There are few things as breathtaking as a row of flowering trees in springtime, but what if the blooms stayed on the trees year round? No doubt it would be beautiful, but would it be helpful?
Well, no it wouldn’t. If the trees were fruit trees, there would be no fruit. If they were other types of trees, there would be no future propagation of the species – no seeds from which other trees would come.
Something similar would have been true if Jesus, after his death and resurrection, had continued to appear to his chosen apostles, and nothing else had happened. The party celebrating His victory over sin, death and the grave, would likely have continued, and it would have been wonderful and lovely, but, like the fruit trees staying in bloom all year round, it would not have been helpful or productive.
No, for the scope of the Kingdom to expand, something else needed to happen. A new chapter needed to begin – and did begin. Forty days after Jesus’ resurrection, He was visibly parted from the disciples, thus signalling the end of His post-resurrectional appearances, and then ten days later something else equally dramatic happened -- the disciples received the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus said they would.
What all this meant was that the blossoming period was over. The springtime of the Kingdom was giving way to the summer of the Kingdom. The work Jesus did in one place and one time was now being expanded and multiplied, the agents of this expansion and multiplication being His disciples.
Their task was to go make other disciples. What this meant in the Jewish world around Jerusalem was making the bold assertion that Jesus was indeed the true Messiah, the one foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The irony of the matter was that death on a cross usually was a sure sign that a would-be messiah (and there had been others before Jesus, usually nationalistic insurrectionists) was in fact not the real article, but in Jesus’ case the very opposite was true. The verdict of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Roman authorities and the masses – all, with one voice -- said Jesus was a dangerous character, a deceiver, one worthy of death, but the resurrection reversed the verdict of men and said this really was God’s Anointed, the Son of God. All the early sermons in Acts make this point.
But, the scope of Jesus’ redeeming work was not just to His own countrymen; it was to the whole world. “Ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth,” Jesus told the disciples before His ascension (Acts 1:8), and this is just what happened.
But the story continues to be written. The task of announcing and implementing Jesus’ kingship continues right down to the present day. The same Holy Spirit that fell on those gathered in the Upper Room on the first Christian Pentecost remains active and at work in Jesus’ believing people today.
Springtime is wonderful, but we also need the summer if the harvest is to be bountiful. May we do our part in the season in which God has placed us – not in our own strength and wisdom, but in and by the power of the Spirit which Jesus has sent us.
Almighty and most merciful God, grant, we beseech thee, that by the indwelling of thy Holy Spirit, we may be enlightened and strengthened for thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the same Spirit ever, one God, world without end.
Amen.
The Rev. Victor H. Morgan is Rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Blue Ridge.