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Returning to the Father

Easter Day : 20 April 2014

When our parents die the world often appears to be an empty and lonely place. Both my parents died not long after the other, after a period of increasing frailty of health in which they needed the care of their children. This was one of the important marker stones of my recent years in Christchurch, and looking back now I can see that, amongst other things, it enabled me to think about the possibility of coming to Dunedin to be the Vicar of this parish.

If those sad events gave me the freedom to consider the next step of my vocational journey it came with a price tag. I realised that I could never go home again. Even in adult life their home was a place I went to gladly and often. There was always a welcome there, and I could count on being received with sympathy and supportive love, even when I came home with bad news. That house was an oasis of acceptance, refreshment and renewal. I always felt that there was a place there for me if I needed it. Now it was gone forever.

In Christian literature the image of homecoming is the most frequent descriptor of life with our heavenly Father in the life of the world to come. On arrival we will feel that we belong more completely than any other place we have ever been. We will understand that this place and space lay behind all the longings of our life here. And from that perspective we will look back on our past life and will see where the true plot lines of Divine love were working their way through our human loves, and even in our failures in loving.

But for us to get back home the pioneer of our salvation must go there first, and today my interest is in where Jesus went after the resurrection. It is a perspective we don’t often hear about as preachers give high focus to the resurrection appearances. Yet they were fleeting, and only lasted for a limited time, and were confined in the main to the small inner group who had stayed with Jesus right up to his last journey to Jerusalem. Jesus had to be coming from somewhere for these brief return appearances to take place – the question is where?

What the resurrection of Jesus means in its most essential content is that he returned to the Father. The Father accepted the total offering the Son had made of himself, raised him by the mighty operation of the Spirit, and brought him back to himself. In so doing he vindicated and upheld the claims and promises Jesus had made to others about his ministry and his person. Jesus you could say had gambled on the Father standing behind these claims, and he been proved right by the corresponding response of the Father.

But what is of even more interest is what Jesus took with him in his return to the Father. In a sense the whole purpose of the Incarnation had been for him to gather up all of us, and all of creation for that matter, and bring it back with him in to the bosom of the Father. He did not intend to return empty handed, but intended to bring God’s world back to God. In so doing this estranged and hurting world could be healed and restored back to its original purpose and style of operating. For as the world of creatures is gathered up by him and returned to its point of origin, its original maker, it is also raised in value - it is enhanced and made much more than it originally was.

The world of creatures as it now is only half the creation it was meant to be. It becomes fully itself as Jesus returns it to the Father with thanksgiving for all that it originally was as a gift from him. The very act of him giving thanks for it, and offering it to the Father, makes it come right, restores it to its original purpose and value. The word Eucharist means thanksgiving, and Jesus’ restoration and return of the world to the Father is a Eucharistic act. This Eucharist we are celebrating is like a faint echo of this stupendous act of Eucharistic offering that Jesus made as he returned to the Father. Here today we are gathering up and returning to the Father that small part of the creation called Caversham. We are joining in, in microcosm, what Jesus did and does in his gift-laden return to God.

And it doesn’t stop there. In the process, as a return gifting to us, a reverse flow as it were of this movement of offering, he Eucharistically distributes himself to the world through the Church. The Church is about to come in to existence in a short space of time on the day of Pentecost. At the centre of its life will be the celebration of the Eucharist. What the Eucharist does in its most essential terms is to communicate the risen life of Jesus to us. All the controversies about what the Real Presence of Jesus amounts to in the Eucharist can be distilled down to this – when we receive the sacred body and blood we are receiving in symbolic form what the risen life of Jesus amounts to. What he achieved through his saving death and rising in glory comes to us under the appearance of bread and wine.

So there is a two-fold movement in the return of Jesus to the Father. He gathers up and takes the world of creatures back to the Father in an act of thanksgiving, an action that will only be completed at the end of time. He gives back to the world the gift of himself in an endless act of Eucharistic distribution. Today we share in that boundless generosity of shared self.

The resurrection then is Jesus’ homecoming to the Father. He has risen in to the fulfilled world of the Kingdom he taught about so often, the place where he abides with the Father and the Spirit. He has risen also in to the Church where he discloses himself to those who gather around the loaf and the cup. In that part of the world, which he loves so much, he rules over those who follow him "from table, font and pulpit." From there he gives directions about how we make our way home to the Father.