Sermon for Rogation Sunday
Be of good cheer
Really? Is this some kind of cruel joke? Be happy in the midst of the uncertainties and fears of the current Covid-19 crisis? In the face of the fears of contagion and death, especially with respect to the elderly and to others who are vulnerable? And yet, what is signaled in the Gospel for the last Sunday of Eastertide (in its traditional reckoning), a Sunday commonly known as Rogation Sunday, speaks directly to the general question about how we face dark and difficult things. The Eastertide readings belong to a long and profound tradition of philosophical and ethical reflection about suffering and sorrow, about life and death. Tribulations ‘r us but they always have been. ‘All God’s children got problems’, as the old Gospel song says. At issue is how we face tribulations of whatever sort. This goes to the question of what it means to be human.
Far from being a cruel joke, what Jesus says here is deep wisdom. He bids us to be cheerful, not in flight from the world and its tribulations, but in the face of the things which confront us. It has entirely to do with how we see and think about things. That is why it is so significant that Jesus begins with what is really a kind of commonplace; “in the world ye have tribulation.” To be sure. How can he then say, “be of good cheer”? Because “I have overcome the world.”
This is the key point. Yet the very language of victory, of overcoming, suggests opposition and division, a ‘them versus us’ mentality, a conflict narrative. Is that what Jesus means? He means rather, I think, that he has overcome the separation of our humanity from the world and from one another because of our separation from God. Such are the radical teachings that belong to the idea of creation and the story of the Fall. The overcoming is human redemption accomplished by God in Christ through the humanity which he has assumed.
Nowhere is the deeper meaning of this shown than in the wonderful phrase which captures the whole logic of God’s engagement with our humanity and our world. Jesus says, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” “Because I go to the Father” is the great mantra of Eastertide. It signals nothing less than our being gathered into the love of God through Christ’s death and resurrection. Rogation Sunday shows us that this is cosmic. The whole world is gathered into God and returned to its truth in God. Rogation refers to the fundamental sense of prayer as asking, to what we desire which is the good which we seek for ourselves and for the world in the truth and goodness of God himself. The Easter mantra connects to the Our Father. As Origen, Augustine, Aquinas and a host of others remind us, nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures is God prayed to as Father. Here everything is gathered into the divine intimacy revealed through the words of the Son.
