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Involvement in a Waiting Game is a good way to describe this Sunday sandwiched between the Ascension of Jesus and the Festival of Pentecost which we shall celebrate again next Sunday.
In one sense the poor disciples didn't really have that great a time after the Lord's Resurrection. Of course they were overjoyed by our Lord's appearing to them and there was a deep exhilaration as he shared his life with them again - albeit his new Risen Life. When the day of Ascension came, however, and Jesus was finally taken from them into the heavens, there was a kind of anti-climax. What now, for us? might well have been the unspoken question They were in a kind of no-man's land or perhaps a waiting room because we are told by St Luke in the Acts of the Apostles that they returned to a room in Jerusalem and occupied themselves in constant prayer. Yet it was not a totally uncertain time. In this waiting period they chose a successor to Judas - Matthias, whose feast day we kept last Friday. We can assume that they thought this was necessary for whatever work God had for them to do. They just didn't then know what that work was.
We know, of course, we we don't really understand how hard it must have been for them. Jesus had promised them the Spirit and before he was betrayed he prayed a long prayer for them, which we have as Chapter 17 of St John, part of which is today's Gospel. Perhaps as they waited there was reflection on what that prayer meant for them and the future direction of their lives .
Eventually the Holy Spirit burst upon them in the most dramatic of ways and the waiting was over. They knew then what they had to do. They realised that the entire Mission of the Christian Church to proclaim the saving Love of Christ to all the world was now in their hands.
Sometimes in our own Christian lives there is uncertainty. Sometimes we are eager to know God's will but a time of preparation and reflection is often essential if we really are to do God's will and not our own The poet R S Thomas puts his finger on it in a poem about prayer at the end of which he says a profound truth - The meaning is in the waiting
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