The Father Himself Loveth You

There is a particular kind of prayer that the Church reserves for this Sunday and for the three days that follow before Ascension Thursday. We call them the Rogation Days, from the Latin rogare — to ask. This is the week of asking. The Collect today is itself an asking prayer, and what it asks for, oddly enough, is asking. Grant to us thy humble servants, that by thy holy inspiration we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same. Two graces are sought, and they are sought in sequence: the inspiration that gives us right thoughts, and the guidance that brings those thoughts into right action. To think and to do.

The world has nothing to teach us about the first that is more than a counterfeit, and nothing about the second that is not, in the end, exhausted. But the Church has a Master who has joined them. He joins them, today, in our Gospel.

I. In that day ye shall ask in my name

In the upper room, on the night before he suffered, our Lord began to do something for which his disciples had no precedent. He began to teach them how to pray. They had prayed all their lives. They were Jewish men, formed in the Psalms, attending the Temple, observing the appointed hours. But what Christ teaches them in the sixteenth chapter of Saint John is not how to pray as the psalmist prayed, nor as the Pharisee prayed, nor even as he himself had prayed beside them on countless mornings. He teaches them to pray in his name. Hitherto, he says — hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.

This is a new thing. Until this hour the disciples have asked the Father through their teacher. From this hour forward they will ask the Father through the Son who has joined himself to them, and who, by his Spirit, will dwell within them, and through whom every petition will rise. The intermediary is no longer outside them; he is in them. In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: for the Father himself loveth you. There is the staggering line of the chapter. The Father himself loveth you. The disciples are no longer to think of God as a distant majesty whom only the Son dares to address; they are to think of him as a Father who already loves them, and to whom they may come in the Son's own name as into the room of one's own household.

II. Be ye doers of the word

Saint James, in the Epistle, will not let this gift be received without its corresponding form. Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. The man who hears and forgets, James says, is like the man who looks into a glass, beholds his face, walks away, and immediately cannot remember what he saw.

There is a peculiar danger here for those of us who have been formed in the Prayer Book. We hear the same word week by week, season by season, year by year. We say the same Confession. We answer the same Comfortable Words. We come to the same altar. There is no liturgy in Christendom more capable of forming the soul, and none more capable of being heard without being received. The Collect today knows this danger. It asks not only for the holy inspiration that gives us thoughts of good — that is the hearer's portion — but for the merciful guiding that performs them. James and Cranmer are saying the same thing in different idioms. Inspiration without performance is the man at the glass, who has seen and forgotten. Performance under inspiration is what James calls pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

The Church has, since the ninth century, walked the bounds of her parishes in this week — clergy and laity together, processing along the field-edges, blessing the wheat, praying for the rain, asking that the earth may yield her increase. We may not have fields to walk; we have neighbours, and elderly relations, and friends not lately visited, and quiet duties unattended. The Rogation procession, in our day, is the moving from chair to telephone, from quiet pew to sickbed, from hearer to doer. By thy holy inspiration — that is the prompting in the chair. By thy merciful guiding — that is the rising and the going.

III. I have overcome the world

And then the chapter ends with the line that gathers it all. These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

We do not preach this lightly. There are members of this fellowship who carry burdens heavy enough to make any cheerful word sound shallow — illness that does not yield, fears that do not quiet, losses for which there is no replacement this side of heaven. Christ does not deny the tribulation. He names it. In the world ye shall have tribulation. He does not promise its removal in this age. What he promises is that the One in whom we ask, the One in whose name our prayers rise, the One whom the Father loveth and who has loved us into the Father's love — that One has overcome the world. The fact is past tense. The victory is already won. We live in the little while between the winning and the wearing of the crown.

So we ask, and we do, and we wait. We come to the altar this Sunday as those whom the Shepherd has gathered, as pilgrims still on the road, and as sons whom the Father loveth — and we receive the Bread and the Cup in which the One who has overcome the world gives himself to feed us until he comes again.

Be of good cheer. The Father himself loveth you.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen ✟