Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Luke 24:44-53

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Another world

When I imagine this scene I think Jesus disappears from their sight into a cloud, but it might just as well be that he walked away and somehow stepped into another dimension, another universe parallel to our own.

It all seems too fantastic to believe except that our physicists now suggest parallel universes are likely not the figment of feverish imaginations. And who knows what time and space are like in those universes, or if time and space exist at all.

They may wrap around or penetrate this world in ways that affect our time and space. Perhaps the boundaries between our universe and others are thin.

It’s all beyond my feeble mind, but some things are not.

Jesus is received into the fullness of the Mystery from which he first came. With gentle ease, he enters that universe beyond our own because he is of one being this Mystery. He belongs to it. It is in him, dwelling deeply in him without separation.  

Everything he ever did or said expresses a dimension of reality, the truth of the universe from which he came and into which he passed when his time here was done.

When he passed from our dimension back into the one from which he came, he left with hands raised, palms out, blessing his friends that they might wait for the life that was in him to fill them. Then they were to take that blessing to the ends of this earth that our world may be infused with the wonder of a new world waiting to be born in us and every earthly place.

That was their job. And it’s still not done.

Pr. David L. Miller