A Homily for Rogation Sunday
Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my
name,
he will give it you. —
The fifth Sunday after Easter Day is
called “Rogation Sunday.” “Rogation” literally
means, “asking”; and it signifies prayer; it used also to be another name for
the Litany. The Rogation Days, which are
the three weekdays before Ascension Day, were first proclaimed in the fifth
century, when they were set aside for the recitation of the Litany (or Great
Rogation) in solemn processions to ask God to save the City of
For hundreds of years it was the
custom, and it may still be the custom to this day in some places in
The Book of Homilies, published
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, and required to be read in
churches, contains an excellent sermon for the Rogation Days. There was some thought given to reading that
sermon this morning, in lieu of the regular homily: but it is twenty-four pages long—a bit longer
than we are accustomed to.
Our Gospel lesson this morning
addresses the subject of rogation, that is of asking, or of praying. In our Gospel lesson Jesus tells us: “Verily, verily, I say unto you: whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my
name, he will give it you.” What,
therefore, does it mean to pray in the name of Jesus?
In the first place, we must be
perfectly clear about one thing: Jesus
is not telling us that his name has magical power. It is not a word that, like Ali Baba’s “open,
sesame” will open the door to great material riches, or like a magician’s “abra cadabra” will cause
handkerchiefs to turn into doves, or rabbits to pop out of top hats.
From time to time people do not
quite understand this. In the book
called the Acts of the Apostles, we read that Simon the Magician offered money
to the Apostles if they would tell him the secret, magic word that enabled them
to effect miraculous healings.
The Times, that epitome of the secular press, occasionally tries to
cover a story about religion (although, usually, only if a priest is caught
molesting young boys or a televangelist is found to be living high on donated
money). A few years ago, the Times heard that there was a lot of
praying going on, and they decided that that was news. They did not send a reporter here to ask the
Rector about the power of prayer; they did not even send a reporter to what was
then Saint Vibiana’s Cathedral to ask Archbishop Mahony about the power of prayer. But they did find one preacher to interview,
who provided just the kind of quotation that the Times loves to run: he said
that the name of Jesus is so powerful, that if you pray in his name for a new
pickup truck, you had better specify what colour you want.
Both Simon the Magician in the first
century and that preacher that the Times
quoted in the twentieth century missed the point of what Jesus is telling
us. Jesus is not giving us his name as
the PIN code to the heavenly ATM machine.
Rather, he is commissioning us to pray as he would pray; he is
commissioning the Church, which is not only blessed company of all faithful
people, but also his own mystical body, the sacrament of his continued
incarnate presence in the world, to continue to offer his prayer to the Father.
When say that we do something in
someone else’s name, we generally mean that we do it on that person’s behalf,
or with his authority, or for his benefit.
If we say that we pray in Jesus’s name it must
mean, at the very least, that we are praying for that which Jesus himself would
pray for.
In the twentieth century, there was
an attempt to teach Christian morality by telling folk that in any situation
that posed a moral dilemma, they should ask, “What would Jesus do?” We would do well similarly to ask ourselves,
“How would Jesus pray?” and “What would Jesus pray for?”
There are some things that we know
we could just not pray for in Jesus’s name. Certainly, our prayer could never be
vindictive, or selfish, or unlawful.
Which of us would dare to pray:
“O God, I ask that thou wouldst smite the evildoer in the blue Volvo who
just cut me off on the freeway” in Jesus’s name? Or: “O
God, I ask that thou wouldst cause thine handmaiden
Jennifer Anniston to put aside that Brad Pitt fellow and cleave unto me
instead”? Or: “O God, I ask that thou wouldst open unto thy
servant the vaults of the Wells Fargo Bank, that I may enter therein and rip
off a bundle of cash”?
Sometimes we turn to prayer because
of a felt need in our own lives. We may
ask God to comfort and relieve us in our several necessities. And it is right that we should do so. The Apostle Paul, who suffered from some
affliction in the flesh, wrote to the Corinthians that he had asked God three
times that it should depart from him; but God’s answer to that prayer was: “My grace is sufficient for thee.”
Jesus himself, in the
When we pray, we may want to seize
the opportunity to tell God how he ought to be running the universe. But God is omniscient, he knows everything;
and we know so very little. Jesus says,
“The Father knows what you need before you ask.” And that is very often more than we ourselves
know.
In Saint Luke’s Gospel, in his
discourse on prayer, Jesus assures us that God will give us that which is good
for us:
If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him
a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him
a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know
how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly
Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
But
all too often we are in the position of a child who says, “I am hungry, give me
a stone to eat.” Or begs for a snake or a scorpion, unmindful of the
danger. What does a loving father do in
such a case? In our ignorance or in our
folly, we are then not praying in Jesus’s name, even
if we tack his name onto the end of our prayer; we are praying only in our own
name.
Our goal should always be to unite
our prayer with the prayer of Jesus, and that means to pray that the Father’s
will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth.
And it means that we should not pray
for material wealth and power, like that curious fellow Jabez
in the Old Testament Book of Kings; but only that our true needs will be met
day by day.
It means also to pray for
forgiveness, not only for ourselves, but for those who have done us wrong. Jesus himself, as he hung dying on the cross,
prayed for those who put him there, “Father, forgive them.” And we should pray to be spared the test and
sheltered from evil.
Finally, to pray in the name of
Jesus means to pray in communion with his Church: with the Church militant here in earth, with
the Church expectant, and with the Church triumphant in heaven. Because the Church is the sacrament of the
incarnation, the outward and visible sign that Jesus Christ is with us always,
lo, even unto the end of the world.
Therefore, we never are more surely
praying in Jesus’s name than we gather as the Church
to offer the Holy Eucharist, joining with Jesus in presenting to the Father the
one oblation of himself, once offered.
Whether it is a few score of us here at Saint Mary Magdalene’s in Orange
or half a million at Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, this Eucharist is never anything
less than the perfect prayer of the whole Church, offered in the name of Jesus.
1 May 2005
Index
of the deacon’s homilies.