Christ plays in ten thousand places

The Feast of the Ascension, which fell this last Thursday, is an important day in the Church’s calendar. Not because this is the day of the Beating of the Bounds, and the promise of cherry cake at All Souls, but because we celebrate as aspect of Christ’s resurrection, which is described by both St Luke and St Paul. Paul tells us that Christ ascended to the right hand of God, and there ‘makes intercession for us’ (Romans 8.34). It is no accident therefore that the gospel reading for the Sunday after Ascension Day often draws in the course of the three year cycle on passages from the extended prayer of Jesus to the Father in John 17.

It is intriguing to note that the Fourth Gospel does not provide a record of Jesus responding to the desire of the disciples, when they say ‘Lord, teach us to pray’. Matthew and Luke have slightly different versions of the Lord’s Prayer. John has this extended prayer in chapter 17 – and yet, when you begin to look at it closely, you begin to realise that it forms an extended meditation on the Lord’s Prayer. It begins ‘After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven, and said ‘Father….’ You could not really have a clearer allusion to the phrase ‘Our Father, who art in heaven…’ ‘I have made your name known to those you gave me’, an echo of ‘Hallowed be thy name’. ‘And this is eternal life’ – John rarely speaks of the Kingdom of God, and often where we would expect to see that phrase in the Synoptic tradition, John inserts the phrase ‘eternal life’. And so it goes on, until we come to the passage appointed for today where Jesus says ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.’ This accent on unity, which we find in this passage, is the form that John’s meditation takes on the theme of reconciliation, a telling commentary on the phrase ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ This reconciliation, this unity, is made manifest in love. For as John says in his Epistle, ‘God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.’

But as we read these words of intercession, as we read this heartfelt plea for unity and love, we are conscious that we live in a world where violence and greed and cruelty reign. There is a striking contrast between the piety of these words and the reality of the streets of Gaza. We see a similar tension in the story from the Acts of the Apostles. It all kicks off when Paul is irritated by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination, which had proved rather profitable for her owners. Travelling towards ‘the place of prayer’, they are pursued and  haunted by this woman. Willie James Jennings, the black theologian, says in his commentary on Acts: ‘As the disciples journeyed toward prayer they gained a co-traveler who haunted their prayer walk. Such haunting is necessary and of the Spirit, as the tormented cries of the enslaved must always encumber the pious actions of the faithful. This young woman spoke a tangled word, one that wove together the old order with confused sight of the new order. She was a slave girl and nameless. These realities went together, because in the ancient world to be a slave was to be only a commodity, only a body in use….’ (Jennings, Acts, p159). She sees something in Paul and Silas that hints at her own emancipation. She is freed from the spirit of divination, and yet paradoxically, Paul and Silas are promptly thrown into prison. In challenging them, they have sought to set her free, and in doing so they encounter discomfort and danger themselves. It is an illustration of the way in which prayer can be dangerous. You may pray piously for all sorts of things, but the spirit of God may stir you up to do something about it. And that may get you into all sorts of trouble: ‘These men are disturbing our city’. They are turning the world upside down. And just to make that point, even though they are thrown into jail, and there’s an earthquake, and the foundations of the prison are shaken, the doors are opened and their chains fall off, Luke records that the prison warder, fearful that he will not be able to account for the escaped prisoners, is about to kill himself, Paul stops the cycle of torture, fear and violence in its tracks: ‘Do not harm yourself’. 

In the great high priestly prayer of John 17, Jesus prays that those who follow him may ‘be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.’ The calling of each and every one of us is to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, so that we may continue to be vehicles of his grace in the world. That means that we need to wrestle with the challenge of the gospel. We cannot simply carry on colluding with our society’s silence in the face of the situation in Gaza. We cannot turn a blind eye to the inequalities which lead to people sleeping rough on our streets. We cannot ignore the way in which international development budgets have been cut to the bone, thus putting lives at risk. One of the early church fathers was once asked how to pray, and he responded, ‘Go into the world and have compassion, for then you will find freedom of speech before God.’ If we participate in the prayer of Jesus, if our hearts cry out ‘Thy Kingdom come’, then our lives will be changed. We shall be transformed. That is the challenge which we face during this period of nine days as we look back to the Feast of the Ascension, and forward to the Feast of Pentecost. 

Towards the end of last year, I went on retreat for a week at St Beuno’s, the Retreat Centre run by the Society of Jesus in North Wales. It was a restorative time – and if truth be told, I was exhausted when I got there. It was a precious moment to recharge the batteries. But each day, I got up and read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had lived at St Beuno’s when he was training to be a Jesuit. Hopkins had been a student at Balliol. And reading the gospel for today, I was reminded of this sonnet, which perhaps illustrates what it means to be transformed into the likeness of Christ. Perhaps it is worth reflecting on these words as we look forward to the flame and fire of God’s love at Pentecost.

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.