Month: May 2025

“I am ascending unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Christ’s Resurrection words to Mary Magdalene reveal the necessary connection between Resurrection and Ascension. No Resurrection without the Ascension, paradoxically! Christ’s homecoming is ours too. We have a place or end with God.

The Ascension of Christ marks the culmination of the Resurrection; its fullness and completion, we might say. In the Ascension we see the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, all “because I go to the Father,” as he has said. That is the meaning of his Ascension as marking the end of his going forth and return that signals the gathering of all things to God. As Aquinas says, “God is the beginning and end of all created beings, but especially rational beings.” Thus Christ’s Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity” to its end or place with God in the dynamic of the spiritual life of the Trinity. His homecoming is equally ours.

We catch something of the drama and the intensity of the Ascension in the readings from Acts and Mark. “He was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. The cloud refers to the symbolic form of the divine presence or glory of God, the shekinah of the Exodus and elsewhere that serves as prologue to Christ’s Incarnation. “He was received up into heaven,” Mark tells us in what belongs to the so-called longer ending of his Gospel.

The doctrinal significance of the Ascension is that Christ returns to the Father in the flesh of our humanity, that “where he is there we may be also”; in short, it signals the idea of our abiding with God. Yet at the same time, the Ascension signals the meaning of prayer. Prayer is the ascension of our hearts and minds to God, and thus to our abiding in his will and purpose. Prayer is sursum corda, the lifting up of our hearts, as we say in the liturgy. Prayer is ascension.

In that sense, the Ascension is both direction and action. Yet it is also cosmic in scope, since the return of the Son to the Father is the gathering of all creation to God. Our prayers participate in that sensibility and activity; the lifting up of all things to God. As Christ has “ascended into the heavens,” as the Collect puts it, “so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.”

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“For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me.”

The comings and goings of God in the Scriptures reach their climax in the Ascension of Christ this Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter which marks the culmination of the Resurrection and Eastertide. Today, Easter 5 is also known as Rogation Sunday. It concentrates for us the meaning of these images of comings and goings. Theology consorts with images, especially the images of the Scriptures through which we are gathered into an understanding of our life as grounded in the dynamic of God’s life.

Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation that precede Ascension Day signal the larger dimensions of the Resurrection. It is at once cosmic and psychological: cosmic because it emphasizes the gathering of the whole of creation to God, and psychological because that gathering has very much to do with ourselves and our blessedness, coming to self-knowledge and awareness as both ‘hearers and doers of the word’ through which we glimpse a true image of ourselves, as the Epistle from James puts it. Otherwise we are deceivers of ourselves; beholding ourselves in a glass but then forgetting who we are. The whole purpose of the Resurrection is to make known who we are in the sight of God.

Christ’s Resurrection is not a flight from the world and our embodied being but their redemption. It makes visible what is hidden and present in the Passion just as the Nativity of Christ makes visible what is hidden yet present in the Annunciation. In each case there is the idea of our humanity as a microcosm of the world; we are a little world in which there is a recapitulation or gathering together of the elements of the world in us. This reminds us that we are intimately connected to everything in the created order. Thus Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation emphasize our connection to nature, to the world, and to our place in the world, particularly our parishes as the places where we dwell as sojourners in the land, the land in which we abide with God, via ad patriam, the way to our home with God signalled in Christ’s homecoming. His return to the Father is the exaltation of our humanity, and signals the hope that where he is there we may be also, that as he is so shall be also, that we shall be as Christ. Rogation Sunday is very much about ourselves and the world in which we are placed but as gathered to God through the comings and goings of Christ. The spring of nature’s year is a parable for the spring of our souls to God.

The overcoming of the world that ends the Gospel reading from John is not the negation of nature in a denial of creation – a kind of gnosticism – but the overcoming of the opposition between the world and God which belongs to the Fall. That is the meaning of redemption and thus marks the restoration of the truth of our relation to God and creation; in short, to our end with and in God. Such ideas speak powerfully to the confusions and disorders of our contemporary world which exhibit a profound sense of disconnect, not only of ourselves from nature and from God but also from ourselves. Rogation Sunday teaches that prayer is the real antidote to the forms of our disconnect. Why? Because in prayer we are gathered into the very life of God himself.

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