“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
Rogation Sunday reminds us of the cosmic dimension of the Resurrection, to the theme of the redemption of all creation. It reminds us emphatically that religion is not about an escape from the world. It sets before us a kind of theology of the land. In the story of Creation, the earth, the dry land, is said to be good (Gen.1.9,10). And we, who are made in the image of God, are also formed out of the dust, “from the ground”(Gen.2.7). We are placed in the garden of creation. The garden is the land of paradise.
In the story of the Fall, our disobedience not only alienates us from God but also from the land. The land of paradise becomes the land of sweat and toil. “Cursed is the ground because of you…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to the dust you shall return” (Gen.3.17,18). “And the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken” (Gen.3.23). In the story of Cain and Abel, the land becomes ‘the land of blood.’ Cain slays Abel in the field: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” God says (Gen.4.10). These stories are altogether fundamental to what unfolds in the story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments.
In the story of salvation, the land is also signified as the “promised land,” the land of our renewed relationship with God. The promised land is variously described in the Old Testament. Its proverbial description is the “land flowing with milk and honey” (e.g. Deut.6.3), but, in The Book of Genesis, the promised land is just “the land which I shall give you” (Gen.13.15,17). It may not be all that much to look at; it may even smell funny st certain times of the year in our rural communities especially! It signifies simply the place of our relationship with God. That is its most basic and fundamental sense.
In The Book of Exodus, the land is the place of revelation, the “holy ground” (Ex.3.5) where God makes his name, “I am who I am” (Ex.3.14), and his will for his people, known to Israel through Moses. The land is the place of liberation, the place of our liberation to God: “I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land” (Ex.3.8). It is in that sense of liberty and as given by God that the promised land is first called “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex.3.8). Yet it is not its paradisal elements, its echoes of Eden in material and descriptive terms, which make it the promised land. The promised land is primarily, as The Book of Deuteronomy puts it, “the place which the Lord God will choose, to make his name dwell there” (Deut.12.11), the place of our abiding in the will of God. It is the land which God gives you; the land where the truth of God is to be honoured and respected.
Jesus intensifies and clarifies this sense of the land as “the place which the Lord God (I am Who I am) will choose, to make his name (I am Who I am) dwell there.” He intensifies and clarifies the name of God into the names of spiritual relationship, the relationship of the Trinity. And he makes the place of our abiding in the life of God the place of redemption. The blood which cries out from the ground to God is the blood of the Only-begotten Son of the Father. The cry is his prayer to the Father. It is his prayer for us and for our forgiveness. He has gathered the whole world into his love for the Father.
His spirit, which he places into the hands of the Father, carries all of the meaning of our misuse of God and the world back to God in love. The overcoming of the world in its opposition to God is accomplished in prayer on the cross, in the prayer of the Son to the Father in the Spirit. It has its fullest expression in the homecoming of the Son to the Father in Christ’s Ascension. It is captured wonderfully in our text. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
Rogation means prayer in its most fundamental sense of asking. All prayer is nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. Out of the land of blood, sweat and tears comes the prayer which redeems the whole world: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk.23.46). Its fuller meaning is captured in our text: “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father” (John 16. 28). And so the land becomes the land of grace, the place of our abiding in the spiritual fellowship of the Trinity, the place of prayer and praise to the living God.
We have to learn to listen to Jesus’ teachings in order to act upon what he says; only then will we be “doers of the word and not hearers only” (James 1.22); only then will we dwell in the land where God is honoured and respected, the promised land of our abiding in the life of God (cf. Deut.6); only then will we enter into his embrace of the world in prayer.
We have been given not only to see the promised land but to enter into it. It is the land where we are placed and where we are called to honour God and serve one another, the land of prayer and praise, the land made holy by Word and Sacrament, the land of grace. It is the whole world as gathered to God in the liturgy of redemption.
“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday
May 5th, 2013
8:00am