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   This Sunday between the Feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost is unique in the Christian year. On the one hand, it looks back over the period of 40 days when the Lord was with his disciples after the resurrection, and, on the other, it looks forward to the fulfilment of the promise which Christ gave them before his departure.

   What will fill the enormous gap which will be left when the visible presence of the one who was the center of the disciples’ lives and who gathered them back together after they had scattered following his death has been removed? It is a moment of uncertainty, a sort of interregnum, marked by the realization that things will be very different.

   We are startled to see how far off the mark the disciples’ expectations seem to be: “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts1:6). During Jesus’ ministry some had expected him to fulfil contemporary Messianic expectations by expelling the Romans and restoring political independence to God’s chosen people. But now, surely, after Jesus’ shameful death on the cross, this false understanding of his mission ought to have disappeared. But, on the contrary, it seems that the resurrection experience has brought about a rebirth of triumphalism.

   Jesus responds with a promise of quite another kind of power: not the power of political self-determination, but the power which the holy spirit will bring. Jesus’ Farewell Discourse in the Fourth Gospel also gives us this sense of being suspended between two realities, but here it is not the disciples who are torn between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. Rather, Jesus himself, in his solemn high-priestly prayer seems already to be experiencing the glory which he had with the Father before the world was made (John 17:5). He even declares, “Now I am no more in the world” (v. 11). But here too Jesus’ concern is for the disciples: “Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (v. 11).

   The empowerment of the disciples, whether with the spirit or with the spiritual knowledge in which eternal life consists, is for the mission. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so now Jesus sends his disciples into the world (v. 18). The gift of the spirit which they will soon receive will enable them to be Christ’s witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria in to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8).

   As we see Jesus’ disciples standing, as it were, on the threshold of the first Christian mission, we cannot help but reflect on our own spiritual empowerment and what it may produce. In his vision statement for the Toronto diocese, Bishop Colin Johnson has said:

May 8, 2005

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