What Does Acts 1:9 Mean?

(9) **He was taken up; and a cloud received him . . .**—It is remarkable how little stress is laid in the Gospels on the fact which has always been so prominent in the creeds of Christendom. Neither St. John nor St. Matthew record it. It is barely mentioned with utmost brevity in the verses which close the Gospel of St. Mark, and in which many critics see, indeed, a fragment of apostolic teaching, but not part of the original Gospel. The reasons of this silence are, however, not far to seek. It was because the Ascension was from the first part of the creed of Christendom that the Evangelists said so little. The fact had been taught to every catechumen. They would not embellish it—as, for example, the Assumption of the Virgin was embellished in later legends—by fantastic details. That it was so received is clear. It is implied in our Lord’s language, as recorded by St. John, “What and if ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before?” (John 6:62), and such words would hardly have been brought before believers at the close of the apostolic age if they had received no fulfilment. It is assumed in the earliest form of the Church’s creed, “He was received up into glory,” the verb being identical with that which St. Luke employs in St. Peter’s speeches (Acts 2:33; Acts 3:21), and in St. Paul’s epistles (Ephesians 1:20; 1Timothy 3:16). We may add that there was something like a moral necessity, assuming the Resurrection as a fact, for such a conclusion to our Lord’s work on earth. Two other alternatives may, perhaps, be just imagined as possible: He might, like Lazarus, have lived out His restored life to its appointed term, and then died the common death of all men; but in that case where would have been the victory over death, and the witness that He was the Son of Man? He might have lived on an endless life on earth; but in this case, being such as He was, conflict, persecution, and suffering would have come again and again at every stage, and in each instance a miracle would have been needed to save the suffering from passing on to death, or many deaths must have been followed by many resurrections. When we seek, however, to realise the process of the Ascension, we find ourselves in a region of thought in which it is not easy to move freely. With our thoughts of the relations of the earth to space and the surrounding orbs, we find it hard to follow that upward motion, and to ask what was its direction and where it terminated. We cannot get beyond the cloud; but that cloud was the token of the glory of the Eternal Presence, as the Shechinah that of old filled the Temple (1Kings 8:10-11; Isaiah 6:1-4), and it is enough for us to know that where God is there also is Christ, in the glory of the Father, retaining still, though under new conditions and laws, the human nature which made Him like unto His brethren.