Sunday after the Ascension
READING: 17 1-17
Yours are mine, and mine are yours.”
I wonder what it feels like to overhear someone praying for people they deeply love? In some churches and cathedrals people write prayers on small cards and leave them quietly in candle stands or prayer corners. Sometimes they are polished and thoughtful. Often they are not. They are hurried, shaky, painfully honest: prayers for a dying parent, a struggling child, a broken relationship, fear about money, loneliness, exhaustion, war, grief. There is something profoundly intimate about reading such prayers. They are rarely abstract theology. They are the sound of human beings trying to remain hopeful.
Today’s Gospel gives us something similar. We are allowed to overhear Jesus praying.
Not preaching to crowds.
Not debating opponents.
Not performing miracles. Simply praying.
And what is striking is that his prayer is not about escape from the world, but about remaining faithfully within it.
“They are in the world,” he says.
This Sunday after the Ascension always carries a particular atmosphere within the Christian year. The Easter season has drawn towards its close. The resurrection appearances are fading from view. Christ has ascended. The disciples stand in that strange space between presence and absence, between memory and mission, between what has been and what is still unfolding.
And perhaps that is where many of us live too.
The Ascension is not Jesus abandoning the world. Nor is it Christianity becoming less earthly or less human. Quite the opposite. The movement of the Gospel now shifts from the physical presence of Jesus toward the Spirit-filled life of ordinary people. Flesh gives way to Spirit — not because bodies or ordinary life no longer matter, but because now the life of Christ is to be carried through the lives of his followers.
The disciples must now “get on with” living the Gospel.
Not by becoming superheroes or religious experts, but by becoming communities of prayer, courage, compassion, hospitality, justice, forgiveness, and hope.
And that is precisely what Jesus prays for here.
Not that they will escape suffering.
Not that they will dominate the world.
Not that they will possess certainty about everything.
But that they may remain rooted in love while living fully within the complexity of ordinary human life.
Perhaps that is why this prayer feels so contemporary. We too live in uncertain times. Many people feel exhausted by the pace of modern life, anxious about war, climate change, politics, rising costs, loneliness, and division. Technology connects us constantly and yet many people speak of feeling more isolated than ever. Bodies present; attention elsewhere.
Jesus prays into precisely that kind of fragmentation:
“That they may be one.”
Not uniform.
Not identical.
But deeply connected.
This week we have also seen the continuing encouragement of “A Million Acts of Hope” — that invitation to make hope visible through ordinary acts of kindness and care. Sometimes hope sounds vague or sentimental until it becomes concrete. But hope becomes real whenever someone cooks a meal for a struggling neighbour, checks on someone who is isolated, listens without judgement, volunteers at a foodbank, plants flowers in neglected places, welcomes refugees, visits the sick, creates spaces where people feel safe and seen.
These are not interruptions to prayer.
In many ways they are prayer embodied.
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is profoundly relational. Again and again the language is about belonging:
“Yours are mine, and mine are yours.”
Not possession, but communion.
The disciples are imperfect. They misunderstand Jesus repeatedly. They fail, panic, doubt, betray, and scatter. Yet Jesus still entrusts the future of the Gospel to them. Which perhaps gives hope to the rest of us too.
And here the example of Julian of Norwich becomes especially powerful.
Julian spent the latter part of her life in a small anchorage attached to what is now Norwich Cathedral. To modern ears, the idea of living enclosed in a tiny room can sound like withdrawal from the world. But Julian’s life was anything but detached. Her little cell stood right in the middle of a busy medieval city. Through her window she would have heard carts rattling over cobbled streets, merchants shouting, church bells ringing, children playing, arguments, laughter, illness, grief, and fear. Norwich itself was marked by political instability, economic hardship, plague, and social unrest.
And yet people constantly came to Julian’s window seeking counsel, prayer, wisdom, and hope.
She lived a life of deep contemplation right in the heart of ordinary human struggle.
That matters.
Because Christian prayer is not about escaping reality. It is about becoming more deeply rooted within it.
Julian understood something profoundly similar to what Jesus prays here in John’s Gospel: that divine love holds human beings even amid uncertainty and suffering. Her famous words, “All shall be well,” were not naïve optimism spoken from comfort. They were words forged amid plague, loss, instability, and mortality. Hope for Julian was not denial. It was trust that love remained deeper than fear.
Perhaps that is part of what the Ascension asks of the Church now.
Christ is no longer physically walking the roads of Galilee. Instead, the Spirit empowers ordinary people to continue embodying his life in the world. The Church becomes, at its best, a people who carry forward Christ’s presence through compassion, truthfulness, courage, and reconciliation.
Not perfectly.
But faithfully.
And perhaps this is where wondering becomes important.
I wonder what it means to remain prayerful in such a distracted world?
I wonder where we are being invited to embody hope rather than simply talk about it?
I wonder who might need our attentive presence this week?
I wonder whether holiness is sometimes far quieter and more ordinary than we imagine?
I wonder what it means that Jesus prays not for escape from the world, but for faithfulness within it?
Sometimes we imagine holiness as dramatic spiritual achievement. But often holiness looks much more like remaining present.
Present to God.
Present to neighbours.
Present to grief.
Present to joy.
Present to injustice.
Present to ordinary life.
Jesus himself models this groundedness. At the very moment suffering gathers around him, he turns toward relationship rather than away from it. He lifts his eyes to heaven and prays.
There is something deeply earthy about this prayer. Jesus prays not from safety but from vulnerability. His glory in John’s Gospel is not domination or success, but self-giving love.
And perhaps that reframes holiness for us too.
Not escape from humanity, but deeper participation in it.
The Sunday after the Ascension leaves us standing with the disciples in that in-between space. Easter joy still lingers, but Pentecost has not yet fully arrived. The Church waits, prays, wonders, hopes.
And in that waiting, we hear again the prayer of Christ:
for protection,
for unity,
for courage,
for love,
for hope.
The risen Christ entrusts the future not to power or certainty, but to communities willing to remain close:
close to God,
close to one another,
and close to the woundedness of the world.
That prayer continues still.
Image: Marian Jenis, Unsplash.com
