The opening chapter of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that after our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, the Apostles together with the women and Mary, the mother of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem. And: “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer …” This period of prayer culminated, of course, in the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.
In the cycle of the Church Year, we find ourselves in the corresponding period. We celebrated the Ascension on Thursday; and we shall celebrate Pentecost a week from today. Christ has ascended into heaven; but the Holy Spirit has not yet descended. So for us, as for Mary and the Apostles in the Upper Room, it’s a time of waiting and prayer.
Although in many places it’s become the practice to transfer the Ascension from Thursday to Sunday, nonetheless I think we lose something vital by doing so. For the Sunday after the Ascension has much to teach us about praying for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And this is particularly the case with today’s reading from Saint John’s Gospel.
The setting is the Last Supper. Our Lord is praying for his disciples on the eve of his arrest, trial, and death. He prays specifically for their unity in love after he’s taken from them. So this prayer exactly anticipates their situation after his Ascension. He’s no longer physically present with them; yet he’s entrusted them with the mission of preaching the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They cannot possibly fulfill this mission without prayer. So here he prays for them and for us as well.
A helpful hint for understanding today’s Gospel is that when we hear it read, we need to assume the posture of people being prayed for. After his Ascension, Jesus stands in the presence of the Father continually making intercession for us. And in today’s Gospel we have the privilege of hearing a snippet of what his prayer for us sounds like.
He prays that we all may be one, as he and the Father are one. During the past century, this passage has become one of the proof texts for the ecumenical movement, which has striven mightily to overcome the various divisions within the Body of Christ.
A key development in the history of Christianity in the twentieth century was the growing realization among Christians that our disunity hinders the Church’s mission and witness in the world. Thus, Christians who had once seen themselves as being in competition and rivalry – Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics – began to discover the rewards of getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, and exploring areas of potential co-operation.
By the 1960s and 1970s, conversations between Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, and Methodists had gained great momentum, occasioning enormous optimism about the ecumenical future. Yet in the following decades, disillusionment began to set in. While these dialogues produced some interesting agreed statements on doctrinal matters, and in some cases formal intercommunion – such as between the Lutherans and us – early hopes for quick corporate reunion have largely met with frustration.
In response, some proposed changing the movement’s goals and methods. In 1995, for example, Konrad Raiser, Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, proposed that the various church bodies should give up seeking doctrinal agreement and structural unity, and instead devote themselves to co-operation on issues of justice, peace, and protection of the environment.
Others sought to ignore, minimize, or trivialize the differences between Christians. For example, also in the 1990s, when I was in my previous parish, I participated in a great ecumenical service at a local Lutheran church for the Week of Prayer for Christian unity. About forty clergy of different traditions processed and sat together. The vestments and robes ranged from Geneva pulpit gowns to cassocks and lacy surplices. The musical offerings featured traditional choral music, an African American Gospel choir, and a folk rock group. A Baptist preacher and a Roman Catholic priest both gave outstanding sermons. About four hundred people packed the church to standing room only. It was a moving and powerful witness to our shared commitment to Christian unity.
Imagine my disappointment the next morning when I opened the local paper and read the first line in the story: “Christians of all denominations came together last night to demonstrate that doctrine doesn’t matter.” What a profound misreading of that service’s meaning! Doctrine does matter! Yet in that ecumenical service we’d come together to express, first, our conviction that our shared beliefs and practices outweigh our differences; and, second, our commitment to praying and working together to resolve and overcome the very real differences that still divide us.
For the unity that we seek, the unity for which Christ prayed, is nothing less than unity in the fullness of truth and love. Such unity can’t be achieved by warm fuzzy feelings of togetherness fostering the illusion that differences in belief don’t matter. It can’t be achieved solely by new bureaucratic structures, or by carefully crafted statements concealing unresolved differences behind compromise formulas and ambiguous language. It really can’t be achieved by human effort at all. Rather, it’s a gift of the Holy Spirit, which can only be prayed for and received in God’s good time.
Listen again to our Lord’s words: “that they may be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they may also be in us . . . that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one . . .”
This unity, which Jesus has with his Father in heaven, is a complete harmony of heart, mind, and will. In John’s Gospel, Jesus emphasizes again and again that he has come to speak the words and to do the will of his Father in heaven. And here Jesus is praying that his disciples may likewise be of one heart, mind, and will—both with him, and with each other.
And such complete harmony of heart, mind, and will is humanly impossible. But notice that here Jesus is praying for his disciples. He’s not commanding us to be one; he’s not promising that we shall be one; he’s praying that we may be one. In other words, we cannot achieve this true unity on our own. We can only pray for it, and we can only receive it as a gift from God.
One of the signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst is the unity of our hearts, minds, and wills in the truth of God’s Word. A key work of the Holy Spirit is to reconcile those who are divided and at enmity. And so, in this interval between the Lord’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we join with our Lady and the Apostles praying in the upper room – the same room, incidentally, where Jesus prayed at the Last Supper – that we may all be one, even as he and the Father are one.
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