The meaning of Ascension Day is not that Jesus went up into the clouds as though a puppeteer on high had jerked a string. The meaning of Ascension Day is that Jesus the Son of God reigns over all things. -Fleming Rutledge

“We Need a New Situation”

“We continue without electricity.”

The WhatsApp alert from Ulises blinked up from my phone as I scrolled the morning’s news.

Ulises pastors a new church community in the Guanabacoa neighborhood of Havana, Cuba, that the church I serve partners with. And like the rest of Havana and much of the rest of the island, he and his family were without electricity for more than a day. Again. Amid the oil embargo that’s plunged Cuba’s already-decaying infrastructure into an acute energy crisis, the community he serves labors for basic survival. A recent New Yorker profile of the Cuban situation notes that since 2021, an estimated one in five Cubans have fled the island. Since many who leave are younger, those who are elderly or in poor health struggle to care for themselves and each other. Tourism and industry have ground to a halt. Public health crises across the island continue to multiply.

Many echo the sentiments of the profile I read and the messages I hear from those like Ulises I know: “We need a new situation.” “We need freedom.” “We need a change.”

Ascension

I’ve had my friend Ulises and his community on my mind as the Church celebrates the ascension of Jesus. In the holy intrusion of God into human desperation through coming, dying, and rising of Jesus, Christians dare to say that God has brought a new situation to a dark, desperate creation. The Almighty has brought freedom to the enslaved, life to the dead, and that the Crucified One now sits on the throne of the universe.

The skepticism many in the modern West have toward Jesus’ ascension is a microcosm of what often seems distasteful about the Christian story writ large: if the point of the Jesus-story is that he goes off to heaven, so that those who believe in him can escape this terrible planet to go there too, Christian faith teaches people to ignore the disease and hunger and aches of this world.

This, however, isn’t what the first Christians actually had in mind as they proclaimed that Jesus “ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” The biblical scholar N.T. Wright, in an Easter sermon, points out that:

The early Christians, like their Jewish contemporaries, saw heaven and earth as the overlapping and interlocking spheres of God’s good creation, with the point being that heaven is the control room from which earth is run. To say that Jesus is now in heaven is to say… that he is present with his people everywhere, no longer confined to one space-time location within earth, but certainly not absent… [And] that he is now the managing director of this strange show called ‘earth,’ though like many incoming chief executives he has quite a lot to do to sort it out and turn it around.

The early Christians, in other words, knew, as we do, that the world is very much still a mess. But they also knew that the One who forgave the unforgivable, filled hungry stomachs, confronted the pretension of the powerful, healed the sick, raised the dead, and laid down his life for the undeserving now sits in the corner office of the universe. And that they- we! -are now summoned to implement that new state of affairs in the midst of this world of dictators, corruption, and desperation that we know all too well.

Serving the King in Guanabacoa

Ulises, his family, and their church are a picture to me of what a community that follows that kind of King looks like. They organize shipments of dry goods for their neighborhood to serve the many people who now don’t have regular access to food. Morning by morning, they serve breakfast to their homebound neighbors. And they care for children, develop young leaders, stay in their neighborhood when it’d be easier to leave, advocate for change, preach the Gospel, baptize new Christians, start new churches.

They, to me, are what it looks like when you believe that the crucified Christ now resides in the CEO’s office of the cosmos.