Driven out

It’s been an ‘interesting’ and revealing week.

And now in the Christian journey we move on from Ascensiontide to Pentecost.

See it from the perspective of Jesus’s friends. They put their hopes in the man from Galilee, beginning to look at God, the world and people differently. Then they watched him bleed into the dirt of Golgotha. And the big question: how did a man of God end up executed on a political charge?

And now they are alone, bereft, terrified – with no idea how to make sense of the past, hiding away in the present, and fearful of what might be coming their way next. After all, Jesus had warned them that they might end up suffering the same fate as he did, hadn’t he? Their encounters with the risen Jesus – who was somehow the same, but different; not cleaned up, but still bearing the wound marks of unjust human suffering – complicated their theology, but offered no enlightenment as to the future.

Then, Jesus commissions them on a hilltop. He leaves them – basically telling them that the time has come for them to get out of the audience and onto the stage. Commissioned, but not empowered; given responsibility, but no equipment. So, once again, they have to wait and wonder. No certainty, no assurance, no clue. No business plan, no strategy, and no resource audit.

And now we come to Pentecost when the Spirit comes upon these scared people and they are driven out into the streets. To do what? Explain theology? Build a sect? Recruit members of a closed society preoccupied with esoteric notions about the end of the world? No. What becomes clear as the story develops is that these people told the world that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Well, that’s OK then.

Except that it isn’t. To say that Jesus Christ is Lord was to say that Caesar isn’t. And that is a political statement. Their empowered conviction about God and the world drives them out to challenge the power structures of the world as they know it.

Of course, they were simply caught up in the tradition that runs through the Hebrew Scriptures and was picked up by Jesus in his manifesto sermon (Luke 4). It reflects the song Mary sang when she heard she was to give birth – the Magnificat. It assumes the Beatitudes are not mere spiritual sentiment. This tradition took the prophets seriously and didn’t reduce their warnings to the level of some spiritualised private piety.

Pentecost is not just another festival. It marks that point when the Christian Church owns its story and, despite the dangers, commits itself to speaking and living in the name of the Jesus about whom we read in the gospels.

Many, if not most, of these friends of Jesus ended up executed. Not because they were religious fanatics, but because they insisted that Jesus Christ was their ultimate authority in this world, not Caesar. It was for this that they were empowered at Pentecost.

The mandate hasn’t changed.