Some of the best summer evenings of my essentially wasted childhood were spent sitting in the screened-in porch of our backyard reading Mad Magazine.
For those under the age of 40 Mad Magazine was to your parents and grandparents what “The Simpsons” and “South Park” is to you. {Just saying that, I worry that even those references might be dated and make me seem older than I am, which is, after all, quite old.}
When the magazine stopped publishing a print edition in favor of an online version even the staid and sophisticated New Yorker took notice: “‘The Mad ‘idiots’ subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon, aimed at icons of the left and the right.”1
Al Jaffe may have been one of the most prolific of the “idiots” contributing to almost every issue and a collection of one of his recurring offerings was even assembled into a book.
I loved the book so much that, as a freshman in seminary when we were asked to compile a list of the most important books we ever read I really wanted to include Mad’s Magazines’ Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions until my more mature friends talked me out of it.
The book is a collection of retorts everybody wishes they’d come up with (but never do) when somebody asked them a stupid question.
I learned a lot from that book and so today, as the self-proclaimed master of the quick comeback to people who are being snarky, and with almost two thousand years to think about it, I’m going to begin by taking up the disciple’s cause and suggesting what they should have said to that know-it-all pair of angels when they asked “why do you stand here looking into the sky?”
Why are we gazing up into heaven? Why are we just standing here looking up into the sky? I’ll tell you why!” they might have said.
“At an impulse we tied ourselves to this man Jesus and his mission. We had three wonderful years with him and watched him do some amazing things. He healed countless sick people! He catered a banquet for a few thousand with provisions that were meagre at best. He reached across boundaries and talked to people, helped people, that we would have never thought to speak to much less help. These were high times.
“Sure, on occasion, he upset the political and religious apple cart and called into question some long held and cherished beliefs of both state and church, but we never thought that would be enough to get him killed, much less crucified.
“Then, listen our two fine winged friends, he came back! Not in spirit, not as a ghost, he came back, and we had resurrection parties. They started when people, dressed a lot like you two, told us he had risen.
“Sure, he was not with us all the time like he used to be, but two members of our group met him when they sadly took a hike to Emmaus and he came to them, broke bread with them and blessed them and it was if their hearts were on fire with new life, new hope.
“Then, later that evening he showed up again! He invited us to look at the scares in his hands and feet! He had supper with us. Had a little broiled fish that he seemed to enjoy a lot.
He was in and out of our lives countless times. Ask Thomas who couldn’t believe but now does! Ask Peter, and the rest of the fisherman who saw him and ate breakfast with him on a beach. Now he’s gone, and it looks like he’s gone for good.
As Barbara Lundblad once said of this moment: “Jesus’ disciples must have felt the earth slipping beneath their feet at the thought of being left alone.”2
To which Amy Butler adds:
You can imagine their confusion and downright horror. They were ready to follow him to whatever was next. And then . . . away he went. Away. Unbelievably, there they were on the hillsides of Galilee hands cupping their eyes, staring up into a brilliant blue sky, trying desperately to understand what Jesus was up to now. And then he was gone. I have to admit that if I had been among the group of disciples there I also would have stared, mouth gaping open, at the clouds in the sky and the wisp left behind as Jesus ascended.3
Suddenly, he was gone, ‘vanishing into the fog like the end of a dream too good to be true.’”4
So, there they were looking up into to the sky and wondering, wondering, just wondering.
It was a spell that had to be broken and that is what the angel’s question did. While it may have called for a snappy answer it was a call to get moving. “It’s time to stop staring and get going, time to stop pondering eternity ... withdrawing from the world and recommit yourself to it. The text continues, “Then they returned to Jerusalem.” They did not go off into the desert to meditate; they went to work.”5
It is quite possible that we, who have been to far too many church meetings, may wince at what they did first but it looks like the first thing they did was call a meeting. And, in an “O My God” moment for this church, it was a call committee meeting.
They were looking for someone to take the place of Judas and, one might argue, that they had no place to go but up, so they put forth two candidates Justus and Matthias and instead of reviewing resumes, curriculum vitaes, asking for references, and going over financial packages, they cast lots. Yes, essentially with a little prayer for good measure, the twelfth apostle was chosen by a roll of the dice.
I’m not sure the system would have been better than ours but it certainly would have been quicker. Just saying.
But if you listened carefully to Peter outlining the candidates’ requirements you would have heard a perfect description of what, not only they, but all of us are to be about. Peter says that “one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection."6
There is a complete job description for all of us embedded so deep in the minutes of the first church meeting that we just might miss it. We are to be “a witness to Jesus’ resurrection.” That’s the thesis sentence of Christianity! That’s our reason for existence! That is what we are to be about. We are to bear witness to the resurrection!
That’s what the disciples did.
Matthias, who is never mentioned again in all of Scripture but who it is believed carried his witness to the resurrection to “Cappadocia, a mountainous district now in central Turkey, and later journeyed to the region about the Caspian Sea, where he was martyred.”7
And Justice, whom the National Catholic Register called “An-Almost Apostle” who never travelled any further than twenty-five miles from Jerusalem.8
Where the Lord's physical hands and feet are no longer present, the ministry of the hands of countless saints in simple and sincere ministries continues to bear witness to the Lord's living presence. {It is in} the daily testimony of the faithful that the Christ still lives and the work of his kingdom continues. The uniqueness of the Easter message is that it invariably changes the lives of those who find themselves touched by it.10
So, for us, the angel’s question is not a stupid one but an important one. “why are you standing here staring at the sky?”11 There are lives waiting to be touched by our witness to the resurrection. The angel is not so much asking us a question but issuing a call to get moving.
So, off we go to be “witnesses of the resurrection.”
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1. Jordan Orlando, “A World without Mad Magazine,” The New Yorker, July 25, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-world-without-mad-magazine.
2. Barbara Lundblad, “Commentary on Luke 24:44-53,” Working Preacher , November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ascension-of-our-lord/commentary-on-luke-2444-53-4#.
3. Amy Butler, “‘Don’t Just Stand There Do Something,’” A Sermon for Every Sunday, May 6, 2024, https://asermonforeverysunday.com/.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 80.
5. John M. Buchanan, “Into the World.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 24 May 2009.
6. Acts 1:22b. (NRSVUE) [NRSVUE=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]
7. “St. Matthias,” Encyclopædia Britannica, March 26, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Matthias.
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