The Cloud That Took Him and the Promise That Came Back

Luke the doctor had already written one long book about Jesus, and it ended with Jesus' friends praising God in the temple. But Luke was not finished. He took a fresh scroll and wrote to a man named Theophilus, "My first book told what Jesus began to do and teach. Here is what came next." (Theophilus means "friend of God," which is a good name for someone getting a book like this.)

He started back at the forty days.

Jesus had died, killed on a cross, and now he was alive, and for forty days he kept proving it. His friends saw him and heard him. He ate with them. He talked with them about the kingdom of God, where God is King and everything wrong is put right. One day, over a meal, he gave them an order.

"Don't leave Jerusalem," he said. "Wait for the gift my Father promised. John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit."

Wait is a hard word for anyone. Then they walked out to the Mount of Olives, the hill just across the valley, and the friends could not hold their question in any longer.

"Lord," they asked, "is this the time? Are you going to give the kingdom back to Israel now?"

(If you have ever asked "Are we there yet?" from the back seat of a car, you know exactly how they sounded.)

Jesus did not give them a date. "It is not for you to know the times the Father has set," he said. "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. And you will be my witnesses, here in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

A witness is someone who tells what they saw. These friends had seen plenty.

Then, while they were watching him, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

Nobody moved. Eleven grown men stood on the hillside, chins pointed at the clouds and mouths hanging open, staring at a patch of empty sky. Somebody's neck must have started to ache.

Suddenly two men in white were standing beside them.

"Men of Galilee," they said, "why are you standing here looking up at the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you saw him go."

(Someone had to say it. Otherwise they might have stood there until supper.)

So the friends walked back down into the city, climbed the stairs to the room where they were staying, and prayed there with Mary the mother of Jesus, his brothers, and the women who had followed him. And they waited, as he had told them.

A cloud can hide someone, but it cannot hold on to him. The angels had promised it: this same Jesus would come back the way he went. The same Jesus, with the same scarred hands. Hundreds of years earlier, one of God's prophets had written that one day the LORD would stand on the Mount of Olives, the very hill they had just walked down.

He has not come back yet. But the waiting has never been empty. A few days later the Spirit came, as Jesus said, and his friends began telling what they had seen: in Jerusalem, then Samaria, then across the sea, town after town, on toward the ends of the earth. The kingdom has already begun in everyone who belongs to him.

One day the sky will open again, and his friends will tip their heads back the way they did on that hill. This time the cloud will be bringing him home to them.