“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
The question sounds a bit like criticism, but I’m not sure that’s fair. Jesus has just been lifted up, taken into a cloud out of the disciples’ sight, and two men in white robes turn up to ask the disciples why they’re staring at the sky. I don’t know. If I saw someone ascend into heaven, I’m pretty sure I’d stare too.
It’s forty days after Easter. Ten days before Pentecost. Jesus’s followers have spent time with him. They’ve come to accept the truth of his resurrection. But they’re still looking to him as something of a political figure. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?,” they ask. Jesus doesn’t answer that question, but instead tells them that they’ll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes, and that they’ll go on to be witnesses to the ends of the earth.
And then he’s gone.
And his friends stand there, looking up at the place where he disappeared from their sight.
“Why are you looking up?,” two men who might be angels ask.
This episode takes place at the beginning of the book of Acts, the book that tells the story of the early Church and of the things Jesus’s first disciples went on to do. That framing is important, I think.
Because what those two figures in white robes are really doing is calling the disciples back to the work that’s in front of them. They can’t do the work they’re called to do if all they do is gaze up toward heaven.
The book of Acts is the story of what happens after Jesus’s ascension. And actually, if you think about it, our own story is too. Our own story is a continuation of theirs.
The angels’ warning made me think of a movie that came out a few years ago called Don’t Look Up. Some of you may have seen it. It turns the angels’ warning not to look up on its head. The movie is a dark satire about a huge comet on its way to destroy the earth, and about all the ways people find to avoid confronting the truth. The scientists trying to mobilize the world to action coin a phrase, “Just look up.” In the movie, it’s the politicians who can’t face the truth who say: “Don’t look up.”
In the book of Acts, the direction might be different, but the call is similar. Keep your focus on the work that’s in front of you. Keep your focus on what’s true and what’s real.
But maybe that’s not fair either. Because the disciples aren’t refusing to look. They’re looking very hard at exactly the right thing. They’re doing what spiritual people are supposed to do. They’re focusing on the risen Christ, on the promise of his return. How can that be wrong? But still the angels stop them.
That’s the bit that I find more challenging than the depressing but straightforward message of the movie about a comet. Refusing to see is one way we avoid truth, a way we’ve probably all experienced, in ourselves and in people we know. But there’s another way we can get things wrong, a way closer to what Jesus’s disciples did after the Ascension. We can stare and marvel at something that’s real and important. We can stare and marvel, and forget to love. We can forget to act on what we see.
What Jesus’s disciples do after Jesus’s Ascension seems so simple. They go back to Jerusalem, to the small group that will soon become the seed of the Church, and they devote themselves to prayer.
Is prayer anything different than staring up into heaven? I think it is. Remember, this is the week before Pentecost. Jesus has promised that the Holy Spirit will come, but that day hasn’t yet arrived.
The angels don’t tell the disciples to stop loving Jesus. They tell them that they can’t stay in the place where he disappeared. That they can’t remain in the past. Love has to become prayer. And it’s prayer that opens them to God, to one another, and to the work that’s still to come.
Prayer teaches the disciples how to love. And as a monk in the Episcopal Church once put it, “Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.” The form that action takes will be different for each of us, but love must act, and I suspect that’s at least one reason why Jesus’s followers couldn’t just stay out in the countryside staring up at the sky. It’s a reason that applies to us too.
“Don’t look up.” Or “just look up.” Both warnings are too simple. There are things we’re afraid to look at because they ask too much of us. And there are times when looking up becomes just an excuse to stand still.
But what God calls us to is truth. What God calls us to is prayer. What God calls us to is love. And “love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.” Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?