With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing upon us, there have been many TV shows, podcasts, articles, etc., commemorating that grand achievement.
What’s particularly amazing to me is that 600 million people, every person with access to a television, tuned in to watch the landing. Never before or since has humanity been so united in collective awe of such an event, man-made or natural.
And the interest was intense. This was no casual affair. People seemed to feel that Neil Armstrong represented all of humanity when he stepped on the moon, that his achievement was a shared one, that by him going to the moon, we had all gone to the moon.
Which made me think: if we feel that kind of kinship with Neil Armstrong, then how much more could we feel that with another man who sacrificed himself for the good of others? After all, Jesus of Nazareth went through a lot of suffering and even death itself in order to take man not to the moon, but to the heavenly realm of God himself.
See, if we got so excited because a man like us went to the moon and somehow brought us all there with him, then how much more excited might we be if a man took us to heaven itself?
God, by emptying himself out to take on human nature at the incarnation, then brought that same nature into full union with God at the ascension.
But Jesus’ journey to God differs in an important way from Armstrong’s to the moon. Though we as humans felt a vicarious thrill of going to the moon with the Apollo astronauts, we can have an actual, real participation in Jesus’ journey to the Godhead simply by accepting this gift.
In other words, in the hero’s journey of Jesus, we don’t just get to stand back and admire his accomplishment, we get to be an actual part of it by accepting his invitation to do so.
The moon landing truly was a magnificent accomplishment and a pinnacle of human achievement, but the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus was THE crowning act of our loving Father in heaven to give us not mere enjoyment, but eternal peace through the redemption of our sins.
That is truly something to celebrate!
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.
