Heaven Alongside

The Girton Interchange at the top of the M11 is a junction the like of which I’ve seen nowhere else in ten years of professional driving.  While two lanes of northbound traffic pass unhindered, scarcely noticing the change from M11 to A14, just feet away on the other side of the barrier an exciting transition is happening, at speeds of up to 60 mph.  Motorway traffic slowing down to turn east changes place with westbound A14 traffic accelerating to follow their route north.  It sounds quite dangerous, but all the drivers seem to realise that in those few hundred yards every vehicle will be swapping sides, and it all seems to work out quite smoothly.

If you are wondering what this has to do with Christmas and the Incarnation, I invite you to check out the relevant verses, which are these:  Luke 2:9, John 1:5, John 3:4 and Acts 1:9-11.

When the A14 route was created, it involved very little new construction, and in large part consisted of re-numbering and upgrading existing roads.  This junction involves negotiating a complex manoeuvre simply to stay on the same route, and drivers using it for the first time are a little cautious, wondering just where all the traffic around them is going. 

So imagine poor country folk, doing what they’ve done every winter night for centuries: looking after their animals on the hillside.  All of a sudden they are surrounded by shining lights, heavenly voices and the sweetest music they’ve heard in their lives.  Little wonder that they were terrified.  At the start of John’s Gospel, the evangelist gives an overview of Jesus’ mission on earth.  It is characteristic of virtually all of the Gospel story that His teaching seemed completely opposite to the accepted ways of the world.  His sayings were often confusing to those who heard them; the comment by Nicodemus is only one example of many.

Some 17 miles after Girton, the A14 road approaches Huntingdon, and by now drivers have got used to the volume of traffic, which includes many heavy lorries and is often as great as on a three-lane motorway.  No one knows which of the adjacent vehicles is heading for the midlands and which for the north, until a junction turns the A14 traffic off to the west again, leaving the remainder to join the A1(M).  It’s something of a surprise if you’re not expecting it.

After three years, and the upheaval that the death - and then the resurrection - of their supernatural friend had inflicted on what had become a new way of life, the disciples must have been absolutely flabberghasted when, in the middle of talking with them about the coming Spirit ... suddenly he was with them no longer, but instead two men in white, explaining that he’d been taken up into heaven!

 

And one day He’ll return – let us renew our resolve this advent to be ready, whenever that may be.