Absence and Embrace
Ascension of the Lord
As a member of the sandwich generation, I teeter between attending to an aging parent and providing for children whose needs grow ever more complex as they enter adulthood. But standing between the generations has underscored for me the challenge and possibility of what one generation passes on to the next. Wills and trusts can detail specific procedures for distributing possessions when a parent is gone, but these documents consist of sterile legalese for executors to implement. They lack a beating heart. Letters from parent to child can do far more to fill out hopes, assurances, and dreams that legal documents cannot, but even such treasured documents cannot replace the presence of one who ushered us into life, nurtured and instructed us. Once that person has departed, we are left with a void, an aching absence.
It is astonishing, then, to notice what Jesus leaves with his disciples as he prepares to depart from them on the night before his betrayal and crucifixion. Not a will with detailed instructions about how to distribute their scant assets. Not a constitution instructing them on how to manage their polity effectively. Not a catalog of spiritual practices to cultivate a deeper inner life with God. Not a theological treatise outlining the contours of a new religion. While he does offer his disciples a lengthy discourse in John 13-16, Jesus’ ultimate bequest to them is to gather them up into his prayer before the Father.
As a typical adolescent, I had a fairly two-dimensional view of my parents. The middle-aged adults I knew had seemingly always been who I knew them to be. The fact that I didn’t know much of their backstories and wasn’t privy to their intimate conversations meant that I only knew them in terms of their dealings with me, their instructions about things that I should or shouldn’t do, their praise and reprimands. They were authority figures without their own narrative or agency apart from my existence.
But being drawn into Jesus’ prayer before the Father on the eve of the crucifixion offers us the fullest depiction we have of Jesus’ life with the Father, the inner communion within the Trinity. In this prayer, including the verses immediately preceding the assigned gospel text, we catch snatches of the backstory of Father and Son. In the beginning, the Son shared in the Father’s eternal glory before the world existed. The Father entrusted the Son with supreme authority and sent him to reclaim a world hellbent in rebelling against its Creator.
Far more than flat recitation of facts, this prayerful backstory pulsates with a heartbeat of gift giving. Eight times in verses 6-12 Jesus speaks of the Father giving to him (disciples, words, everything, His name) and his own giving to his disciples. The inner dynamic of this Divine communion is one of grace. It’s an ever-expanding gift economy that begins with the Father and Son and overflows from Jesus to his disciples. The backstory of Jesus’ relationship with the Father fleshes out what we could misconceive as a two-dimensional authoritarian relationship from Father to Son and from Son to the Church.
But just as astounding is to hear Jesus praying for his disciples – praying for us! It’s like eavesdropping on your parents or mentors and hearing them speak of you with the utmost tenderness and love. Jesus prays for us.
He is “not asking on behalf of the world,” but on behalf of those whom the Father gave him, because they belong to the Father. Despite the intractable wretchedness of his followers, then and now, Jesus does not bypass the Church and go straight to praying for the world.
Stunningly, Jesus has not given up on the Church. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”
Despite our compromised state, Jesus esteems us. Before the Father, he delights in us. Against all rationality, he declares us worthy of his love and affection. In effect, Jesus prays, “Father, what you began and entrusted to me is now bearing fruit in these whom you gave me. Our shared passion to love the world back to life is taking form in this community of disciples You gave me.”
John 17 has ignited trinitarian theologies and missiologies. It undergirds the Nicene confession of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. But what sets this text apart is that it is Jesus’ prayer. What John 17 seeks to do to us is not merely to instruct us in right theology or practice. As prayer, it desires to form us for communion with God the Father, Son and Spirit.
The calling to be the Church is impossible in every age, and seemingly never more than in our own. Myriad foes seek to distract, discredit and render her innocuous with false narratives and hopes. Inexorable cultural forces splinter the body of Christ into ever smaller fragments. Christ’s absence from among us heightens our sense of vulnerability to the point where we can despair over what will remain that we could possibly pass on to the next generation.
But then we find ourselves embraced in the communion Jesus shares with the Father through this prayer. This is the prayer that the risen and ascended Christ ever lives to offer for our sake at the right hand of the Father. What sustains our life as Christ’s followers, therefore, is not making right decisions. (The eleven disciples’ attempt to shore up the apostolic band in Acts 1 by adding Matthias proves to be inconsequential compared to the Spirit’s stunning moves to add Paul and Gentile believers throughout the empire.)
Nor are we constituted by the strength of our commitment to the Church, whether as an ideal or a flesh and blood community of saints/sinners. What energizes our mission is not our keen sense of convictions or values. No, what holds us together is the way in which we are embraced within the loving communion of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What propels us ever outward is how we are caught up and carried away by the mission of God to love a rebellious world.
It is fitting that on this Sunday following Ascension we celebrate another, albeit non-liturgical, holiday. On this Mothers Day, we remember and celebrate the love of the One who birthed us, nurtured and trained us, and sent us into the world. Christ has ascended. But even in his absence, his intercession draws us into such tenderness and grace that we are propelled outward to participate in his mission of gathering up others into this Divine embrace.