Big Idea: The risen Jesus meets with his disciples and commissions them as witnesses of his life, death, and resurrection. Then he leaves them and ascends to heaven.

Understanding the Text

This passage not only brings Luke’s Gospel narrative, and especially its developing resurrection motif, to a triumphant conclusion, but also prepares for the taking up of the story in Luke’s second volume, Acts. The summary of the gospel message in 24:46–48, the cryptic promise of “power from on high” in 24:49, Jesus’s ascension in 24:51 (more fully narrated in Acts 1:1–11), and the communal life of the believers in Jerusalem in 24:52–53) will be developed in the early chapters of Acts. The story of Jesus is now becoming the story of the Jesus movement.

The most obvious difference between these verses…