In this delightful medieval picture God can be seen peering through the clouds down to the strange activities of humans. It is a good take about what many Christians have been taught for centuries - that God is the great deity, out there and up there, in heaven. In a three tiered universe it was the only place that such a powerful creator God could be. He was all powerful - almighty, as many traditional prayers say - all knowing, but not at all engrossed in his creation. He was outside time and outside all that happens on the floor of the earth. A dictator, but one who could, as the prophet Hosea says, love his people Israel. So it is not strange that we humans should often go our own way. After all, this God had given us autonomy, to a large extent, to manage our own affairs. Having wills of our own we were wilful.

Of course many of these ideas of ours about God were very simple and came out of our experience of growing up in this planet of ours. Dreams of a lost paradise came later when we were at loggerheads with one another in parts of the earth. There was much about us that looked to a rosier future when we discovered our artistic capabilities of carving and music, as well as the possibilities of family life. If only the God of space, up there, would take some part in our struggle for survival. Space was a problem then as now. It seems that there has always been a future, 'out there', which we have longed to understand more fully.

So after some two hundred thousand years of our 'history' we were astonished that there was one of us who reflected the real and total image of our creator. Events had been leading up to this wonderful moment of course but even so it was a surprise. Jesus, the new Joshua, was in life the reality of God. Our ideas of God were changed for ever. Here was the source of all the love we had yearned for. He had connections with all our past and yet he was the 'new man'. God could now be seen - in Jesus. In the company of Jesus - as disciples of him - we were to enter into a much larger life with God instead of being moribund as we had for so long thought was our destiny.

But then he was taken away from us in the prime of his life. We hadn't understood him in the long run. We thought that here, in this transitory life, we were due to be counted as kings rather than servants. But God understood our incapacity and regard for self - to mention only two of our weaknesses. So in Jesus' acceptance of death God transformed him through death to be the risen Lord in whom we could all know, for ever, the life of the creator and lover of humankind always with us.

It has taken us a long time to appreciate how immensely valuable is the space in which we live with God. He has never been far off but for centuries we have maintained the vocabulary and ideas of distance. Jesus - truly human - is also alive with the aliveness of God. All who know him are aware of this. So although it hurts our pride that we cannot fully explain how this is we can be humble enough to turn away from all our previous efforts in history that attempted to create a new logic (as we thought) of the divine and of Jesus the Lord.

After all, anyone, whether Christian or otherwise, who comes to know the presence of God and of Jesus within our personal space, feels the infusion of a love which has conquered death and brings life to us which courses through our minds and bodies like an infusion of eternity. Great things have been wrought in the past 2000 years of Christian history but what lies ahead in Christian faith is due to be even greater - the working out of the divine love, known as closer to us than breathing, to transform the communities of Jesus the Lord, among us.