(On Ascension Day.)
TEXT: ACTS i. 6-11.
THE great event that we commemorate to-day was no doubt something very different to the disciples at that time from what it is to us. They had hardly recovered from the stunned condition into which His death had thrown them; they had hardly come to realize calmly their pain at His separation from them; at least, they had certainly not yet learned to look at it in the right way, for they regarded it as the ruin of His whole work on earth—when His joyful resurrection took them by surprise, comforting them and setting them right. But now when He was withdrawn from their eyes while they gazed up to heaven, it was more tranquilly and wisely, and certainly with a greatly lightened sorrow, as one looks at the close of a full and completed life, that they regarded the end of the relations in which they had hitherto stood with their beloved Lord and Master. For us, on the contrary, this event stands as the beginning of that relation of Christ to His people which has continued ever since then—the only relation which we know by direct experience. Hence, while we can, it is true, sympathise with the sorrow of the disciples, we cannot feel it directly as our own; and it would be unnatural in us to try to work ourselves up into such a state of feeling, as if we missed something by the personal, visible presence of the Saviour being denied to us. But we may profitably inquire to-day whether we thoroughly appreciate all the good and beauty of the relation that has subsisted between the Saviour and His people since He ascended from the earth, and enjoy it, as He intended, in all its fulness. The Saviour certainly brought that good very thoroughly into view in the comforting promises that He gave to His disciples as often as He already in spirit saw Himself exalted to the right hand of the Father. If, in a general way, there is little or nothing, even of what Christ said to His disciples in their most intimate intercourse, that might not also be applied to us; if we share with them almost all the privileges that He bestowed on them, as well as all the duties He imposed on them; how much more may we apply to ourselves what He said for the purpose of preparing them for the position which we have in common with them. If we take all the utterances, ever becoming more clear and intelligible, concerning the spirit and manner of His kingdom; the tender outpourings of His glorious love in the presaging sense of His departure; the earnest warnings and exhortations addressed to their hearts not yet fortified against danger;—if we regard all this as said to us also, whom He embraces in the same love, and for whom He prayed, even as for those through whose word we believe; how much more may we claim a share in the elevating promises by which He sought to comfort the disciples for their loss, and to make them fit for their new position.
These promises of the Saviour to His disciples in reference to His complete departure from them are scattered through His discourses, and it would be necessary to collect them from many passages if we wished to study them fully and in detail. But as custom requires us to take one connected portion of Scripture as the leading thread of our public expositions; the account of the ascension, which we have just read, will serve our purpose, in so far as it reminds us distinctly of those promises to which I wish chiefly to draw your attention, and which we may most directly take to ourselves. For certainly when the Saviour tells the apostles they are to wait till they are endued with power from on high, and then to be His witnesses; we cannot appropriate to ourselves what belonged specially and peculiarly to the gift at Pentecost, to which Christ here unquestionably alludes. And indeed that power from on high was not, after all, the Spirit of God, whom Jesus had already breathed into the apostles in the first days after His resurrection,—whom He had even earlier spoken of them as possessing, when, on their acknowledging Him as the Christ, He said that flesh and blood had not revealed it to them, but the Father in heaven; for when the Father reveals anything, He does it by the Holy Spirit, as it is said in another place, No man can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Spirit. Now if we further reflect how, since then, many have become His witnesses who had no share in the extraordinary gift of Pentecost, as we ourselves are, each in his own way; how can this call to be His witnesses but remind us of that glorious promise, without which no one would be capable of fulfilling this commission—the promise which the Saviour linked with this very commission, saying, Go, and teach all nations, and then adding, And I am with you all the days, even to the end of the world. And the words of those who came to the apostles after the Lord was taken away,—to what could they refer but to the promise which, during the recent days, the Lord had often expressed in various forms, that the Son of man would return in all the glory of the Father, a Lord and King, a Judge of all living. If, then, we desire to reflect together on the promises of the departing Saviour, it is just those two on which we should fix our attention: first, that He will be with us even to the end of the days; and second, that He will come again to judgment. But, my friends, let us deal in the same way with these two promises; with the one as with the other! If no time is too late for the one, so let us also believe that no time is too early for the other. If we enjoy the one as an immediate and precious possession, let us not regard the other only as a hardly discernible form, approaching with little show out of the dim distance; but let us appropriate both, not as something strange and far off, but as something present, forming the essence of His living relation to His Church, of His kingdom already set up,—something of which, just for this reason, He could say, It is not for you to know times and seasons, because it is not at all a matter of times and seasons, but has always existed, from that time onwards, and must from one period to another come ever nearer to completion. In this manner, then, let us talk together of these two promises.