where is jesus?

Jesus, returned to the Father, had sent the Spirit. Was Jesus, therefore, finished with them? Did his ascent into the innaccessible heavens and the sending of the Spirit as his "replacement" mean that their contact with him was forever a thing of the past? Was he to be only a ghostly model to conjure in the mind but never to hold again in human arms? No; and this is not simply because Paul had taught them that Jesus was Lord of the Cosmos and they were his mystical Body. Such constructs are, in the last analysis, too cerebral to make a lasting difference in the ordinary lives of ordinary people like Prisca and Aquila.

The appearances that followed on the discovery of the empty tomb had given them a taste of Jesus risen and exalted. The disciples had, in effect, just caught him midway through his ascension from the realms of the dead--on his way to the Father's right hand. From time to time, long after Jesus's ascension, unusual individuals, like Paul on the road to Damascus, would be privileged recipients of such "out of time" appearances, as they may be even to our day.

But what of you and me, the less-than-privileged? What of folks like Prisca and Aquila, or tunic-making Dorcas and sleepy Eutychus, whom nobody would mistake for visionaries? Are we to be left only with faith?

-- Thomas Cahill