… and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. This is the choicest cut to me in this morning’s Gospel portion, and I can’t wait to dig in.

But a quick review first. Jesus has been raised from the dead. He has been showing up in all sorts of places unexpectedly for forty days. He seems to be somewhat the same as he was before his death—he has a body, after all; he’s not just a ghost. He talks and eats with people. And although everyone doesn’t recognize him right off, they don’t take him for anything but a man. On the other hand, something is different. He seems to come and go from here to there without the space-time drag the rest of us bodies feel in this atomic world. He shows up in this place and that, only to disappear just as quickly. His presence in this way must have been a tantalizing taste of what it would be like to have him around for good.

But now comes time for his departure into heaven, where he will sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead, as the creed puts it. We call this the Ascension, and today is Ascension Sunday in the church. It marks the end of Jesus’ resurrection life among us bodily. Yet it marks a beginning, too—the beginning of something new for God and for us.

The something new for God is that humanity is taken up into the Godhead for the first time. At Christmastide we celebrate divinity being dropped into humanity for the first time. Now the circle of blessing is completed. Now humans not only know what it is to experience God among them; God gets to experience what it is to have us in the divine life. Your life is now hid with Christ in God, as St. Paul puts it. Your life and mine, even now, in God. Big thought there, huh?

But the Ascension also paves the way for Christ to become present among us in a new and surprising mode. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week, means that Christ will no longer be localized in one body, even in his own body, the church. The Holy Spirit will blow through the world like a fresh breeze or a mighty wind, depending upon where you stand with Christ—or maybe where you stand with those Christ stands with. The Spirit refreshes the humble and distresses the proud.

So Luke gives us a peek at these last moments before Jesus ascends into the clouds. Even that is interesting, if not a little sci-fi sounding. It’s really a picturesque way of talking about how he goes to join the invisible world, which God and the angels inhabit among us right now.

So we’re getting closer to the good stuff—hold on. Jesus reminds his disciples that—surprising as all these events have been, what with a dying and rising messiah and all—all these things have been lurking in the very scriptures they grew up on. They only needed eyes to see it all there, eyes that he provides them with.

Which, by the way, is what he still does with us. If you want to understand the scriptures and be faithful to them, you can’t just read them as if they are children’s literature that anyone can fully grasp with a little interest. Everything in the Bible does not have equal and enduring force. We have to let Christ be our guide. And the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches us how to search for the spirit in the letters, without getting stuck in the letter.

Jesus assures them that these things in some way must have been as they came to be. He then reminds them that forgiveness is the essence of God’s relationship to the world; it is the very heart of the gospel. Repentance is only the human acceptance of God’s forgiveness. All you people out there who think God is waiting to forgive you until you have built up enough guilt and shame to show how sorry you are for your sins or what a sorry sort you are just for being who you are—well, get over it. God isn’t impressed with your sorri-ness. You might as well cave in to God’s delight in you as you are. If that sounds scandalous and dangerous, what else would you expect of a God who conquers the world by dying in disgrace on a cross?

And that’s why I think what happens next is so fascinating. We’re finally there. Jesus blesses his disciples. There are little things about this that grab my attention. Like why he led them out to Bethany and the Mount of Olives. And what were his hands doing? Did he lift them this way—like the pope does (palms slightly upward), or this way—like the Kohanite priests did (fingers spread in a Mr. Spock, Vulcan-like way)?

I also wonder what he said to them. Did Jesus offer the typical priestly benediction attributed to Moses’ brother Aaron? The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. That would make sense. He would be telling them that he is the everlasting high priest. His blessing of them will matter to them even when they don’t get it from the priests in the Temple—and it wouldn’t be long before they would be kicked out of the Temple and stop receiving it.

But Luke doesn’t tell us what he said. Maybe that’s just as well. The words themselves might not have mattered as much as the act itself. What he was doing for them transcends whatever words he might have spoken.

It’s like the way someone looks at you when he or she really loves you just for you. It’s a look that lingers. It’s a look straight in your eyes that goes straight through your eyes to your soul. Do you know that look?

Some of you don’t, truth be told. And that may be the perpetual tragedy of your life. Most of us have authorized one of our parents to be our blessor. When we are so blessed, the path to feeling at home in the world and in our own skin is so much easier. When you know a parent’s blessing, you can take it for granted and in some sense forget about it and get on with your life. Children who know that they are blessed tend to live with more abandon and less self-consciousness than those who lack it. Say what you will about the prodigal son, but the boy somehow knew his father would never leave him even if he left his father. The elder brother never gets that, even to the point of complaining to his father about the injustice of it. The elder brother thought it was all about performance, when in fact it was all about seeing the sparkle in your father’s eye or hearing the sheer pride in his voice over your name.

The Bible is full of these stories of how some get the blessing and others don’t. Why does the second son, Jacob, get the father’s favor over the firstborn of the twins, Esau? We don’t know. Strangely, fathers do tend to favor second sons and first daughters, while mothers tend to favor first sons and second daughters. Babies get everyone’s blessing. Go figure.

The one person who has looked at this phenomenon of blessing most profoundly is the Baptist counselor and pastoral theologian Myron Madden. Blessing is the act of passing the power of one person’s life to another. It is never based on what a person does, as if it could be a reward that is earned; it is always a simple act of grace. It falls on our being, regardless of our doing. It injects a blessed person with a power to flourish in freedom that nothing else seems to accomplish.

In my years of counseling with people about spiritual matters, something else frequently is mixed up in it all. The nagging problem that dogs some people all their lives stems from feeling unblessed by the parent they look to for the blessing. I don’t care how much a child feels provided for or supported or encouraged. I don’t care how much a child believes that a parent wishes her or him well. If that child never sees the sparkle in the eye or knows the unquenchable delight of a parent over the very existence of the child, that lack of blessing will haunt the child all through life. And it will even make it harder to believe in the blessing of God.

Parents, listen to me carefully right now. It’s natural to favor one child over the others. I wouldn’t doubt that Cain’s trouble with Abel came from that, or Absalom’s trouble with his father David, or all the sons of Jacob over the blessing of Joseph instead of them. But if you are going to go only by nature, it’s also natural to female midges, tiny flies in the insect world, to fertilize their own eggs by eating the genitals of their mates and then devouring them entirely. It’s not always good to be the male, don’t you know?! And it’s not always good to appeal to nature. Nature sometimes needs healing, not heeding.

The Bible is the epic account of God’s determination that every nation and every person should experience the power of God’s blessing. This is why God promised to bless the whole world through Father Abraham.

Our parents are always and only surrogates for God in this matter; they are not substitutes for God. So, parents, before you die—and that means today at the latest—take a long and hard look at whether you have communicated your blessing to every one of your children. And if you haven’t, go to them immediately and lift your hands of love over them. Let them know that whatever power you have to offer from your life to theirs, it is theirs from now on. And children, if you have lived without the blessing you have sought from a parent, as hard as this is, I must tell you that if you cannot let go of that need, you have made your parent into a god that competes with the only God who has the power to bless you forever. The Bible calls that idolatry. And God isn’t for it.

When Christ lifts his hands and blesses his disciples, he is bypassing family structures and taking God’s blessing directly to them. It cannot be because they have done anything to be worthy of it. After all, none of them were really faithful to him unto the end. But he is signaling their worthiness by his blessing, and they will now be free to spend the rest of their lives telling that story to the world, telling that good news that is both really news and really good.

Madden says something intriguing: What it means to me to be a Christian is the faith that I put a sparkle in God’s eye. That is what the Gospel is about. That allows us to go on beyond the family bond. It also, I would say, allows us to move on to a bond that has eternal stickiness—the bond of the family of God.

There’s an interesting thing that appears in Luke’s last words that completes the circle of blessing. Notice that when the disciples had received the blessing of Christ, they were filled with joy and went to Jerusalem, where, Luke says, they were continually in the temple blessing God. It’s the same word he uses in both cases. Apparently, the delight in being blessed for who you are and not just for what you do extends even to God. God enjoys our blessing. The circle of blessing is completed only when we are so full of the power of life that God gives to us that we in turn bless God in return.

Let’s complete the circle now, shall we?