Once, in a class, an Anglican professor wrapped up a theological exposition with the triumphant conclusion, “And that is why, my friends, Christmas is the central festival of the church year, not Good Friday, as the Reformed would have it.” The salient point was the the crux of our salvation lay in the incarnation of the Word—the sovereign and gracious decision to be God-with-us—and not in the death of that Word in our place or on our behalf, in this Anglican view a secondary move in the drama of salvation.

I reported the conversation later to a Wesleyan friend, adding my own comment: “Funny; I think they’re both wrong; Easter is the crucial point of our salvation, since incarnation and crucifixion are all for nothing if death is not defeated and the atoning of our sins not vindicated by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.” To which the Wesleyan friend said, with no little astonishment, “Pentecost is the central festival, because what good does all that action of Jesus’ do until it is made known to the whole world by the work of the Holy Spirit so we can come to saving faith?”

The whole experience makes for a handy and rather amusing typology of where we various Christians lay our emphases, but the broader and more salient point is, none of the festivals make sense without the other, and therefore no aspect of the work of Jesus the incarnate Word makes sense in isolation from the other aspects. It is the whole story, not a point in time, that marks our salvation. This strikes me as one of the best arguments for the church year itself: it pushes us to take seriously the whole gospel. We have to account for why, in fact, the story of Jesus’ earthly life ends at Ascension; or why the otherwise improbable story of the magi at Epiphany is the critical beginning of Jesus’ public presence; how Transfiguration reveals and conceals the nature of Jesus’ glory; and so on. The church year is by nature ecumenical, dampening our isolationist theological tendencies with the expansiveness of the gospel.