Today is Ascension Day. It is a public holiday in parts of Europe. Hemelvaartsdag. New York City observes it by letting you not move your car. The Church Order of Dordt required a service. Does your church observe it? Probably not, although the Apostles and Nicene Creeds make the Ascension an essential.

Only Luke reports it—briefly at the end of his Gospel (with manuscripts disagreeing) and more thoroughly in Acts chapter 1.

Have you noticed the “two men”? Behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” 

Who were these two men? Or did you assume they were angels? Luke knows the word for angels, but he calls these guys “men.”

Luke reports “two men” also at the empty tomb on Easter morning. Behold, two men stood by the women in dazzling apparel. By contrast, Matthew reports an angel and John says two angels. (Mark has a young man!) We presume that Luke knew Matthew’s version, but we know that he used other sources too. In Luke, the talk at the tomb anticipates the talk at the Ascension: The men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you . . . etc.”

Most commentators regard the two at the tomb as angels. That’s an easy way out. We know what to do with angels: send them back to heaven and then they’re essentially irrelevant. But if they were real human beings they remain mysterious. I’m guessing that Luke did not tell us who they were or where they came from because he did not know either.

While Luke’s Easter account has “two men,” in his story from that same afternoon, on the Road to Emmaus, Cleopas tells Jesus of a “vision of angels.” Luke might have been referencing Matthew’s source, or perhaps he was suggesting that the witnesses to the empty tomb did not yet have the mental categories for what had happened. The resurrection that they expected, along with other Jews, was the far-off-in-the-future, Ezekiel-dry-bones, second-time-around for the nation of Israel, and that did not connect with the two men at the tomb.

The two men at Easter were in “dazzling” apparel. The word for “dazzling” is also used by Luke (and only by Luke) for Our Lord’s white raiment at his Transfiguration. And there too, two men were standing by — Moses and Elijah, coming in from out of time, earlier time.

What I draw from this is that the two men, at both the tomb and the Ascension, were witnesses, though of the future, not of the past. They were people of the Resurrection, members of the new humanity, inhabitants of the New Heaven and Earth, citizens of the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven from God.

One of Luke’s themes in his Gospel and The Acts is the New Humanity, of which the Lord Jesus is the Firstborn and the New Adam. He is the progenitor of the new multi-ethnic community of the Holy Spirit, and with him comes the new investment of the Holy Spirit in the world.

Luke is the most “modern” of the Gospels, the most historical, and the most humane. He shows how the Holy Spirit enters (invades!) the secular history of the Roman Empire to create a new civitas within it, one of grace and service and welcome, in contrast to Imperial power and wealth and violence. Two vivid examples, in Acts 16, are Lydia and the jailer, who counter the violent exploitation that was the accepted way of life in Philippi. These two Philippians were a new kind of human being!

This new humanity is only preliminary and partial until Our Lord comes again. Until then we have only passing evidence of it and glimpses. And this is what I think we see in those two guys at the Ascension: glimpses. They are witnesses to, and evidence of, what we ourselves will be.

Where did they come from? I used to imagine it as something like time-travel, that these two guys had traveled back from the future, like in the movies, or like the “prescients” in the novel Cloud Atlas. It’s probably better to imagine that the New World already is, and our time is just painfully catching up. They didn’t travel back—we are glimpsing ahead. However we might imagine it is less important than joyfully receiving the promises in the mysteries.

Luke reported them as men, not angels, no doubt because that’s what his sources told him. But Luke is also a theologian, by means of the selection and arrangement of his materials. Specific words like “men” rather than “angels” would seem then to carry theological importance. I invite you to consider what the theological implications might be if these guys were people. Let me offer this:

We usually explain the significance of the Ascension in terms of heaven, and that’s not wrong. Ephesians does it, so does the Heidelberg Catechism. But we then tend to attach to this conventional belief the idea that the purpose of salvation is to save us from hell and prepare us for heaven. And if so, it follows that the Second Coming of Jesus will be just a temporary touch-down, from which he will quickly depart back to heaven, where we will spend eternity with him. The idea is that the whole human race will be divided eternally between heaven and hell. It is a view that goes back to St. Augustine’s City of God. Who knows about the earth, and who cares? Who cares about the sandhill cranes and the passenger pigeons and the Great Barrier Reef? Who cares about the suffering of millions in the world? They’re all just going to hell anyway. This is a conventional and all too common understanding.

But what if instead, the two “men” draw the attention of the Apostles back down from heaven to earth, and to the future. When these men remind the disciples — and us — that Jesus will return, it quite naturally implies that he will stay.

They are men, not angels, and they are from the future of this world, after “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come (Nicene Creed).” Their witness is that the great promise of the Ascension is not for the timeless bliss of heaven but for the renewal of all things, including the earth, and human life upon it.

These two guys are homeys! I hope you find some inspiration and encouragement in them. I do.