![]() ![]() The letter to the Ephesians gives us another iteration of this message. ![]() As they practiced and preached that, bringing others into communion with God, they would recognize his presence among them until the end of ages. Inviting them to this living faith, the risen Lord told the disciples that his message of unfailing love was the only genuine power in the world. The only path to deep belief is to step out and walk on the water of faith in the one who sends you into mission. Jesus, who had come to understand his mission by putting it into practice, knew that no theory, no law, no dogma, no commandment can elicit genuine faith. And Jesus, knowing that mission offered them the only path to comprehending his mystery, sent them to take his message to the ends of the earth. In doubt and confusion, joy and wonder, they encountered the one who knew and loved them like no other. There on the mountain, when the disciples saw Jesus, they truly came home. There, like those who had gone before them, the disciples found themselves on that threshold of faith where amazement left them both worshiping and doubting. (Remember, among others, the mountains where Noah's ark landed, where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, where Moses encountered the burning bush, where God gave the 10 commandments and where Jesus sat as he spoke the Sermon on the Mount.) Matthew, exquisitely in tune with the symbolism of the Hebrew Scriptures, simply tells us that they went to Galilee, going like their ancestors to a mountain of encounter with God. Now, when the news of Jesus' execution had surely arrived before they got there, how did they face those back home whose words or gazes asked, "What now?" What a hard homecoming it must have been! What could they say to their friends and relatives? They had journeyed so far following a master who inspired them to leave everything behind. What did they do and say to one another along the way? What happened as they returned to where they had first fallen in love with Jesus? Matthew says nothing about what happened as the disciples retraced their steps for the 60 miles separating Jerusalem from Galilee. As they obeyed those instructions, the risen Lord appeared to them, and he, too, commissioned them to announce the news and send the disciples back to where they had started. Matthew, taking a very different and subtle approach to Jesus' departure, starts this story when the myrrh-bearing women met an angel who sent them to announce that Jesus was risen and would meet his disciples in Galilee. In Luke's presentation, just before ascending to the Father, Jesus sent the disciples into a retreat, a 10-day time of reconstituting themselves in preparation for the experience of Pentecost (Acts 1:11-26). Luke is the only evangelist to describe Jesus' ascension, and he ties the two volumes of his Gospel together by describing it at the end of the first and the beginning of the second ( Luke 24:50-51 Acts 1:9). For 40 of those days, the risen Jesus made himself known to them, revealing that he had passed through death and teaching them again what he had always taught: "The reign of God is among you" ( Luke 17:21). In the opening lines of the Acts of the Apostles, the second volume of his Gospel, Luke describes the disciples' 50-day period of learning the meaning of the Resurrection. ![]()
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