Preached by the Rev. David Henson on Sunday, May 17, 2026
If you had the chance to ask God a question, what would it be?
I think most of us here today have something we’d like to ask. It’s the kind of burning question that we might keep asking God over and over again.
Or the kind of question that both keeps us up at night and that keeps us coming back here each Sunday to pray and to listen for an answer.
When will the suffering finally end?
Why won’t my children talk to me?
Can I really be forgiven?
When will bad things stop happening to good people and good things stop happening to bad people?
What’s the deal with the duckbill platypus?
Why is there so much hate and division in our world?
When will our nation finally be made whole again?
And so, I find it both remarkably human and deeply reassuring that the final words spoken to Jesus on this earth come not in form of a faithful proclamation, not in the form of wonder and gratitude, not even in the form of tearful goodbyes.
Rather, the final words spoken to Jesus as he ascends come in the form of a question.
And not just any question.
For the disciples, this is the question. The burning question they keep asking Jesus over and over again. The question they believed, if they just could get an answer on, contained the promise of God and would finally solve all their problems.
“Lord, is now the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
It’s the same question people had been asking Jesus ever since his first muddy footsteps out of the Jordan River following his baptism, ever since his first sermon that nearly gets him run off a cliff in in his home town, ever since he feed the multitudes with a handful of fish and loaves and they tried to make him their king right then and there.
It was the same question John the Baptist asked when he was imprisoned and waiting for execution. Was Jesus really the Messiah who would restore the nation or should they wait for another.
It was the same question at the heart of all the disciples’ squabbling for power and greatness, as the future rulers in God’s kingdom; or when they asked to call down fire and consume the village of offensive Samaritans in their homeland, or when they earthly pointed out the swords they were bringing with them to reclaim Jerusalem. The question even ripples below the surface of the crowds’ joyful and royal welcome of Jesus into the holy city on Palm Sunday.
The question is everywhere in the gospels, just under the surface every time Jesus does some inexplicable miracle or deed of greatness like calming the storm, casting out demons, healing the sick, and raising the dead.
Lord, is now the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?
It’s remarkable that after three years of following him, hearing his teachings, seeing his crucifixion, witnessing the resurrection, and spending 40 days with a man who died but was now alive again.
After all of that, despite all of that, the disciples still don’t get it. They still think Jesus has work left to do, that the mission is somehow unfinished.
They’re still asking the exact same question same question.
This question that assumed the entire point of Jesus’ mission was to restore their own nation back to its former political glory and earthly power so that they might reclaim their land and independence from the occupying Roman forces. They wanted to be the greatest nation on the earth again, just like God had promised Abraham all those eons ago.
You can almost hear their exasperation or desperation as Jesus prepares to depart the earth physically.
Is this the time you will drive out the Romans? To finally become the powerful military, conquering Messiah we have long expected? The one who will reign on earth forever?
Notice what they don’t ask. They don’t ask how to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. They don’t ask, like Jesus did in his prayer, for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. They ask instead, for the kingdom to belong to their nation, and by association, to them.
If that all sounds a little too familiar and a little too uncomfortable, it should.
Because the final question from the disciples is exactly what Satan asks Jesus to do during the Temptation in the Desert—to rise to political power, to sit on the throne of glory and authority of the kingdoms of this world.
Jesus, of course, resists the temptation, but we’re told that Satan leaves him until an opportune moment to tempt him again.
Because from Satan to the disciples, from his first moments in ministry with the 40 days in the desert to his final moments on earth with the 40 days in the Resurrection, they all want the same thing from Jesus.
They want Jesus to ascend to thrones of humanity, not the throne of heaven.
And so at the Ascension, perhaps, we see the last temptation of Christ, when he faces that same old question one more time.
The temptation to stay, to remain on earth forever and impose the kingdom of God by force. To become a monarch, a king for a country, to take earthly power that was always so willingly being offered to him.
But time and again, Jesus refuses to answer the question the way they wanted or expected Messiah to.
Throughout his life, Jesus had shown that true power in the kingdom of God was found in all the things the powerful thought were signs of weakness—humility rather than pride, forgiveness rather than grudges, love rather than hate, serving others rather than serving your own interests, giving things away rather than amassing them, becoming like a child rather than being a real man.
And that the ultimate show of power and glory in the kingdom of God is not exerting one’s will with power and dominance but in being willing to live and to die for others, even your enemies and betrayers.
That’s the sort of power Jesus promises they will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
Power whose fruit is not greatness and dominance, but love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control.
True power in the kingdom of God resides in these.
It’s no wonder the disciples seem a little dumbfounded in the Ascension. Their Lord has left, but, at least to them, left so much undone, and left them, the perennially misunderstanding disciples to become Christ’s holy agents in the world.
And he left without ever really answering the question they’d been asking him over and over again. So the question just hangs up there in the air, over them, after he disappears.
In the end, I’m not sure the disciples ever stop looking at the sky if the two strangers dressed in white don’t interrupt their reverie …
“Men of Galilee, why are you staring up into the sky, looking for an answer to the same old question you’ve always asked?”
I love that the last thing the disciples said to Jesus was a question.
And the first thing they heard after he ascended?
Another question, a new question.
Which seemed to do the trick.
With that new question in their hearts, no longer obsessed with the restoration of their nation to some mythic greatness and glory, the disciples instead return to their community to pray, to wait, and to listen as they prepare to receive the Holy Spirit’s transformative power that will be not just for one nation, one people, but for all people and all creation.
And maybe that’s what the right kind of questions do for us. They don’t give us answers or certainty. Sometimes they might give us doubt, but they almost always give us direction. They send us deeper into community, prayer, and discernment.
The kind of question something like the Ascension raises for the disciples and for us today, centuries later.
Questions like, “What does it mean that, after the Resurrected Christ departed the earth and ascended, the only body of Christ that remains among mortals is us, the Church?”
And that’s the kind of question that doesn’t leave us staring at the sky. It’s the kind of question that commissions us and sends us out into the world, new questions burning in our hearts, giving us life, animating our work and witness.
So, that when we face the inevitable suffering, despair, division, and fracture of our world, we ask:
“What can we do?”
”What difference can we make?”
“What is God calling us to?”
”What Good News is there to share even now, even amid all this?”
Maybe in the end, what the disciples needed wasn’t an answer to the question they’d asked dozens of times.
Maybe what they needed instead was a better question. Maybe that’s what we all need.
A better question to ask not just of God, but of ourselves.