The wind
of
God

'... and the wind/spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.'

The poetic account of the world and cosmos that we live in was surely a stroke of genius of the fifth century writer of Genesis. Evening and day, light and darkness, sun and moon, living creatures and finally humanity in the image of God. But it is this evocative, primary feature of the account which is so striking - 'the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.' God is invisible to us. Only a poetical evocation can possibly succeed for those who have been touched by him. Later writers were to achieve this in accounts where God, the invisible deity, 'speaks', as in Elijah's encounter when, after the storms and wind there was to be heard the 'sound of silence' when Elijah became aware of the divine.

Sometimes it is good to try to think of these ancient authors both of the Hebrew texts and the New Testament texts. They would be surprised - if it should have somehow come to their ears - that Christians of the 21st century were continuing to read them! We see these texts in a book or hear them read out in churches but that is a world of difference from 'homing in' on their origins in specific, if unnamed, people of past civilisations. This can be seen in striking detail in the opening accounts of the texts in Acts. The author of Acts is widely regarded as the author of the gospel of Luke. At the end of the gospel he writes about the ascension of Jesus in brief but final words. When we come to Acts, for some reason he repeats the account of the ascension but in extraordinary, detailed geographical and astronautical detail! Then, before he sets out on his potted history of some of the early disciples, the wind/spirit of God arrives in visible form and the mixture of human guttural accents! Why?

One reason could be that by the time Acts was written - say about 80-90 CE - there was a quite different audience to be addressed. In the gospel, God, like the god of Genesis, was invisible and felt only as wind and as the silence of divine spirit. But towards the end of the first century there was conceivably the need to address opposing sceptics both from the Jews and the gnostics from the East. There could also have been the greater need for mapping out time scales in the Christian revelation of God in Jesus. If Jesus the Lord was to be accepted as 'real' then the final acts of God in raising him and revealing the new life of the kingdom that had been 'achieved' perhaps needed to be given material form. The fifty days from Easter to Pentecost was one way of making the invisible events of the spirit of God visible - they were mapped out in earthly time.

The text of Acts is one of the important witnesses to early Christian history but its author has imposed upon the story both the exigencies of his own time and also his own conclusions about where the Christian movement was heading. That future of Christian life and faith was only realised through 200 years of struggle with the Empire and gnostic and other variations of the gospel. It was only after 300 years that Acts came into its own when Ascension was celebrated as a separate feast 40 days after the resurrection and Pentecost on the fiftieth day. From which time, in the last quarter of the fourth century, the church has not looked back! The fourth century was a time of critical and political arguments within the church and the formulas which the pundits of those days settled on - such as the 'naturalising' of relationships between Father, Son and Spirit - can be seen as the logical conclusion of the author of Acts bringing the divine life of spirit/wind into temporal categories. The calendar of feasts became esablished within the next two hundred years. Christian faith and life from henceforth became naturalised in temporal form.

Have we lost something? Not from the point of view of seeing Christian faith as a real part of the history of the world. But within itself the church has felt the lack of that understanding of the hidden but powerful wind of God traversing not only the waters but the world and the cosmos itself. While there is nothing that we can do to assert any proof that the Christian way is in fact true, what can be convincing is the reliance of Christians on the hidden reality of the divine wind/spirit of the Father and Jesus the Lord. Our worship in the mainstream churches hops from one temporality of the gospel to another in the course of each year, from Advent to Pentecost. There is a richness in that annual round of celebration. But, going back to thinking of the authors of the New Testament, and what was their real motive in writing of these events, we can realise, following them, a certain freedom of spirit to enable the divine spirit to shine through ourselves too.

Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, [Jesus] answered them, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say,''Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you." And he said to the disciples, "The days are coming when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and you will not see it. And they will say to you, 'Lo, there!' or 'Lo, here!' Do not go, do not follow them. For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of man be in his day." (Luke 17: 20- 24)

© Aelred Arnesen