Acts 1:1-14“Luke is thus very interested in human response. It is not enough to describe the coming of salvation in an objective way. Again and again the Gospel grapples with the problem of why some people and groups respond positively to Jesus and why others do not, why some enjoy the fruits of salvation while others bar themselves against it. The Gospel shows how people appropriate salvation, how they resist it, and the effects that reception or rejection, as the case may be, has on human lives.” - Brendan Byrne“Any time we see the disciples missing the point it is an opportunity for us to consider the ways in which WE might be missing what Jesus is doing.” - Daniel Kirk“It would be easy to imagine that what Jesus meant at this point was something like this: ‘No, no, you’re dreaming of an earthly kingdom, but I’m telling you about a heavenly one. You think what matters is reorganizing the world, but I’m preparing you for the next one. What counts is not what happens in the world of space and time, but where you’re going to spend eternity. I’m going off to heaven, and you must tell people how they can follow me there.’ From that point of view, the answer to ‘are we nearly there yet?’ is ‘no, we’re not going there at all actually.’” - N.T. Wright “‘The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast’ (Isaiah 25:6, 9) —when Isaiah describes salvation as a meal, I think of mi abuelita, my grandmother, who always had a pot on the stove, ready to add another guest at her table. If the kingdom is like a feast, and if the Lord is the host of that heavenly meal, then God is like mi abuelita with her arroz con pollo. God is like my grandmother, waiting for another visitor to pull up a chair at her table.“Mi casa es su casa,” she would say. My house is your house. Her table was a glimpse of ‘the kin-dom of God,’ as the mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz puts it, the community of faith as the family of God, where we are all kin, part of God’s ‘kin-dom.’…‘salvation refers to having a relationship with God, a relationship that does not exist if we do not love our neighbor.’ God’s kin-dom looks like my grandmother’s house—a house where there is always room around the kitchen table for another neighbor, another stranger, another guest, as God expands our vision for who are our kin, for who belongs in the household, for who can be served a bowl of arroz con pollo.” - Isaac Villegas “To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitble despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as CREATURES: image bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.” - N.T. Wright“If we end the gospel story of Jesus by saying… And then Jesus went off to heaven (which is why he’s not here), but someday he will come back and bring the kingdom of God… then we are free to run the world the way we want in what we assume is the absence of Christ.” - Brian Zahnd http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/US_History_reader/Chapter14/MLKriverside.htm
