Year: 2013

“I have overcome the world”

It is, it seems to me, the forgotten or at least an overlooked doctrine, the doctrine of the Ascension. Christ’s words from the Gospel of Rogation Sunday point us to the radical teaching of the Ascension. We have a home with God because Jesus has overcome the world.

The world no longer defines us. The Ascension of Christ frees us from our pragmatic frenzies and follies and from our fearful fatalisms. It marks the culmination of the Resurrection. Something of the fuller meaning and teaching of the Resurrection is presented to us in the Ascension of Christ. It bears eloquent testimony to the meaning of human and cosmic redemption. The world is God’s world; it exists for his will and purpose, not ours. We have an end, a home with God in Christ. “I go,” Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also.” That sense of an end or purpose, especially for rational creatures, is really quite strong.

But what are we to make of the language of overcoming? It seems, dangerously, to be the language of technocratic exuberance whereby we think the world is simply there for us, a resource to be mined, fished, farmed, logged and generally exploited for the advantage and purposes of our devisings, the sad consequences of which are only too depressingly before us. But it is also the language of existentialism, (at least in its Nietzschean form) the language of the will to power which trumps the possibilities of a world of truth and meaning. Yet, Jesus means, I think, something quite different. His overcoming of the world has to do with God’s radical and wonderful redemption of the world without which the joy and delight of the Ascension make little sense.

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“I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Lifting up holy hands. Lifting up your hearts. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker reminds us, “signifies all the service that we ever do unto God.” Prayer is about the Godward direction of our lives. It is not about the odd nod to God; it is not about the regular irregular presence at Divine Service; it is about a whole life lived towards and with God. Such is the radical message of Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation. Ora et labora, if you will, pray and work.

In the Resurrection of Christ we are given a new and radical freedom – a freedom in the world because of freedom in Christ; a freedom with one another because of our freedom with God. Prayer is the operative term, especially in the days of Rogation, the days of prayer which remind us emphatically of a life of prayer. We are, I fear, quite dead to this. We have far too small an idea of prayer, if we think about it all. Our churches are failing, to be sure, but the real failure would be to give up on prayer.

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“I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.”

It is one of the profoundest statements in the Gospel. It captures in a phrase the whole of religion. It suggests something about God in himself and something about God for us. The mission of the Son – his going out and his returning to the Father – belongs to his essential identity. Everything is to find its place within the relation of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. Everything finds its place in the life of God. That life is opened to view in the mission of the Son. We have only to enter it so as to live it. Such is the grace of God.

Here is the blessing. The blessing is to know that you are a child of God. The children of God know that there are hardships and sufferings, for they are not to be ignored, but even more they know the victory of Christ – “I have overcome the world,” the world within and the world without.

And something of the meaning of that “overcoming” is sacramentally signified for us this morning in the baptisms of Warren and Isabella. By this sacrament, they are made “a child of God”, “an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven”, “a member of Christ.” We find the truth of ourselves in Christ. But we have to be incorporated into him so as to grow up into that life. Baptism is the beginning of spiritual life by the grace of Christ. It can begin in no other way. But as a beginning it signals and presupposes a continuing in the same, continuing in the way of grace through prayer and praise, through the ordered life of worship and discipleship in the Church, through the growing up into a spiritual understanding of what has here been conferred upon them this morning. Their baptism is a visible reminder to all of us about our baptisms – our profession, our calling.

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“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.

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