It's All About Easter - Philip Yancey

The last weeks of Christ's life on earth:

Holy Week - Crucifixion - Resurrection - 40 days - His Ascension back to heavenly glory

Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, 'Where are you going?' Because I have said these things you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.  (John 16:5-7)

Jesus was giving His last words to His disciples, at the last meal they shared just before He was arrested.


At the time the disciples had no idea what Jesus meant. How can it be good that He is going away?

They ate the "body, broken for you" without comprehending the drastic change, that the mission God had assigned to the Son, the Son was now entrusting to them.

"As you sent Me into the world, I have sent them into the world," Jesus prayed.

Jesus left few traces of himself on earth. He wrote no books or even pamphlets. A wanderer, he left no home or even belongings that could be enshrined in a museum.

He did not marry, settle down, and begin a dynasty.

We would, in fact, know nothing about him except for the traces he left in human beings.

That was his design. The law and the prophets had focused like a beam of light on the One who was to come, and now that light, as if hitting a prism, would fracture and shoot out in a human spectrum of waves and colors.

Six weeks later, the disciples would find out what Jesus had meant by the words for your good.

As Augustine put it, "You ascended from before our eyes, and we turned back grieving, only to find you in our hearts."

Would it be too much to say that, ever since the Ascension, Jesus has sought other bodies in which to begin the life he lived on earth? The church serves as an extension of the Incarnation, God's primary way of establishing his presence in the world.

All along he had planned to depart in order to carry on his work in other bodies. Their bodies. Our bodies. The new body of Christ.

The church is where God lives now.

      -- From The Jesus I Never Knew,
                          by Philip Yancey