Mind the gap!By the Revd David Burgess
I always enjoy reading children’s prayers – for their honesty, their straightforwardness and (for adults) their unintentional humour.
Here’s one from a young girl who simply signs herself ‘Ginny’: “Dear God – please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. Love Ginny.”
I don’t know how May is going to work out for you, but from the point of view of the Church calendar it’s a very quiet month until the very end. However, we then have two of the four major Christian festivals – Ascension (on the 21st of this month) and Pentecost (on the 31st) – in the space of ten days. Ginny would be pleased!
For most of May, though, how do we fill this gap?
In fact, there’s a lot that we can be thinking about in the intervening period between Easter and the two other festivals.
The readings in our church services this month are almost in ‘real time’; that is, we look at the Bible stories that took place during the period between Jesus’s Resurrection and his Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And quite strange stories some of them are too.
Before Good Friday and Easter Day, we’re used to a Jesus who was close to his friends and followers; someone who could be approached, touched, and dealt with on an ordinary human level, even though he was also the Son of God.
After Easter things change. We see a Jesus who can walk through locked doors, who can disguise his appearance, and, even though still close to his disciples, somehow has a difference about him.
They’re stories about someone who is literally halfway to Heaven – someone on whom the earth and the natural order of things don’t have a hold any more, and someone whose natural inclination is now to be where he belongs.
There’s a puzzle here. What was the point of Jesus’s half earthly, half heavenly ministry during those six weeks? He certainly wasn’t just killing time until his Ascension. He was, I think, giving those around him a glimpse of eternity and the understanding that where he would go, they in turn would follow.
So, during this brief time, the disciples were given a true taste of Heaven on earth. It was the same Jesus, but a Jesus who was doing profoundly different things and preparing them not only for their future on earth, but for their eternal future.
I always find that there’s a sense of wonder about the stories that describe this period in Jesus’s life. They don’t show just a gap needing to be filled; rather, they depict one of the most fascinating parts of the whole New Testament.
I hope that, if you come to Church during this period, or if you look at the episodes I’ve described, that you in turn catch some of this intrigue as well.