Despite having all the Scriptures explained to them (Luke 24:45), the disciples still seem to cling to their outdated expectations of the kingdom of God: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (v. 6) The naivety of their question is almost laughable. The reader remembers Jesus’s rebuke upon his first visitation on Emmaus: “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24:25) Even now they cling to the old way of seeing things!
Except now, Jesus honors the question with a proper, gentle, but firm response. “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority,” (v. 7). Instead, true to God’s style, Christ’s victory will be carried on not by warriors, philosophers, nor charismatic leaders – but by witnesses.
How tremendous a victory Jesus must have secured to entrust the work he began to witnesses! No ground needed to be taken. No seminal tome needed to be written. No political achievement remained but the coming coronation that was already installed “on Zion, my holy mountain,” (Psalm 2:6). He simply requires heralders and messengers to spread the incredibly good news that the battle has been won to all corners of the globe!
Even more bewildering is that Christ entrusted this message and this work to the very fair weather friends who had sold him out and left him for dead. He knew their failures better than they did and was more mindful of their limitations than they dared admit! Yet, no bitterness was in his heart, only confidence in their impending success; uneducated, unprepared, unqualified, unvetted though they are.
How could Jesus leave it to these men to continue what he started?
And while at this point the disciples have done nothing with their lives to commend themselves to this task, they have seen things that have been burned into their very souls: “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it,” (1 John 1:2). They will never forget the singe of their own consciences, the comfort of his words, the conviction of his presence. They know themselves firsthand: faithless failures in need of grace. And they know he who “loved me and gave himself for me,” (Galatians 2:20) and who showed a love to which no greater compares to “lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Scourging, stoning, crucifying have nothing on the burning conviction of these men who have seen him as he is! In less than a generation this rabble of fishermen, stone masons, tax collectors, and would-be zealots will “have turned the world upside down,” (Acts 17:6)! Scorning their lives as nothing compared “to sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,” (Philippians 3:10). Such would be their legacy that within a few hundred years the very palaces of Caesar would become churches proclaiming the name of King Jesus.
All this will begin soon when the Spirit, the one who echoes Jesus’s words through time and space into every human life, will come to ignite hearts which, left to themselves, are cold and faithless.
For greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world! (1 John 4:4)
