“The Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed
that I came out from God”
Rogation Sunday highlights the radical nature of prayer. It does so by way of attention to the threefold relationship of humanity, nature, and God. The word, rogation, derives from the Latin, rogo, rogare. It simply means to ask. Prayer in its most basic sense is about asking. To ask is like the desire to know. Wanting to know is really about asking to learn. It assumes, first, that we don’t know all and everything, and, second, that there are things to be learned, knowledge to be gained and appreciated, as it were, in short, loved. To ask for anything assumes that we lack something which we think is good and right to have. Our wanting acknowledges our lack.
But in asking there is the spiritual insight and acknowledgement that all and every good belongs to God, and that all knowledge and wisdom comes from God. Prayer in this sense is the honest awareness that nothing that we have or enjoy is simply of our own making and doing. It belongs to our relationship with God and with one another. Rogationtide brings out how our relationship with God and with one another is grounded – pardon the pun – in the land where we are placed. Rogationtide in the Christian understanding offers a theology of the land and of the meaning of human labour and life in prayer and in situ.
The Easter mystery of the Resurrection is not about a flight from nature into some vague and indeterminate fantasy of human imagination. It is the most radical affirmation of creation and of human individuality. It is found in the gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come. It signals the freedom of our lives as spiritual beings in the very places where we live. Where we live is where God is to be praised and honoured. What Rogation Sunday celebrates is the redemption of all things to God, especially, the things of the land, of nature. Here is a corrective to Earth Day, to all of the environmental concerns of our global world. How? By reminding us of our connection to creation and to the redemption of the world and our humanity, we are to be not just “hearers” but “doers of the word,” learning how to “think those things that be good” and to “perform the same,” as the Collect puts it, albeit only by God’s “holy inspiration” and “merciful guiding.”
In the Offices this week we read through the largest part of The Book of Joshua about entering into the promised land and through the last seven chapters of The Acts of the Apostles. Following Exodus and Deuteronomy, Joshua emphasizes the primacy of following the law of Moses and the idea of the promised land proverbially imaged as “the land of milk and honey,” a land flowing with abundance of the good things of creation because of the goodness of God. This requires our acting in accord with the will of God in creation and in creation restored.
Our readings highlight the theme of the redemption of all things to God through the Passionand Resurrection of Christ which culminates in the Ascension. And what is that except the homecoming of the Son to the Father in the gathering of all things back to God? Theology as prayer is really about the idea of recapitulation, the “gathering together into one again of all things, both which are in Heaven and which are in earth, even in Christ”(Ephesians 1.10). The key word is ανακεψαλαιωσις. It is a kind of circling by gathering together all the things of Heaven in God and all the things of earth in man both of which are united in Christ, both God and man.
The Rogation Days recall us, first, to the essential goodness of creation – good in its parts and very good as a whole, secondly, to our separation from God and creation through the Fall which results in the long parade of folly and suffering, and thirdly, the redemption of creation through the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension. The Ascension, as the Fathers put it, is the exaltation of our humanity, our being raised up into the truth and beauty of creation returned to God. Such is learning and prayer.
In the Christian understanding, all prayer is nothing less 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). And so, too, in today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us about the meaning of his going to and being with the Father: Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it to you … for the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me.” 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. Prayer gathers us to God in the motions of his gathering of all things into unity in himself.
The idea of recapitulation as a returning to a principle presupposes a departing from it, a scattering or falling away – the Fall. Yet that in turn implies an original being together with one another, a harmony. Adam – meaning our humanity generically speaking – before the Fall stood together with God in Creation, but then fell away, scattered from God in the Fall. The whole pageant of redemption is a returning upward, our being brought together again, our being restored to God, to one another, and to the natural and created order in God. Such is Ascension.
All this is wonderfully concentrated for us in Christ’s words: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” That going to the Father is the true meaning of his “overcom[ing] the world.” It is not our overcoming through technocratic manipulation, domination, and destruction of nature. Christ overcomes the fatal separation of ourselves from nature, from God, and one another. The overcoming is the recapitulation of all things into unity in God.
We have to learn this over and over again, it seems. The Book of Joshua ends with Joshua renewing the covenant between Israel and God to keep the Word and commandments of God, explicitly warning them about falling away. This recurring theme counters the victim culture of our age which is largely about confessing the sins of others. Scripture, on the other hand, calls attention to our own sins and to our being made accountable for our thoughts, words and deeds. The Acts of The Apostles ends with Paul’s words about those who hear him in Rome but don’t believe, quoting Isaiah about “hearing but not understanding,” about “seeing but not perceiving.” This complements the Epistle reading from James which also notes how this is a kind of forgetting of who we are; in short, a loss of what it means to be human. And likewise with Balaam’s oracles in Numbers about what he has learned.
Today in our secular culture is Mother’s day. (One might note the conjunction of the ‘gendered’ images of Christ’s going to the Father and of Mother’s day.) All of us are born of mothers. The fourth commandment bids us to honour our natural origins, honouring our fathers and our mothers; in short, respecting the givenness of families as part of creation. Mother’s Day is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relation of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; gathered into the radical nature of prayer that brings all things into communion with God.
“Prayer,” as Richard Hooker notes, “signifies all the service that ever we do unto God”. Prayer is the life of mother Church, the constant interchange between heaven and earth, between angels and humans. Prayer speaks to our learning and desiring. “As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth, so prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.” (Lawes, Bk. V, ch. xxiii). As for Augustine, so for many, the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ is often first learned from our mothers whose love in sacrifice and service complements and participates in the sacrifice of Christ which reveals to us the radical and all-encompassing love of God as Trinity.
That idea of love underlies Rogationtide. It is about loving and knowing for there is no knowing without loving and no loving without knowing. Knowing without loving is mere folly; destructive and dehumanizing. Our literary, philosophical and poetic heritage reminds us in countless ways of what happens when we forget who we are in the sight of God and of what we are capable of doing to nature and to one another.
Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem Binsey Poplars reflects on the destruction of a grove of aspens at Binsey by the Thames, northwest of Oxford. He calls attention to the human problem about our doing and knowing that is the dark side of the industrial revolution. “O if we but knew what we do/ when we delve or hew.” For in relation to nature “to mend her we end her, when we hew or delve.” And not just trees, sad to say. Our “strokes of havoc,” as he puts it, “unselve” the “sweet especial rural scene;” and thus we unselve ourselves.
This is more than romantic nostalgia for a rural world. Hopkins in God’s Grandeur reminds us that in a world where “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell,” a world where “the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod” – itself a lovely image of our disconnect from nature – there is something greater. “For all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things … because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.” This is the love which Christ teaches us in these Gospels about the pageant of redemption. Such is prayer. Such is Rogation that brings us to the Ascension and to Pentecost.
“The Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed
that I came out from God”
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday 2026