courage and the power to have joy and worship.
You know, I thought about this not long ago when I attended a party. The party had a theme to it: you were supposed to dress like someone from the early 1960s. Well, I was a wee lad in those days I want you to know, and so I had to use my imagination. I decided in my wisdom that I would dress as The Saint. Remember the television show The Saint? Now, for me to try and look anything like Roger Moore requires a miracle, right?! However, I did my best, and I wore the proper attire that I thought was fitting of the sixties.
Do you remember always that The Saint had a halo come upon his head, and Simon Templar would look up, and there would be the halo? So I built myself a halo. I did it out of coat hangers and some cloth – well, Marial did – and I put it around my head and walked around with a halo on my head – talk about feeling like an ass! Anyway, I had this halo. People thought it was extremely fitting for the Minister of Timothy Eaton Memorial Church to be wearing a halo on his head at a party.
Anyway, I walk into the room, and I am talking to different people. I assumed that everyone would automatically assume that I was The Saint, but no! Someone came up to me and said, and I loved this one, “Are you dressed as the Archangel Gabriel?” Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will among people! I said to him, “I don’t know what that has to do with the 1960s.”
He said, “Neither did I, that is why I was wondering why you are wearing it.”
Then again, I stopped and thought for a moment when I was reading this passage on the Ascension of Jesus, because in many ways, when we say that Jesus fulfilled Scripture, and when the disciples had a testimony to make, I mean it was right there at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. The seeds of this were already there: the Angel Gabriel proclaimed to Mary that she would give birth to the “Son of the Most High” that she would and her people and those that her son would touch would receive good news of peace on earth; that the Ascension and the end of Jesus’ life was also the fulfillment of what Gabriel had said at the beginning of Jesus’ life.
In a sense, this passage is the bookend of the entire Gospel: the fulfillment of all that had been promised at the beginning. You cannot separate the message of the Christmas Story with the message of the Ascension. They consistently show and reveal the testimony of the Gospel of Luke that Jesus, the Son of the Most High, the risen, the crucified and the living God is Lord. What a powerful gift for those disciples!
There is another testimony here, and that is the testimony of the Spirit. Jesus makes a promise, and this really affects us. He says, “You will be clothed from on high.” A strange term really. All Jesus is saying is that his followers would be enveloped by the Most High. How does this happen when Jesus has ascended to heaven but through the power of the Holy Spirit?
Sometimes, and I heard this not long ago in a sermon that was preached that stretched the power of the Almighty, the transcendent God, the God who is in heaven, who is separate from us and distinct from us, and that is true, but it is not the full story, because to do that is to deny or to miss the fact that there is the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus ascended into Heaven in order that the power of the Holy Spirit would clothe from on high his disciples.
It may seem like a strange power. It may seem like a unique power. But it is a power that completely and totally envelops and clothes our lives if we are open to it. Without that, there is no power and there is no witness, and the fulfillment just doesn’t seem to be there, and the completion of the sovereignty and the reign of God does not appear there. But with the power of the Holy Spirit it does. The Spirit for those disciples as they are saying farewell to their Lord, does a few things. It is like being their navigator.
This past week was a sad week for our church really. We lost two of our beloved members, and at one of those members service remembered someone who had been a navigator in Air Force during World War II. He had been part of the crew of Lancaster planes that had flown the bombing raids – a very, very difficult thing, dangerous and troubling, and very, very disturbing for those who did.
We said farewell to the person who was the navigator on board those flights. The navigator, as the clouds descended and as the night fell, became more and more important for the safety and the accuracy of what they were doing, and it was more and more important that they knew exactly what they were doing and were doing it in the right place to protect the innocent as much as anything – a high calling really at stressful point.
I think the Holy Spirit is like that, not in the negative sense of war, but in a positive sense of guiding the disciples and guiding the Apostles. The Spirit is our navigator. That applies to almost any facet of our lives. We forget sometimes that the Holy Spirit is there. If we have the grace to call upon the Spirit and to seek the Spirit’s guidance and the Spirit’s power, but often we lose track.
When I think back to that reference I made at the beginning of the service about the Lane Departure Warning Beep that we get with a car, I looked at an Owners’ Manual about that very thing, and said: “Failure to prepare for a lane change by using your mirrors can result is danger.”
In other words, don’t trust it – right! It is not enough! You need something more. Jesus is saying to the disciples, “Don’t just trust in your own power, but trust rather in the clothing of the power of the Most High that comes upon you. He will direct your power.”
There is more revealed in the true meaning and the true purpose of Jesus’ ministry. When the Spirit clothed from on high comes upon you, things are revealed that you missed and that you had forgotten. Remember a few weeks ago I quoted the great Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and a number of you have sent notes to me and have written to me about him. This is something Spurgeon said in one of his sermons: “The Holy Spirit does not give a fresh revelation, but rivets the old one. When it has been forgotten and been laid in the dusty chamber of our memory, he fetches it out and cleans the picture, but does not paint a new one. There are no new doctrines, but the old ones that have been revised.”
Powerful!
I thought of that last summer when I visited Chicago and went to its very famous Art Institute. I love the Chicago Art Institute. They had a display of a contrast in photography. They had taken photographs of a painting that they had received that had been covered in dust and was very dirty and monitored it until it had finally been cleaned.
To clean a majestic piece of art I would think would be one of the most stressful things that one could do. But, you know what was amazing when you looked at the contrast after it had been cleaned, all the colours were brighter: the white around the eyes were sharper; the expressions on the faces were more acute. It was incredible! It was almost as if there was a new painting, but it wasn’t a new painting. It was the old painting, come back to life.
I think when the Holy Spirit comes upon us, when the Holy Spirit guides us, the Holy Spirit brings that which is often clouded back into life, and reveals to us again and again the power of the glory of Christ’s ministry and his message. It revives within us the last thing that Jesus promised, and that is joy. How soon we forget that Christianity is about joy! The ascension into heaven of Jesus of Nazareth is joyful. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is joyful. The bearing of the sins of the world on the Cross is joyful. The ministry of Jesus to the outcasts and the lonely is joyful. The birth of Jesus into this world incarnate was joyful. It was joyful because it was God’s very presence amongst us.
This great day of Father’s Day, this great day when we think of the examples that we have been given from the past, the things that have been handed down, makes us look to the Gospel and say with the disciples, who once they had encountered Christ, they were filled with great joy. May that be your testimony this day! Amen.