“He lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up…” —Luke 24

Despite it being right there in the text and portrayed in a dozen ascension paintings, it struck me this morning like a fresh revelation: Jesus’s final act before ascending was to bless us. In fact, he seems to have been mid-blessing when the launch sequence initiated.

This sparks thankfulness in me. And curiosity. Was he speaking as his feet left the ground or was it a silent blessing? Was he looking up or out or down? Was his ascent steady and swift, or more like a week-old balloon that has just enough helium to saunter skyward? Could someone nearby have grabbed Jesus and brought him down for a moment, or would they have gone for the ride?

It’s fun to imagine being in the lucky sandals of someone there, standing under the levitating Savior’s shadow of blessing. But in a real sense we are all still standing under that shadow of blessing. Jesus went up before his blessing was finished because it would never be finished. It is perpetual, an ongoing outpouring of good toward us.

And that’s wonderful news, because there is something deep within us that longs to be blessed, to have good directed towards us. The famous Aaronic blessing in Numbers 6 is like water for our parched souls:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Twice in this short blessing, God’s face is invoked — quite remarkable, since 1) God is invisible and 2) Moses was told he’d die if he saw God’s face (Exodus 33:20). Nonetheless, God offers this face-based blessing — to which Jesus later puts an actual human face — and boy do we need it.

A baby makes important developmental milestones by gazing in its mother’s eyes. Same for us with God. There isn’t space here to go into it — and I’m not sure I have the words anyway — but there is a real sense in which our souls can gaze at Jesus and know in our bodies his loving gaze back. It heals us. If you haven’t experienced Jesus’s loving gaze, that sense of God’s face shining on you, well… it can’t hurt to ask him for it.

Because when we know we’re blessed by God, when we’re safe in the shadow of the blessing of Jesus, we are better able to be a blessing to others.