ONCE more, we find ourselves caught up in the suspense between Ascension Day and Pentecost, in that place of strange poise and tension, that place of the potential waiting to be made actual, a kind of holding of our own breath, waiting for the breath of God to come to renew us and our world.

A watchword text for these waiting days would be Luke 24.49: “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

This is, indeed, one of the texts that form part of the new Stations of the Resurrection that run between Easter Day and Pentecost; and I had the interesting challenge of writing a sonnet for that eighth Station in the recent Church House publication Stations of the Resurrection.

In the end, the sonnet became a kind of meditation on, and expansion of, Jesus’s words in Luke: an opening out of their references and their implications, but still expressed as the words of Christ to us. To imagine, on the basis of scripture, what further words Jesus might be saying to us is very much in the Ignatian tradition; but when that tradition was suppressed for a while in Protestant countries, a certain freedom went with it. It was felt that nothing could ever be added to or subtracted from the ipsissima verba, the “Dominical sayings”, often printed in red in our Bibles.

So, even as late as the 1940s, when Dorothy Sayers produced her radio-play cycle The Man Born to Be King, now regarded as a classic, there was huge controversy because she was felt to be putting words into the mouth of Jesus. There were many angry letters to the BBC, and one group went so far as to proclaim that the fall of Singapore in 1942 was a sign of God’s displeasure with the series!

One may laugh at such an extreme reaction now, but I share enough of that reticence to have hesitated a little before allowing myself the poetic licence with which my sonnet expanded on that verse in Luke; for my sonnet, too, is imagined as though spoken by Christ:

God’s glory waits to shine afresh in you
To recreate you with his kindling breath
For all I promised you is coming true
The breath of Life has burst the gates of death.
No need to leave the place I’ve given you
The world I love and gave my life to save
Stay in the city till it all comes true.
The Father’s Spirit raised me from the grave
And I will send that Spirit down on you.
The poor fools who claim power in this world
Have toiled in vain for nothing but a lie,
Pilate and Caesar, Herod, all have failed.
But you’ll be clothed with power from on high
To share a Kingdom that can never die.