What Is the Ascension of Jesus? (11 of 12)

The most skipped event in the life of Jesus, and the one the New Testament treats as the beginning of everything that follows.

When Did the Ascension Happen?

Forty days after the resurrection, according to Acts 1:3.

Luke says he presented himself alive by many convincing proofs, appearing over that period and speaking about the kingdom of God. Luke is the only writer who gives the interval, and he is also the only one who narrates the event itself in any detail, doing it twice, at the end of his Gospel and the start of Acts.

What Do Luke and Acts Say About the Ascension?

He was taken up from the Mount of Olives while blessing them.

Luke 24:50-53 has him lifting his hands and blessing them, and while he was blessing them he was carried into heaven. Acts 1:9-11 adds that a cloud hid him from their sight, and that two men in white asked why they were standing there looking into the sky, saying he would come back in the same way.

The last thing the disciples saw him doing was blessing them. Luke ends his Gospel with them returning to Jerusalem with great joy, continually in the temple praising God, which is not the reaction you would expect from men whose leader had just left.

What Did Jesus Say Before He Left?

That they were to wait, and then to go.

Acts 1:4-5 has him telling them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the gift the Father promised, and that they would be baptised with the Holy Spirit in a few days.

Their question in Acts 1:6 is worth noticing: Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? After everything, they are still asking about national restoration.

He does not correct the expectation. He says it is not for them to know times or dates the Father has set by his own authority, and then redirects them to what they will do: receive power when the Spirit comes, and be witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

That sentence is the table of contents for Acts.

Why Does the Ascension Matter?

Because it is enthronement language, not a departure scene.

The New Testament consistently pairs the ascension with sitting at the right hand, which is a throne image rather than a travel image. Ps 110 is the most quoted Old Testament text in the New Testament, and its opening line is the Lord saying to David’s lord to sit at his right hand.

The spread of citations is worth seeing. It appears in Matthew twice, Mark three times, Luke twice, Acts, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Hebrews at least six times. No other passage is used that heavily.

Two verses carry the weight. The first supplies the exaltation, the seat at the right hand. The fourth supplies the priesthood, a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek, which is what Hebrews builds its argument on.

And Jesus himself used it to make a point about descent. First-century readers took the psalm as promising a Messiah from David’s line. He asked how David could call his own descendant Lord, which presses the claim that the figure in view is more than a son of David.

Dan 7:13-14 has one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven and approaching the Ancient of Days, and being given authority, glory, and sovereign power. Read carefully, the movement in Daniel is toward the throne rather than downward to earth.

So the ascension is not primarily about Jesus leaving. It is about him arriving somewhere and receiving something.

What Does It Mean That He Is Seated?

That the work is complete and the reign is current.

Hebrews makes the contrast explicitly. Priests stood daily performing repeated sacrifices that could never take away sins. This priest offered one sacrifice and sat down.

Standing is the posture of work in progress. Sitting is the posture of work finished.

And the reign is not deferred. The New Testament speaks of the present authority of Christ, not merely a future one, which is why Paul can write about powers already placed under his feet while himself sitting in a Roman prison.

Does He Still Have a Body?

The New Testament says so, and the implications are not small.

The resurrection appearances insist on physical continuity: wounds that can be seen, flesh and bones, fish eaten in company. Nothing in the ascension accounts reverses that.

Which means the claim is that human nature has been taken into the presence of God permanently, not temporarily borrowed and then set down.

Hebrews works this into its argument about a high priest who is able to sympathise with our weaknesses because he has been tested as we are. The sympathy is not memory of a past condition. It is ongoing.

What Happened Next?

They waited, and then Pentecost.

Acts 1 has them returning to the upper room, devoting themselves to prayer, and choosing a replacement for Judas. Then Acts 2, and the movement that this series has been following in its other threads begins.

The ascension is the seam. It closes the account of the life of Jesus and opens the account of the church, and every apostle covered in the companion series is standing on the hill when it happens.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline. The story continues in the series on the Twelve Apostles.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Luke 24:50-53, Acts 1:1-11, Ps 110, Dan 7:13-14, and Heb 10:11-12 and 4:15.

The citation list for Ps 110 across the New Testament: Matt 22:44 and 26:64, Mark 12:36, 14:62 and 16:19, Luke 20:41-44 and 22:69, Acts 2:33-35, 1 Cor 15:25, Eph 1:20, Col 3:1, and Heb 1:3 and 1:13, 5:6, 7:17 and 7:21, 10:12-13, and 12:2.

Where the sourcing stops: the reading of Dan 7 as describing movement toward the throne rather than toward earth is a common scholarly observation rather than my own construction, though it is not universally held. The forty-day interval comes from Acts alone.

Footnotes

1. That Psalm 110 is the most frequently cited Old Testament passage in the New Testament is easy to state and hard to absorb. The earliest Christians reached for an enthronement text more often than for anything else, which tells you what they thought had happened.
2. The disciples’ question in Acts 1:6 about restoring the kingdom to Israel is often read as a failure to understand. It is worth noticing that Jesus does not tell them the expectation is wrong. He tells them the timing is not theirs to know, which is a different answer.