Author: CCW

“The end of all things is at hand.”

This might seem rather stern and threatening. The Gospel reading, too, talks about hard things, like persecution and death. But it also tells us about the coming of the Comforter. Somehow, the sense of “the end[ing] of all things” is not just frightening judgement but joy and mercy. Comforting, somehow.

We meet in the Ascension of Christ. I am struck by how relevant and powerful the fundamental creedal principles of the Christian Faith often are with respect to the issues of our post-Christian and post-secular culture. It shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because what we have before us is precisely a way of thinking that empowers and informs a way of living. That is the important insight of the ‘perennial philosophy’ expressed in one way or another in all of the great religions of the world.

In the Christian understanding, the doctrine of the Ascension is especially suggestive and important about our understanding of our humanity and our world. The Ascension signals the completion of the mission of Jesus Christ. He has come forth from the Father and has come into the world and now he leaves the world and returns to the Father. In those motions, we see the comings and goings of God in which there is both revelation and redemption. These comings and goings open out to us a spiritual and intellectual understanding of human life and of the world in which we find ourselves. Christ is not some will ‘o the wisp who comes and goes without reason or purpose.

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“He ascended into heaven”

A creedal teaching, the Ascension of Christ is one of the most overlooked feasts in the life of the Christian Church. Its meaning, however, is quite radical. In a way, it brings to a kind of completion the radical meaning of Christ’s resurrection.

Death and resurrection constitute the fundamental pattern of Christian life but without the Ascension to say that is to say very little. What the Ascension reminds us is our home with God. The Ascension of Christ is about the homecoming of the Son to the Father which establishes our homeland of the spirit. The Fathers of the early Church grasped this point ever so strongly. The Ascension, as Leo the Great puts it, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” In Christ’s Ascension, the heaven of God becomes our homeland.

The Ascension marks the culmination of the Easter Season. It inaugurates a new spiritual outlook, but one which forever remains grounded in the pattern of death and resurrection. We have an end with God and that homeland of the spirit is something which we participate in now through prayer and praise and through the sacraments.

We ascend in the Ascension of Christ. Somehow we are caught up into that heavenly motion. How? Through prayer, the very thing that has brought us to the Ascension of Christ. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,“ as Augustine remarks. The Ascension signals the purpose and meaning of Christ’s being with us. Nothing need stand between us and God except the barriers which we create ourselves. Prayer as the lifting up of our hearts places us in the divine will for our humanity and world. He has the whole world in his hands; never more so than at the Ascension when the Son returns to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world.

It is in prayer and praise that participate in that work of cosmic redemption and are gathered into the heavenly community. We ascend in the Ascension of Christ.

“He ascended into heaven”

Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2011

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world”

Jesus’ words are strong and wonderful words. They capture an important feature of the Christian understanding, one which, perhaps, we have forgotten. The Resurrection changes how we look on the world and on our experiences in the world. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. The celebration of human redemption equally embraces the idea of the redemption of the world. That is really what is meant by the term ‘overcoming’.

Today is, or was, commonly called Rogation Sunday. Rogation is about asking. Prayer, in its most basic sense, is about asking. To ask for something recognizes that you don’t have something which you need or would like to have. The idea of asking is itself a kind of reality check on the human situation. It recognizes that we are incomplete. Asking means looking to another for what we do not have but want and need. The ultimate Other is God. Asking is a fundamental feature of prayer. And of the possibilities of education, of learning, too. The passionate desire (eros) to know means recognising that you do not know.

Asking is complemented by another fundamental feature of prayer, namely, praise. Prayer and praise are important features of Rogationtide. Prayer is to be understood in a much bigger and broader sense than what we might ordinarily think. Prayer is large in its scope. As Richard Hooker puts it, “prayer signifies all the service we ever do unto God.” In other words, prayer in its largest sense embraces the whole of our lives. Our lives are to be understood as lives of prayer and praise.

The liberating factor is that prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing need stand between us and God. Why not? Because of Christ’s death and resurrection. We are, you might say, freed to God. Prayer and praise are about that freedom.

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