Jesus Is Taken to Heaven
While the apostles were still with Jesus, they asked him, “Lord, are you now going to give Israel its own king again?” Jesus said to them, “You don’t need to know the time of those events that only the Father controls. 8But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. Then you will tell everyone about me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and everywhere in the world.” After Jesus had said this and while they were watching, he was taken up into a cloud. They could not see him, but as he went up, they kept looking up into the sky.
Suddenly two men dressed in white clothes were standing there beside them. They said, “Why are you men from Galilee standing here and looking up into the sky? Jesus has been taken to heaven. But he will come back in the same way that you have seen him go.”Acts 1:1-11 Contemporary English Version
I don’t know about you but I have trouble with the cosmology of the ascension story. The idea of Jesus floating up into the sky just doesn’t fit the round earth theory. I can see why many of my friends just dismiss the story as a contrived story that expresses theologically the truth of Jesus body not being part of this world anymore.
The way I see it is that Jesus could well have pulled off an ascension. It is consistent with a resurrected body that is real but beyond the limits of the previous mortal version. I like the way C.S. Lewis describes it in his book, The Great Divorce. He describes the next dimension as more solid than this dimension. The post-resurrection stories indicate a Jesus with a body that defied the limits of time and space.
Jesus would have known that his followers had a flat earth cosmology. They weren’t the lucky recipients of an imagination developed by reading science fiction. The most effective way of getting them used to the idea of leaving this earth for the next would be to ascend into the clouds. I wonder how he’d do it now? “Beam me up”?
What do you think?
Very interesting, got me thinking. However, I believe in the literal translation, Jesus went UP into the clouds and will re-appear IN the clouds. I haven’t read the CS Lewis book, but I have always believed that heaven isn’t in space, nor is it in time. Time and space is in another dimension to God’s dimension and Jesus left the earth to go into that dimension.