“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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“Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth”

The Resurrection makes visible the essential life of God as Trinity, the source and end of all life. The burden or purpose of these Eastertide Sundays is to bring that essential life more fully before us. The Resurrection is neither an add-on, a kind of holy extra, nor just one more detail, one thing after another in an endless list of things. It opens us out to the truth and life of God by gathering everything together. It looks back to the Passion and ahead to the Ascension but even more it opens out to us the Holy Spirit as the guiding principle of our lives.

The reading from the Epistle of James complements the Gospel passage, once again from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus is speaking to the disciples prior to his Passion and Resurrection about himself and his mission; it is nothing less than a making known of the radical nature of the divine life which is the source and end of all life. It is a gift, something given, but given as that upon which all life depends; the truth and end of creation itself is found in the life of God. “Of his own will,” James says, “he brought us to birth by the word of truth,” highlighting our vocation to be “a kind of first-fruits of all his creation.” Wow. You are not nothing, at least not in the eyes of God. And what else matters?

In other words, the Resurrection makes visible the real truth and purpose of creation and of our humanity. It signals the restoration of the truth of our being as made in the image of God and of our humanity as “the abridgement of the world” (Andrewes). Our humanity is a microcosm of the world; there is a kind of recapitulation of all that belongs to creation in our humanity. But only as grounded in the total self-giving life of God as love. In Christ there is an abridgement of heaven and earth, of God and our humanity.

Today’s Gospel focuses on the motions of God himself and in relation to us. There is the paradox of the comings and goings of God which reveals the truth and presence of God with us. “I go my way to him that sent me,” Jesus tells the disciples, fully knowing their incomprehension and puzzlement but actually preparing them (and us) for what will be made clear in his Resurrection. Its radical meaning is precisely about his relation to the Father and to the Holy Spirit; the revealing to us of the all-sufficient life and love of God as the principle of reality and our lives. These ‘Eastertide’ passages from John’s Gospel, the so-called “farewell discourse” of Jesus, portends his Passion and Death and his Resurrection and Ascension as well as teaching us most fully about the Holy Spirit, the bond or “love-knot” of the Father and the Son (Andrewes).

Theologically, we are being lifted up into the mystery of God as Trinity through the comings and goings of God to and from the world and us. We are meant to learn about the abiding presence of God revealed in Christ’s sacrifice and its meaning for us as new birth and life. The emphasis on the coming of the Comforter, or Paraclete, meaning counsellor, as John alone uses the term in chapters 14, 15, and 16 of his Gospel, grounds all of the activities of God towards us in the life of God himself, the spiritual reality of God which is the ground of all life.

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