Christ Church

He ascended into heaven

The Ascension signifies the homecoming of the Son having finished his course having accomplished the will of him who sent him and returning to the Father. The whole life of the incarnate Christ is his going forth and returning to the Father in the power of the Spirit. In his going forth and return to the Father he returns all things to their source and end, to the divine life which he is with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Why the Ascension? Because the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, the fullness of its meaning. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not to the world; it is to the world in God. Everything is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit realized in the celebration of the Ascension. Ultimately, it signifies the meaning of prayer as well as the cosmic dimension of our liturgy of prayer. Our liturgy is all ascension.

“Lift up your hearts.” Prayer is the motion of the Ascension in us. “We ascend,” says Augustine, “in the ascension of our hearts.” We ascend in the lifting up of our hearts. We have someone and somewhere to lift them up to. The Ascension of Christ is directly related to Jesus Christ as the “High Priest” of our salvation whose perfect humanity is the vehicle for our redemption and whose perfect sacrifice is the forgiveness of sins. He, and he alone, is the mediator of the new and better covenant. “For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hand, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf” (Heb.9.24).

Prayer enters into the presence of God because of the Ascension of Christ.

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“Lord, teach us to pray”

Rogation Monday is one of the formal days of prayer that bring us to the culmination of the Resurrection in Christ’s Ascension. In other words, these days of Rogation prepare us for the homecoming of the Son to the Father which is about our home with God, that “where I am there ye may be also”, as Jesus says. That homeland of the Spirit is the true meaning of our Christian fellowship. We participate in it now through prayer.

For prayer, too, is about our being with God without whom we cannot be with one another. The Gospel from Luke is about learning to pray; the prayer which shapes all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. It signals nothing less than the nature of our being with God and with one another. In that sense, it is quite radical in its scope and meaning.

In prayer we are constantly seeking God’s will. “Thy will be done,” we pray, a very different thing from simply asking and getting what we think we want as if God were some sort of grace-dispensing machine, a kind of candy-man giving whatever we demand and want. A good part of prayer is about learning what God’s will is for us and for our lives. It is not some sort of wish fulfillment, fantasy or dream. It is about reality, reality as defined by God, the source and principle of all reality. Part of that reality is about human sinfulness – our pride and folly which stand in the way of God’s will for us and in us.

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“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement wonderfully the themes of Eastertide especially in the last three Sundays after Easter and particularly on this Sunday known as Rogation Sunday. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the Gospel reading. “No man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus also says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake.”

The things which Jesus does are the works which reveal that “I am”, as he says, “the way, the truth and the life”. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer, the very theme and meaning of Rogation. Prayer is fundamentally asking. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

And yet, this is bound to trouble and disturb us. Are there not other ways to God, the ways that belong to the other religions of the world, for example? No doubt, the other great religions have much to offer in the way of wisdom and truth, and wonderfully and profoundly so, it seems to me. Each of them, whether it is Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism and so on, have important and distinctive insights. So, too, does Christianity. The point is to be able to respect the integrity of each religion and not reduce them all to some common political, social or psychological idea, subjecting them, in other words, to some feature or other that contemporary secular culture finds amenable with itself; in short, accommodations to the ‘secular’ culture of our day. The point for Christians is not to deny and diminish the claim that Christ is “the way, the truth and the life,” but to connect other insights to that idea and to realize that there can and must be a respectful dialogue among the religions of the world only in and through what belongs to each.

The centrality and the uniqueness of Christ is an essential doctrine of the Christian Faith and one which is highlighted in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in Article XVIII. The only anathema is disbelief in Christ‘s uniqueness. Only through the centrality and the uniqueness of Christ can Christians engage the religions of the world and the forms of contemporary culture.

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