Being Practical

Texts: Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; 1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19 Today is the Sunday after the Ascension, which is not the catchiest of titles but it serves, perhaps, to illustrate the difficulty the Church faces with this strange period of 10 days between the Ascension and Pentecost.  I have said something about that in the notes in the pewsheet this morning.  In this modern world it is hard enough to get our heads around the idea of the Ascension itself; what do we mean when we say that, in the sight of his followers, the Risen Christ took off from earth and rose into the heavens?  That's one difficulty, and mercifully we can usually avoid it because Ascension Day always falls on a Thursday, not a Sunday. But we can't avoid the difficulty of this period of 10 days.  What's going on?  Where is Christ at the moment, while we wait for the coming of the Spirit?  Are we left alone in the meantime?  And we are not helped by the fact that only St Luke mentions the Ascension at all; the other three gospels do not, although St John does have Jesus saying that he was "returning to my Father".  Some suggest that St Luke was simply tidying up; it appears that there were a few weeks of resurrection appearances after Easter, and then they stopped, and at some point after that the Spirit came upon the believers.  Perhaps St Luke felt compelled by the logic of the situation to say that the Risen Christ must have gone back to the Father (or ascended into heaven) sometime between Easter and Pentecost to explain the cessation of the resurrection appearances...  And again that fits reasonably well with Jesus' teaching in St John: he said that the Spirit could not come unless he first of all went away. Well, we might have to struggle with some of that a little more on Trinity Sunday, but today I want to come down to earth, and ask a more practical question.  What, according to Luke, were the believers supposed to do in this short period as they waited for the Spirit?  And the answer seemed to be to hold a mini-Synod, or perhaps we should call it a mini-electoral college.  In our first lesson this morning, which seems to be set between the ascension of Christ and the coming of the Spirit, we're told that a gathering of about 120 believers (by sheer coincidence, almost exactly the size of our Diocesan Synod!) met together to elect an Apostle to replace Judas.  Just the sort of thing that we do in Synod – we fill vacancies in offices. All very mundane and down to earth.  But one of the great fascinations to me in reading Scripture is always to look for the subtexts, or subplots.  There is something very interesting about the criterion for choosing the candidates.  A little later in time, the Church decided to choose some deacons, including Stephen.  On that occasion the instruction was to choose people who were known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom.  There is no mention of those qualities here: here they want someone selected from among "those who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us".  Only such people were qualified for selection.  And the reason for this is given by Peter as follows: "For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection." There's quite a lot going on here.  First, it tells us, I think, that the critical issue for this particular community of faith is to establish the fact of the resurrection.  In other words, here is further proof that the idea of the resurrection was there at the very beginning of the Church, and not invented sometime later as the Geerings of the world would have us believe.  And it may well be that at the heart of the argument over the resurrection was the identity of the Risen Christ with Jesus of Nazareth. I spoke recently about echoes from one story being heard in another; and the echo I think we can hear in this story comes from St John's account of the healing of the man born blind.  You remember what a fuss that healing caused, and how the cynics argued that it could not be the same guy.  The guy who was now jumping up and down and able to see could not be the same man who was born blind and had been a blind beggar ever since.  And so the man's parents were brought into the argument – is this your son?  Is this the same guy?  And, of course, we could say of the parents, they were with the guy from the beginning: that was the value of their testimony. So this morning's story strongly suggests that those who were arguing against the resurrection were insisting that whoever the Risen Christ was he was not Jesus of Nazareth.  That's one sub-text here, but there may be an even more interesting one.  If the criterion for appointment as an Apostle is that he must have known and been with Jesus throughout his earthly ministry, then a very important person is disqualified, that person being Saul of Tarsus, better known to us as St Paul.  It is clear from some of his writings that he had to argue very strongly for recognition as an apostle; and it may well be that he was said to be disqualified because he had not been with Jesus throughout Jesus' earthly ministry. So perhaps we have in this story this morning an early example of factionalism in the Church, of an attempt to keep power within the inner circle of those who had been Jesus' followers from the very beginning.  All very human, and very similar to what goes on in Synods of today!  The Church as institution – making practical arrangements – choosing office holders, playing human power games, and so on – may not be very attractive, and it is easy to be scornful, but, says St Luke, we have to live in the real world. And in a strange sort of way that seems to be the central message of our gospel reading today.  This is another extract from that long teaching we have in St John's gospel given by Jesus to his Apostles on the night before he died.  We are now reaching the conclusion of that teaching.  Chapter 17 records Jesus at prayer: first, he prays for himself, then for his apostles, and then for those who will believe in him through their teaching (including us).  And in this prayer that he offers for his apostles there is yet another subtext. Jesus says this: "My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one."  Almost certainly, behind this remark is a dispute within this community of faith between those who believed that the world is so evil Christians must withdraw from it, and those who believe that we must exercise our faith in the real world, and confront its evil head on, as it were.  Some members may well have withdrawn into some sort of enclosed community, like the Essenes, forerunners of monastic communities that would develop in the second century. These readings illustrate the tension that exists between the two ages, or the two worlds, in which Christians find ourselves.  The new age, the new creation, has begun, but the old one is still with us.  The Resurrection, the Ascension, and Pentecost are to be understood as the victory of the new over the old: they are first and foremost statements of faith by the Church that in Christ life is victorious over death, love over hatred, not just here on earth but throughout the whole of creation...  The result of that victory is reconciliation with God the creator of all that is, seen and unseen; and the evidence of that is the coming of God's Spirit in all his fullness, which we will celebrate next week.  Alleluia!  Amen!