Luke 24:52 - Exposition

And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. This "great joy," on first thoughts, is singular till we read between the lines, and see how perfectly they now grasped the new mode of the Lord's connection with his own. They knew that henceforth, not for a little time as before the cross, not fitfully as since the Resurrection, but that for ever, though their eyes might not see him, would they feel his blessed presence near (see John 14:28 ; John 16:7 ). One question more connected with the Ascension presses for an answer. Much modern criticism regards this last scene simply as one of the ordinary disappearances of the forty days, and declines to admit any external, visible fact in which the Ascension was manifested. But St. Luke's description. both in his Gospel and in the Acts, is plainly too circumstantial to admit of any hypothesis which limits the Ascension to a purely spiritual elevation. At the end of his earthly ministry, the evening before the cress, Jesus asked back his glory: "Now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own sell, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" ( John 17:5 ). The Ascension and consequent session at the right hand was the answer to the prayer of Christ. It was necessary for the training of the first teachers of Christianity that the great fact should be represented in some outward and visible form. "The physical elevation," writes Dr. Westcott, "was a speaking parable, an eloquent symbol, but not the truth to which it pointed, or the reality which it foreshadowed, The change which Christ revealed by the Ascension was not a change of place, but a change of state; not local, but spiritual. Still, from the necessities of our human condition, the spiritual change was represented sacramentally, so to speak, in an outward form He passed beyond the sphere of man's sensible existence to the open presence of God" ('Tim Revelation of the Risen Lord'). The session at the right hand of God ( Mark 16:19 ) cannot designate any particular place. The ascension, then, of Jesus is not the exchange of one locality, earth , merely for another we term heaven. It is a change of state; it is a passing from all confinement within the limits of space to omnipresence.