This Thursday is Ascension Day.

Some church groups celebrate it and many of us actually simply ignore it.

For us, Christmas and Easter constitute the only church year that really matters.

I'm not even sure if Pentecostal churches celebrate Pentecost each year.

And so I suspect most of us don't pay much attention to Ascension Day, the Ascension

of the Lord Jesus, despite the fact, as we saw yesterday, that it's mentioned quite frequently

in Scripture.

The opening verses of Acts tell us that for 40 days following his resurrection, Jesus met with

his disciples and taught them more about the kingdom of God.

Actually, I think that's the explanation for the amazing

biblical theology of Simon Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost. It wasn't just that

he was now filled with the Spirit. It was that Jesus had filled him full with Scripture.

That rich biblical theology of his sermon didn't come to him on the spur of the

moment, I don't think. It was surely what he had been taught by the Lord Jesus during those weeks

of seminar teaching. But why did Jesus not close out the last day of those seminars by saying to them, that's the

end of the seminars and you won't see me again.

I'm going back to the Father permanently now.

Probably for two reasons.

The first was that he wanted to make clear to them not just by word, but also by action,

that he really was leaving them permanently until he would come back again at the end.

I suspect that if he just said his farewells in a relatively undramatic fashion to the

apostles and the other Christians, and left them as he apparently had been doing

...