It took one hour to get from my childhood home in New Haven , Connecticut to Salem, where we got to see my cousins. One hour. And yet, it seemed like a lifetime. I remember vividly sitting in the backseat, fighting with my little brother and asking the same question over and over again, “Are we there yet?”
Sure enough, I hear echoes of my childhood self when we take road trips today. TV and games help, but there is still the same longing question that often comes from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” One time Max asked this question just twenty minutes into a trip from Kansas to Colorado. I did not have the heart to tell him how much we were not there yet. After all, his mind could not have grasped the ten hour trip at the tender age of two.
As we move further and further into the Easter celebration, we move deeper into the story of Christ’s resurrection. Today we remember how, after appearing to the disciples many times in the resurrected form, Jesus ascended into heaven. He left bodily, physically. And he would never come back in that way again.
But before Jesus left, the disciples asked him the same question that I asked my parents so long ago, the same question that Max asked me. Are we there yet?
The disciples wanted to know if this was it. Was this the end of the world, the time when Christ would come in all his glory and defeat all the darkness, the time for us to rise with him to eternal life? Was this it? Are we there yet?
And Jesus looks at them and gives them the same answer that he gives us two thousand years later, It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set…
It is not for you to know.
Just look at things from our vantage point today. We are now more than two thousand years after the ascension and still, we wait. The disciples could not have conceived of this. Their minds would not have grasped it. Just as you and I cannot grasp God’s timing today.
2012 has become the next hotspot in terms of end of the world foretelling. Evidently, the Mayan calendar ends on that year. Probably, this is because the Mayans could not conceive of the human race lasting longer than this, but many people have taken this to mean that the end of the world is to occur in 2012.
I do not believe any of this. You see, I truly think that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he told them that it is not for us to know. Whenever human beings get in the business of fortune telling, of trying to examine the future as if it is some game that God has given us clues to, some kind of puzzle that can be solved if we just piece together slivers of our lives or the lives of others, we make a mess and we waste our time. Jesus told us that this kind of thing is God’s business. We are not to know.
I walked through the MOSH museum yesterday. They have a great planetarium. There are photographs from the Hubble spacecraft: photographs of nebula, of whole galaxies dancing in the darkness, of blue stars and supernova. These photos represent events that are so vast and I cannot take in their size. They are so beautiful that I find myself wanting to stare at them for hours. They display the glory of God, a glory that is simply beyond human understanding. As I stood before them, I felt awe.
In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster is a scientist who courageously volunteers to travel light years away from earth in a ship designed by aliens. She sees beauty that is so spectacular, so beyond human comprehension, that she finds herself speechless. She tries to record all that she sees by speaking into a tape-recorder, but when she comes to the events of the cosmos, she pauses in great silence and she says, “They should have sent a poet….They should have sent a poet.”
Why is it so hard for us to simply not have the answers? Some things are simple to great for words. Some things simply cannot be described or calculated. Why can we not leave certain things up to God? The disciples wanted the whole story wrapped up in their life-times, they wanted it all clean and neat. What was about to happen was so much larger than that.
People will often ask me about the salvation of souls. When a man dies who was angry or who took his own life, I will be asked the question, “Is he going to hell?” But the truth is that I cannot answer, or I could answer but my answer would be insufficient. I do not know the times and I do not know the places. All I know is what Jesus promised, that if we know him and love him we will come to Him.
And whenever we get into the business of determining the salvation of others, we get in just as much trouble as we do when we try to figure out the schedule for the end of the world. We just make a mess of things. Why can we not simply leave this up to God? It is our job to tell others about Jesus and our love of him, but salvation is not for us to determine. It is God’s job, not ours.
When Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are left standing there staring after him. They no doubt are wondering where he went, wondering if he will come back. They don’t want to move on with their lives because that would confirm that he is gone, so they just stand there gaping. Two men, messengers of God, angels, have to appear and tell the men that he has gone, but that one day, he will come again in the same way that he left.
So the disciples go home, or the closest thing that they have to home. They go to the Upper Room and they meet together, lost and confused. And that is where the Holy Spirit comes.
If they had stayed looking up to heaven, trying to calculate Jesus’ next arrival, they might never have become the Church. The Holy Spirit came to them when they went back to their lives and tried to figure out how to live in the present moment. For the Holy Spirit does not come in the past nor does God live in the future. God meets us in the now and helps us to see more clearly now, not then, but now.
I would love to see Jesus come again. I would love for Him to come and make all the wrongs right, fix the brokenness of the world, ease the pain, punish the wicked. Sometimes I still look up to heaven and want to ask, Are we there yet? But every time I do, I just get this deep silence in response. For I cannot begin to fathom the answer.
When we were on our way to Colorado and Max asked that question, I leaned over from the front seat (JD was driving) and I looked at his little face. “It’s going to be a while, buddy,” I said. “But I will be with you every step of the way.”
Maybe that is the better question, instead of asking Jesus, Are we there yet or Jesus, Is so and so going to heaven, or Jesus What will happen next, what if we asked one simple question,
God, will you stay with me, every step of the way?
I think that God answers that question, for we can fathom His answer.
Yes, he says. Yes.
