Adopted by God
Ascension Sunday
May 17,2015
Acts 1: 1-11
Jesus’ ascension to heaven is His crowning moment. It’s the ultimate moment, the proof of Jesus’ resurrection , but also the reason that He was resurrected in the first place. Jesus is to be God’s son, sitting at the right hand of God, ruling with God, ranked equally with God. Jesus’ Lordship is proved in this moment.
It is important to note that the early Christians initially did not hold a Trinitarian theology like we do—they didn’t understand how Jesus could be both God and human. After all, the first witnesses of the resurrection were Jews, and Jews are monotheists. To claim Jesus was God was initially unthinkable. It was only after much reflection on what had happened that they came to view Jesus and God as one and the same.
What early Jewish Christians believed about Jesus is called Adoptionism. It is the belief that Jesus was so holy and righteous that God deemed Him worthy of adoption as God’s son. Some fascinating recent research points to the fact that for Romans, an adopted son was a step up from a biological son. Often people were adopted as adults. The person adopting him felt that he had proved himself a worthy heir, as opposed to the layabout n’er-do-well that actually shared his genes. The most famous example of this, about 40 years before Jesus’ birth, was that Julius Caesar had adopted a man named Octavian to be his legitimate, true heir, with all the rights thereunto appertaining. There was just one problem: Julius already had an heir, his son Caesareon by Cleopatra, queen of the Nile. After Caesar’s untimely death—et tu Brute, and all that—Octavian received the laurel wreath instead of Caesareon, but that infuriated Cleopatra, and she sent her other lover, Mark Antony, to go to war with Octavian so her son could inherit the throne. Mark Antony lost, and Octavian changed his name to Augustus Caesar. Augustus was the Caesar when Jesus was born.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman calls the idea that Jesus was adopted by God “Exaltation Theology.” (See Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperCollins e-Book, 2014.) It is the idea that Jesus was so wonderful he received a blessing that no other human could earn—he was made the legitimate heir, the adopted Son of God, the same way that Augustus was made the legitimate heir of Julius Caesar.
Adoptionism was soon forgotten as a more sophisticated theological understanding was developed. It soon became commonly assumed that Jesus was the pre-existing Son of God, had always been Gods son, and was actually really one with God. But what’s interesting is that adoptionism wasn’t really forgotten. It was just applied to a different group of people.
It was applied to us.
Biblical writers from Paul on began to view us, believers, as the ones who by God’s grace have been adopted as children of God, equal to the true son, Jesus, and so recipients as Ephesians says of “the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.” We receive an inheritance from God because we are adopted by God as God’s children—an honor as great as Julius Caesar’s adoption of Augustus. By God’s grace we are exalted to the greatest heights, simply because we believe.
One of the great catechisms of the Presbyterian Church, the Hiedelberg Catechism, says this of Christ’s ascension:
Christ’s ascension to heaven benefits us in that, first, He is our advocate in heaven in the presence of our Father; second, we have our own flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that Christ our head will also take us, His members, up to Himself; and third, He sends His Holy Spirit to us on earth as a corresponding pledge. By the Spirit’s power, we seek not earthly things but the things above, where Christ is, sitting at God’s right hand.(Hiedelberg Catechism, 1563, q. 49)
The Heidelberg Catechism calls us to live our lives with an ascension mindset. Ultimately we are to understand ourselves raised up and glorified by God, belonging at the side of our Lord Jesus Christ in God’s heavenly court. But this is not other-worldly theology. The point is that we are to live exalted, ascension lives here on earth—living by the standards of God’s kingdom right here in this place that is still so far from God’s best intentions for it. Here’s the trick to Ascension or Exaltation living: it is to seek first the Kingdom of God and it’s righteousness, it is to have your eyes on our heavenly Lord and brother Jesus, and to seek the values of God’s kingdom of love and peace and joy and forgiveness even though we’re living in a world where those values seem not to matter, to even be a liability.
And here’s what’s amazing about that: if that’s what we seek—if that’s how we live—then we raise this world up closer to the Kingdom of God. We exalt the world and the people around us.
It is our job as God’s people, as Christ’s witnesses, and as God’s adopted children, to seek the wealth of God’s kingdom—love and joy and peace and blessing and forgiveness—and then to spread it generously throughout this world. If our eyes are set on that heavenly prize, we are living exalted, ascension lives; and just as much, we are making this world an exalted place, enabling it to ascend a bit closer to the Kingdom of Heaven. Remember, what we believe is that one day, God’s kingdom and this world will be united as one. We generally portray that as God’s Kingdom coming down to earth—but we could view it just as easily as earth being raised up to the heavenly realm–for the world itself to ascend, as Jesus did; for the world, by God’s grace, to be exalted to heaven.
God has exalted us, and adopted us as God’s children, just for this purpose. And God has exalted us to adopted status, because God believes that we are the right people to do it.