Christ Church

“He shall teach you all things”

Wind and fire. The most intangible of all tangible things. Such are the paradoxes of this day. Who has seen the wind? Who can touch the fire? But such metaphors open us out to the mystery of God as Trinity, the mystery which we can only think and adore. We cannot take the mystery of God captive to our understanding. That is the essence of idolatry, the idea that God is made in our image.

Something of the spiritual reality of God is wonderfully signified in the Feast of Pentecost, in the coming down of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit who signifies the essential nature of God and whose descent upon the Apostles establishes the spiritual community that is the Church. We are raised up into the mystery of God by God’s embracing us in the vision of his glory. God engages our imaginations. God engages the cultural and linguistic distinctives of our humanity but without being reduced to the cultural, the linguistic and the experiential. God engages the whole of our humanity. It is all God and all us at one and the same time.

Pentecost gathers us into the whole pageant of God’s dealings with our humanity, the whole pageant of revelation laid out in the Scriptures. There is creation. “In the beginning God created … the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters,” bringing all things into order and being. This is the strong sense of creation as the spiritual act of the Creator. In the Christian understanding, creation is the spiritual act of the Trinity. The Spirit moving over the waters brings order and unity to the inchoate forms of the created and material world. God breathes his Spirit into the dust of humanity and we are made living beings, made in the image of God as spiritual creatures.

There is redemption – the pageant of God’s dealing with his wayward, recalcitrant and disobedient people, all who seek to have things their way. God speaks to prophet and people, constantly and steadfastly recalling them and us to his law, to his word and will for his people delivered on the mount of glory in a cloud of majesty and awe. God leads his people in the wilderness journeys despite our persistent sinfulness, “a pillar of cloud by day, a pillar of light by night.” Once again, these contrasting and elusive images of things seen and heard open us out to the transcendent mystery of the glory of God. Jesus breathes on the disciples on “the same day at evening,” the evening of the day of his Resurrection. He bestows upon them the grace and power of the forgiveness of sins consummated on the cross and extended to us in the life of the Church. The eternal mystery of God is shown to us through the God-given created differences of what belongs to the unity of creation: through the word and metaphor, even wind and fire, and through the languages and cultures of the world, equally God-given. Such is revelation.

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“He sitteth on the right hand of the Father”

Not quite a scriptural text per se but a scriptural digest of many passages in their interrelation. In a way, it is all about understanding the interplay of images. The text is creedal – from the Nicene Creed. The Creeds are themselves a distillation of the images of scripture that provide a critical interpretive principle for thinking the scriptures. This is especially important in relation to the doctrine of the Ascension. It is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world; in short, finding the meaning and purpose of our lives in God and the world in God.

There is the religion of Jesus in the heart, the religion of sentiment and feeling which remains very much with us in a host of contradictory forms, largely in terms of the dominance of the therapeutic culture. There is, too, the religion of Jesus the moral policeman, the religion of outward conformity to the shifting demands of social and political correctness, also very much with us in terms of the ideologies and concerns about social justice and identitarian politics. While there is something true in each of these, neither of them is the religion of the risen and ascended Christ who “sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. But without the risen and ascended Christ, the religions of sentiment and moralism are altogether empty and destructive, the religions of empty hearts and whitened sepulchres. For that is really all about us and not about God and us with God.

This is what happens when we try to reduce God to where we are rather than to be lifted up to where he is, to speak in the language of the images of scripture. Our lives are to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love. These images about the comings and goings of God are the spiritual and eternal motions of God himself, on the one hand, and our circling around and into that mystery of eternal life, on the other hand. In other words, the metaphors point us to an understanding of God and to our relationship with God.

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