Monday, May 11, 2015

Love and Leaving


As the Easter season draws to a close, we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension this Thursday, and in most places, Sunday.  We remember that the resurrected Jesus is removed from the disciples and taken up into heaven.  Luke tells it this way.

“[A]s they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.  While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’” (Acts 1:9-11)

After 40 days of renewed life with the disciples, Jesus is taken from them.  Almost no sooner had he been restored to them than he was gone again.  It seems to have left the disciples a bit confused.  Their community of love, only just renewed, had again been disrupted.  If I had been among them, I would have remembered what he had said on the night before his death, which happens to have been the gospel for yesterday, and I would have wondered.  “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”  (Jn. 15:9)   How does love go together with leaving?  And the disciples are left looking, perhaps somewhat aimlessly, into heaven.

Somewhere along the line I heard someone share something very important about parenting.  Parents love their children, it was said, not so that their children will love them but so that their children will in turn love their children.  To that, I might add, and love others.

Parents, from whom most of us first learn to love, love us not so that we return the love but so that we pass along the love.  Surely that is how the Father loved Jesus.  It is also how Jesus loved us, so that we might love others in the same way. 

Parents’ love for their children is not about the parents.  It is about the children.  Jesus’ love for his disciples is not about Jesus.  It is about the disciples.  Both are about passing love along. 

So it is important in the story that Jesus be taken from the disciples, even permanently.  The Jesus story is not so much about Jesus loving us as it is about us loving others as we learned to love from him.  The Jesus story is not so much about Jesus as it is about us. And that is so our stories may be not so much about us as about those we loved.  And taught to love by being loved. 

That is why I think this story of Jesus’ departure begins the Book of Acts, the story of the disciples' spreading of love.  It is why the mysterious men from heaven in the story of the Ascension say to the puzzled disciples, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”  He will come the same way he left, in love, this time your love.

Peace,

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