I have just heard an announcer on the BBC tell us that Ascension Day was the day that Jesus left his disciples and sent the Holy Spirit to be with us.  Forgive a little autobiography here - embarrassing! I was a pupil at our local primary Church of England School in Northumberland. We would always go to the parish church on Ascension Day for a service and then have the rest of the day as a holiday. I remember one such day. I must have been ten or eleven. I was disturbed. I seem to have got the message that Jesus was no longer with us. He had gone up into heaven. But just that afternoon I heard a talk on the wireless by the head of BBC Religious Broadcasting that Jesus was no longer with us physically in order that he could be with us always. Relief of the ten year old!!

 In the past century we have heard a lot about Spirit theologies and Body of Christ, or Church, theologies. It is surely time to right the balance. The problem has always been that, humanly speaking, we always seem to need neat, quick and straightforward answers to questions about God’s relations with the human race. But that’s against the facts and against the odds. Take the question of ‘time’. In the first two centuries Christians were still looking for the early manifestation of Jesus and the kingdom of God fulfilled, and the final banquet of God’s love shared with all. It wasn’t going to happen. So to offset this ‘failure’ so to speak, the Church was led to enclose the kernel of the Gospel in more and more complex ideas of how Christian faith ‘worked’ and how Christian worship could deliver the answers we needed to be ‘saved’. For example, the 40 days of Luke’s theological design to cover the time from resurrection to ascension began to be understood literally - that was something that the church throughout the centuries could embrace as a needed, human simplification  of the complexity of our relationships with the divine. But at the cost of seeing the figure of the Lord reduced in stature.  Professor Charlie Moule wrote a brilliant New Testament paper called Jesus of Nazareth and the Church’s Lord in which he said,

“Some presentations of Christian belief today, show a tendency to translate what the New Testament writers think of the presence of Jesus himself into the presence, rather, of the Spirit of God, better known indeed and better understood because of all that Jesus Christ himself once was and did and taught, but not Jesus Christ himself ... Another way of rationalizing Christian belief, besides that of interpreting ‘Christ’ as the Spirit, is to stress the identity between Jesus of Nazareth and the Church. (Forgiveness and Reconciliation by C.F.D. Moule, SPCK, 1998, page 81.)

All this can be verified in the growth of the festivals of the Church's year. Ascension as a truth - the glorifying of Jesus - was understood as part of the annual feast of Easter for at least the first two centuries. It was not until much later that it was separated from Easter by the 40 days. All this is well known. What should we do without these demarcations of liturgical time? It is not going to happen! Instead, perhaps they are the opportunity to embrace the richness of an understanding of a living faith and worship resting upon the divine acceptance of the complexity of human life and understanding seen above all in the beauty of the breadth of Jesus' own mind and perceptions.