Living the Blessed Fifty Days

April 20 – PASCHA

“Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world … That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God’s new world, which he has thrown open before us.”

– N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

May 29 – ASCENSION

The ascension means that Jesus, in bodily form, has returned to the right hand of God, from where He exercises His Lordship over the earth. His own resurrection was the beginning of the re-creation of the cosmos, and His return will accomplish the final marriage between heaven and earth.

In the meantime, we who have put our trust in Christ build and serve the coming Kingdom by giving witness to the qualities of such a Kingdom whose methods match its message. As N.T. Wright explains,

The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always—as Paul puts it in one of his letters—bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifest.

There is no room for self-aggrandizing triumphalism here. And there is no room for despairing over failed utopias. For our very hope is in the fact that we, the emissaries of God’s coming Kingdom, know that every act of love and justice—every kindness; every poem, song, dance and painting created in love; every celebration, parade; every garden tended; every act of reconciliation; every tear of grief shared and borne for the sake of the other—serves to anticipate and prepare for Christ’s return. And as 1 John 3:2 so astonishingly declares, “…we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is,” and all of creation, τον κοσμον, will cry “Glory!”

– Steve Bell