Jesus is Not the Church

If the church identifies its structures, its leadership, its liturgy, its buildings, or anything else with its Lord — and that’s what happens if you ignore the ascension or turn it into another way of talking about the Spirit — what do you get? You get, on the one hand, what Shakespeare called, ‘the insolence of office’ and, on the other hand, the despair of late middle age, as people realize it doesn’t work… Only when we grasp firmly that the church is not Jesus and Jesus is not the church — when we grasp, in other words, the truth of the ascension, that the one who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord who is strangely absent, strangely other, strangely different from us and over against us, the one who tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him — only then are we rescued from both hollow triumphalism and shallow despair.

– N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 113.