I suspect that most of us, from time to time, allow our imaginations to wander back to the time of Christ, and then we ask ourselves “What was it like to be one of the disciples?” What was it like to know Jesus intimately as they did, to have him right there? What was it like to walk behind him on the road, to see his footprints in the sand, to know that the man ahead of us is the messiah? We do not know. But they must have known him well. After all, they were there with him. Eating with him. Drinking with him. Serving as eyewitnesses to his miracles. Surely, they knew him better than we do. They had special access. But our gospel reading for this Sunday calls that into question, casts it under suspicion, and reveals a different picture: They did know him, yes, but not as well as we usually imagine, not as well as we like to think. After all, if they knew him so intimately, why is it only at the ascension, and the close of His earthly ministry, that He opens their minds? Only at the ascension does His true form as Savior dawn upon them. Only at the ascension does the truth of His eternal sonship spill into their hearts. The startling revelation of this passage is that, in one very real sense, until the ascension, they did not know him.

But even though this is a startling revelation in one respect, in another it is unsurprising. After all, throughout the gospels, we constantly see the disciples getting His identity wrong. At one point they see Him as a political leader destined to restore the kingdom of Israel to its earthly splendour. At another, they ask Him to call fire down upon enemies, assuming that He has come to reveal a god of wrath, and in this moment they are unable to recognize His gentleness. But thankfully, just before the ascension, just before Christ is spirited away, leaving only footprints in the sand, He opens their minds. He allows them to see fully. Indeed, only at the ascension, does Christ’s new face—the face of the Son incarnate—shine out through His old one, and merge with it. Only then does His new and deeper identity suffuse the old one with light. And then He is gone.

And so, we are left wondering: Do we, in some ways, know Him better than they did? They walked beside Him on earth, but we know that He is the risen Lord and the image of the Father. Perhaps we know Him better than John, the beloved disciple, did at the last supper, even as he leaned against Christ’s breast, the thrum of Christ’s heartbeat in his ear, and the warmth of Christ’s chest against his cheek. For in that moment, John was listening to the heartbeat of a man he did not know, or at least did not know fully. Yes, John knew Him well, and did not know Him. John, like the other disciples, only knew Him clearly in the wake of the ascension.

But what did they know of Him before the ascension? What was His presence like to them, if Jesus of Nazareth was not yet the Son of God, not yet the risen Lord? Perhaps before the ascension, before His rising, Jesus was only a vague outline of the Christ, like an image reflected in water: vivid yet unstable. Whatever they knew of Him, their revelation of Christ was much more gradual than we usually suppose. And it was only there, at the ascension, as He vanished into thin air, that their minds were wide open, their understanding radiant.

As odd and bewildering as it is to think that the disciples came to know Christ so gradually, I think that we can relate to their experience quite easily. In our own lives, after all, our most intimate relationships start as a mystery and then develop gradually. When a child is born to us, he cannot speak. At the beginning, he can only mumble softly and cry—usually at 3 in the morning—to express himself, and at this point, we can only guess at his personality. But then he starts to grow, he learns to speak, and soon enough his words offer a clear window into his soul. And over the years his personality emerges slowly, clarifies and appears before us, like an apparition materializing in the night, a glowing blur coming into focus. Only with time does this new and little soul yield forth its secrets.

And in any relationship with a significant other, the same pattern is there: mystery and a gradual coming-to-know. As we have seen a thousand times in the movies, in that first scene when the man sees a woman across a crowded room and falls for her: A romance only begins when we fall in love with another, whom we do not yet know. On their wedding day, the bride and groom do know each other, it is true, otherwise they would not be in love, but it’s also true that after they recite their vows, their intimacy continues to deepen as the days become weeks, weeks become years, and years become decades. Wedding vows are not uttered in full knowledge, but in a kind of ignorance—or at least in partial ignorance. They pass from one mystery into another and back again. For at the beginning, these two people can’t possibly know each other fully. But it is this distance that creates the possibility of a deepening intimacy, of a life spent growing closer. It is because our relationships begin in mystery that intimacy deepens as years stretch into decades, as the outline of the other’s face comes gradually into view. Marriage is the slow unveiling of a mystery.

These relationships—which on one level seem so ordinary—in fact hide one of the deep truths of the Christian tradition: love is the merging of mystery with knowledge. In love there is attraction to mystery, and a coming-to-know.

And for the disciples, I imagine it was similar. They loved Christ. They did not know Him all at once and were pulled across the room and into His mystery. They felt an attraction to Christ, this ragged and wandering teacher, treading in the sands, and yet at the same time, He was a deep mystery to them, and all sorts of questions—“Who is He? Where is He leading us?”—must have arisen continually from within to torment and disquiet their hearts. “Who is this man,” John may well have asked, “this stranger for whom I have thrown it all away? For whom I have given my life?” The disciples knew Him first as a stranger across the room. And only at the ascension, were their minds opened. Only at the ascension was He revealed as the risen Lord. Only with that last rising was He the risen one.

But this doesn’t mean that all mystery vanished on that day. Even after the ascension, their knowledge was still incomplete. After all, the God revealed to us in Christ is infinite. We can know God, yes, but our minds are limited, and He is unlimited. He is limitless undying love, as John Lennon sang, and so as we come to know God we are always reaching into a mystery. We know God and fall in love with Him, yes, but He is inexhaustible, and so our knowledge is always deepening. We can journey into God forever, and yet we can never exhaust Him. His love is a depth that we cannot sound. Some drop a stone into a dark well to hear the splash and know the depth. But in God, who is infinite love, that stone falls forever. Into infinite love. Into that infinite wellspring of love. When it comes to knowing God, there is always an attraction to mystery, and coming-to-know, a deepening of intimacy. There is always an element of knowledge and an element of mystery. And they are always fused. It must be this way, and it always will be.

But we have to trust the mystery. Just like the disciples had to trust this strange, ragged figure, treading in the sands, leading them onward to who-knows-where. In some ways it feels hard to put ourselves in their shoes, to imagine how they felt on that day, as Christ was spirited away. Perhaps before the ascension, they doubted whether Christ was trustworthy, but as Christ ascended, in the wake of His life, they must have known Him—finally—in His fullness: As Christ, the Son of God. In a new radiance. And that mystery that first drew them toward Him, that initial attraction, that first glance across the crowded room, so to speak… That was trustworthy. That feeling was real. That feeling was God.
Amen.