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Into Thin Air is John Krakauer's grizzly account of the loss of twelve persons attempting to climb Mount Everest. Krakauer himself was a member of one of the parties making the effort to reach the peak of Everest. His account reads like a novel and it is hard to put down. The most fascinating feature of this story is trying to decipher what drives people to attempt the adventure of climbing the highest peak in the world. People pay exorbitant amounts of money to be led by veteran guides and teams of leaders who have led many people up the mount. Many have succeeded with good guidance. Some have not reached the top. Some died on the way.

The trails up the mount are littered with the remains of sporting people who have failed. To be sure, there are those sports figures who love the dare involved. There are adventuresome people who like any kind of challenge. There are those who climb only because the mountain is there. An underlying feature for all is a common urge. The majestic heights of the mountain beckon all who see it to explore its beauty and wonder. Krakauer heads each of his chapters recounting this mystic venture with quotes from other people who have made the effort to climb Everest. One climber surmised that he had been lured into an ephemeral climb in search of something he had already left behind. That observation is a parabolic warning that on this Ascension Day we could be looking for something beyond us and lose sight of what our Lord has gained for us by his ascension into thin air.

Enlightenment

The event of the Ascension of our Lord is recorded in the First Reading and the Holy Gospel appointed for this day. The story is well known. What is important to note is that it is Luke who informs us that over a period of forty days Jesus appeared to the disciples. Jesus used the time to assure the disciples of his resurrection and that they would eventually understand the significance of what he had taught them in the light of his death and resurrection. Through the process of recalling and researching what Jesus had taught them and done for them, they would discover that the acts of Jesus would be entirely consistent with what God had revealed through the history of Israel. Through that process of searching his life, death, and resurrection and matching his work with what God had previously revealed to their people, they came to understand more fully by the power of the Holy Spirit whom God would send them. They would be enlightened by the Spirit.

In the Second Reading for Ascension we hear the apostolic description of what our Lord Jesus Christ continues to do for us. We assume it is Paul who is writing. He says, "I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know him." That is why our Lord ascended to the Father. Jesus ascended that we might come to know the Father better. What the Father reveals to us is that God would have us to know our relationship with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. What we learn thereby is not some set of formulas, rules, or facts that we must do to be on better terms with God. Rather we learn that God has already indicated how God was willing to enter life on the same terms as we to make sure we can understand God's love for us.

Hope

Essentially, what God has done for us in Jesus of Nazareth is to call us to share life with the Christ. Paul writes, "So that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you." As Paul employs the word "hope" here, we should recognize that Paul writes of "hope" as a unique Christian experience. For Paul, hope in Christ is the absolute assurance that what God has done for us and what God promises to do in the future is divine reality. This understanding of hope is not that something might happen to provide a happy ending, a good solution, or a bonanza of some sort. Hope in the Hebrew Scriptures is always expressed in terms of the mighty acts of God. God is the hope of Israel because of what God has done and will continue to do for God's people.

In the New Testament it is the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ that is the mighty act of God. Consequently, our Risen Lord Jesus Christ is our hope. Our hope rests solidly on all that culminates in and is affirmed by the resurrection of our Lord. That implies all that was revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth builds up into this sure and certain hope. Paul's understanding of this hope in Christ Jesus has absolutely no relationship to worldly or human achievement. Utopian and secular optimism are totally alien to this revelation of hope in Christ. The origin of this hope is in the resurrection of Jesus, and its promise of the future is in the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. For that reason on the day of the Ascension of our Lord that hope is revitalized and renewed as we rehearse the Ascension event as a sign of promise that our Lord will return. That hope gives new meaning to our lives, refreshes our spirits, and gives us the certainty that our work is not in vain.

The Glorious Inheritance

With the hope we share in our Lord Jesus Christ comes the inheritance we will also share with him. When we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord, we recall how Jesus returned to the Father to enjoy what the Father had been holding for him. What our Lord could claim as the Son of the Father was the right to God's kingly rule. Paul writes about "the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints." The very reason that Jesus entered into the human condition was to enable people to enjoy the same benefactions he received. Elsewhere Paul can write about the believers in our Lord Jesus Christ as those who have been adopted by God. In ancient times adoption was created as a procedure to enable the childless wealthy man or woman to pass on an estate to an heir. By grace we have been adopted into the family of God to be God's true heirs with the Lord Jesus Christ.

As sons and daughters of God we are privileged to share with the Son of God. We are afforded the right to share in the kingly rule, eternal life, and a life of righteousness. We have not experienced the ultimate of what that means. What we do have now as the heirs with the Lord Jesus is the assurance that sharing his kingdom will happen. While Jesus was on the earth, while he suffered death and entered into the resurrection, Jesus was always the heir, even though he was in this life. The same holds true for us. We are the heirs of the kingdom with the Lord Jesus. That is certain. It is sure and certain as our hope. However, there is the "not yet" feature of our inheritance. While we are in this world, with whatever conditions, handicaps, trials, or tribulations we have, we are heirs of the kingdom. Or if our lives are serene and calm, devoid of trial and hardship, we also sense the "not yet" of faith.

Immeasurable Greatness

If our talk about our inheritance as the adopted children of God appears to be only about our future, Paul corrects that notion. Along with the expressions concerning our hope and inheritance as the children of God, Paul maintains we are in position to understand "what is the immeasurable greatness of his power ... according to the working of his great power." This means we can examine the creation with a new understanding of what God is doing within the creation not simply as happenstance and accidental products of Mother Nature, but we see our providential Heavenly Father providing for us, God's creatures. We witness the storming and erratic behavior of natural forces within the creation not simply as accidental freaks of nature, but we see the hand of God writing warnings in big letters of greater judgments to come. Ordinarily people balk at any interpretation of natural catastrophes as judgments of God. To be sure, we cannot assume, as our Lord Jesus Christ himself said, that the victims of natural disasters have sinned more and are more deserving of judgment. The disruptions of the creation rather are calls for us all to repent.

Paul writes that those who believe can take note how God uses the immeasurable greatness of divine power to give everyone a wake up call to God's presence within the creation. If people fail to see the goodness and grace of God at work within the vastness and finiteness of the creation, then God has to shake them up by a negative expression of divine power. Airiness, one of the early church fathers, believed there were four Gospels, because there were four zones within the creation and four great winds within the creation. Today we would hardly subscribe to such a simplistic notion. Yet for his moment, the church father saw the gospel related to God's power within the universes. For our day, we have every reason to believe the same as our understanding of the universes expands.

The Power At Work

However, Paul would have us realize that God employs divine power in more than the creation. Paul writes, "God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in heavenly places." The full potential of God's power is not known by what God can and does do in the universe. That use of power of itself is awesome. However, in the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, God demonstrated the divine power over life and death. That is how God gave the evidence of the best and most of what God can do for us. When God gives life in the form of the tiny infant, we see the divine power at work in creating a remarkable gift who will grow with its wisps of hair, tiny fingernails, and little shining eyes. Yet when that body grows to old age deformed by calcification of arthritis, dimmed in the eyes, and wrinkled with pain, we can surrender it to the grave. Yet we not only surrender it to the maggots of decay but to the sure and certain hope of the resurrection from the dead.
Niteline once featured a story of a medical experiment on Mount Everest, the same mountain mentioned in the introduction. The experiment was to research the behavior of the heart under the trying circumstances of thin air. The air is so thin on the mountain that the oxygen is about one third of what we naturally breathe. The purpose of the study would be to determine what we can learn about the heart in trying circumstances. So the ascent of Mount Everest would have the benefit of helping us to live longer. What we learn from Paul is that the ascent of our Risen Lord to heavenly places is to afford us the benefit that God will raise us from the dead for eternity.

Above All Authority

God's use of authority through our Lord Jesus Christ goes much deeper than God's promise and ability to raise us from the dead. When God raised God's Son from the dead and admitted him into God's kingdom and under God's kingly rule, Paul writes, God "put all things under his feet." He further explains this to mean that we are to take this literally.

Our Lord Jesus Christ rules "far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come." The practical application of the rule of Christ is that whether there is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House, Christ is ruler over all. Whether any nation rises to upset the international hold on the use of nuclear power, Christ is still ruler over all. That is true about all earthly power or wherever we locate power.

Whether we are talking about the powers that be in the governor's office, city hall, the university, the business conglomerate, or within the home, Christ is ruler over all. We tend to lose sight of that. One can understand why. We live under power; we work under power. We may be in position to employ power ourselves. It is reality to say that if we want to get something done, we have to get to the powers that be. However, we can be sure that the abuses of power, the false uses of power, and the misuse of power will ultimately fail, because Christ rules over all. The History Channel has aired the fall of Napoleon, one of the most outstanding figures in all of history. The same program has chronicled the fall of the Third Reich and the end of the Holocaust. Other programs have included the collapse of segregation in our own country, the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and the collapse of the USSR. Christ does rule over every power and dominion.

The Head Of The Church

Having recognized our Lord's complete and full use of power over all other powers in the world, Paul concludes with the statement that God has made Our Lord Jesus Christ "the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." The striking feature of this observation is that Paul indicates that Christ uses the powers of divine majesty to rule all things for the sake of the church. One would never guess that possibility when one reads secular assessments of the role of the church in the world. For some writers it is popular to make the church fair game in writing of the diminishing role or power of the church in the world. Paul would never agree to that. Paul would insist that it is only because of the existence of and the presence of the church in the world, that the world still stands. It is only by faith we recognize this to be true.

By faith we know the realities of the history being made around us, and Paul would say, for us. For example, our nation was totally absorbed by the production of the movie Titanic. The film got a number of academy awards and still stimulates considerable interest years afterward. Yet the film trivialized the event by centering on it as an occasion for a love story. The lesson to be learned from that shocking event was what William Lord called A Night to Remember in his excellent account of the tragedy that it was. Lord saw the sinking of that marvelous ship as an incident that shook the confidence of a world in a year in which people optimistically believed it could create an unsinkable ship like it could rule and do anything it wanted to do. Faith recognizes otherwise. Just as we, the people of God, know God rules all things in our interest and welfare. We can read the negative signs of the rule and judgment of Christ in the world. We also recognize the manner in which he also serves humanity through the great heroes of faith. For us this means the certainty of the Presence of the Christ in our lives. Jesus, our Lord and Christ, did not ascend into the thin air to vanish, but he broke a trail for us that he might be present with us at all times and lead us into eternity.