... going to the Father

​... going to the Father – a contemplation for Ascension by Rev. Reingard Knausenberger on Sunday 12 May 2024

by John-Peter Gernaat

In preparation for the Crucifixion, Jesus says to his disciples several times: “I am going to the Father”.

In the Christian festival cycle from Advent through to Passiontide and Good Friday, the gesture is one of Spirit incarnating into physical earthly being, of “coming from the Father”. The Easter shift of resurrection begins a dramatic turnaround. Through the deed of Christ, the Son of the Father, within Jesus, the human being, the whole of humanity is now shifting to ‘grow up into the world of Spirit’, of “going to the Father”. Now we can know where we are going, what our purpose and future is about.

We know from The Fifth Gospel by Rudolf Steiner that Jesus experienced a deep sense of despair in the years before his baptism in the Jordan. Wherever he travelled in his adolescent and young adult years, he sensed that human development had reached an end point. There was nothing in the human being that could initiate what was needed for the human being to develop beyond what was already present. There was no hope of a productive future. Then Christ enters into the human organisation of Jesus at the baptism in the river Jordan. Finally, Christ goes through the portal of death in the crucifixion. A new power now becomes available in that the Divine had gone through the human experience. It is the power of resurrection, the ‘Christ in me’, that every human being can connect with during earthly life and take across the threshold of death.

After the Resurrection the disciples of Jesus are able to establish a new relationship with the Risen One, and then Christ ascends. A new relationship must be built by the disciples. This relationship is only possible by the disciples expanding their consciousness to remain connected with Christ.

There is a completeness in the number ten, of the ten days of Ascension until Whitsun. It is possible to feel how Christ ascends, expanding step by step through the nine Hierarchies to ultimately implant the fruit of his earthly experience and the seed of his experience of death into each successive Hierarchy. On the tenth day Christ is re-united with the Father, every year a bit stronger.

Christ expands through the Hierarchies in his going to the Father. We must expand our soul to connect with Christ and the Father-God. This is the important message of Ascension that must not be lost.

In the Act of Consecration of Man we experience a progression in how we the address our source of life: it begins as ‘Divine Ground of the World’. Our substance is His substance. All of creation is derived from this Divine source. When, much later we address the ‘Father God,’ it implies that a very intimate relationship has developed, a recognising how we, the human creation, are children of the Divine. When we establish that we are intimately connected with the spiritual world and that it is the source of our life, we can establish the relationship to the Divine Ground of the World as one of ‘father’.

But as the creations of the Father, we have a task. The Divine has poured all the resources into us and is now depleted. We cannot expect the Father to continue to make endless resources available to us. We find the resources of the Father now in the realm of nature. This is the past where the resources have been invested so that there can come into existence a being that can develop self-awareness. We can only become self-aware in our meeting with another ‘I’. Christ is the helping guide for human beings to awaken to their ‘I’ and their inherent creative power. When we are in community, we can magnify this power.

In the Creed the Divine Ground of the World is described as ‘spiritual-physical’. Jesus Christ, through death, resurrection and Ascension, becomes ‘physical-spiritual’. The Son appears through the development of a new seed that comes about by overcoming death. From the Son of the Father emanates an active quality of enlightened creating will. Thus, all human souls have the potential to become ‘a son’ of the Father.

The source of my, and all fellow human beings’, existence is the Father God. When I am one with Christ, I can speak the Lord’s Prayer as a truth, by addressing the Divine Ground of the World as ‘our Father’.