John 14:1-14

05/09/10
John 14:1-14
Hudson UMC

There are some passages in the Bible that just take your breath away. I think that I find more joy in this passage every single time I read it. When I first began to organize my thoughts in a serious way to prepare to preach on this marvelous text where the beauty of God is so evident, I realized that there was entirely too much to cover in one sermon. However, I also knew that I actually want to complete John at some point and that I did not want to spend two weeks of ordinary time on the same passage. So, I decided that I would focus on one main point and save the rest for another time. All of this is to say, then, that you might hear a sermon on the rest of this text very soon; perhaps on Trinity Sunday in a few weeks.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” Jesus here is giving us tremendous promises about the life that is to come. He is asking His disciples to trust Him as He tells them about things that they have never seen and so He wants to assure them that trusting in Him is the same as trusting in God. If God is faithful and never wavers from His promises, we can be assured that the same is true for Jesus.

After saying that there are many rooms in His Father’s house he says, “If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Jesus is saying that, since He has made this promise, has uttered these words, it is as if the deed were already done. Human beings often say things like, “My word is my bond,” but with Jesus we have something even more important. With Jesus, we do not have His word over here and His action over there. In Jesus, Word, Being and Activity are all inseparable. He does not say one thing and do another, and what He says and does is not different from who He is. We, however, are not the same way. We often say things that are not true to who we are, that is, we lie. We often do things that are out of character for us. We put of facades, we project a version of ourselves that we want others to see, but we keep the real “us” hidden away. What we say to others does not necessarily tell them anything about who we are deep down inside.

Not so with Christ. Christ does not seem to be one way but is actually something else. He encounters us as a real incarnation of God, God with us, God for us, and God who has become one of us and one with us. This is indeed who He is. What God is toward us is what He is in Himself. So, when Jesus promises us something, that He is going to prepare a place for us in His final kingdom, we can believe it because it is rooted in the very being of God and, so long as God is God, His promises will never pass away.

Jesus has just commented that His disciples know the way to the place where He is going. “Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’” Jesus explains that His disciples know the way, but they don’t think so. This is because the disciples were thinking about directions that they could learn, or in our case today, that we can print off from the internet. This is not what Jesus was thinking, because Jesus knew that the way is not a what, but a who.

The fact that the way is a person, that it is the person of Jesus, changes everything. Now, being a follower of the way, which seemed at first like it was following a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” as if it were a kind of roadmap to heaven, turns out to be far richer. It turns out that, when God provides a way into His very heart, He does not just provide a path to take that, if we are not careful, we can wander off and get lost. Instead, He sends us His very self, not just to walk along side of us as we follow the way, but to be that way. One of Paul’s very favorite ways to speak of believers is that we are “in Christ.” What a wonderful thing, to be in Christ. If we are in Christ, we are not outside of Christ as if Christ were somewhere “out there,” rather than so very close that He has taken up residence in our very lives through the Holy Spirit. If we are always in Christ, we do not ever need to worry about losing our way, even if we have times when we feel lost. If we are in Christ, who is the way, we will always be on the right track.

Jesus says here also that He is the truth. Again, Jesus radically overturns our usual way of thinking about truth, because, again, we usually think of truth as a what, but again, it is a who. Truth is not a bunch of well thought out, carefully constructed statements. It is not the greatest philosophical system available at any given time, or even the greatest one that human minds can come up with. Because Jesus is the Truth, we can’t think of truth as if it is some impersonal idea that is somehow independent of space and time, that, if we can just possess it, we can know the truth. We see here that truth is not something that we can possess, but something in which we participate. The truth is a person with whom we can have a relationship, that we know the truth because the truth decided to be known by us and has revealed Himself to us.

Towards the end of the Gospel of John, when Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, at the end of his interrogation, He was asked, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered him, saying, “You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” Pilate responds with the critical question that is on the lips of so many people during these uncertain times where truth always seems to be beyond our grasp, “What is truth?” Pilate was so sure that he knew that truth was relative and that human beings did not have real access to truth that he was not able to recognize the Truth Himself, standing right in front of Him.

The last thing that Jesus claims to be at this moment is the life. Once again, Jesus shows us that something that we often think of as a what is actually very much personal. Sometimes, we think of life as if it were a commodity, something that we have. We do it when we think of life in quantitative terms, that is, according to length of time that someone is alive. Someone has a long life or doesn’t have a long life. Our usual goal is to have a nice, long life, though thinking about the end of our lives pushes us to think of life in qualitative terms. We begin to think about how good our life is, whether someone has a good life or a bad life.

But what Jesus is telling us here is that life is not something that we have at all, but something that God is. Way back in chapter five, we heard Jesus speaking of the resurrection of those who believe and He said, “For just as the Father has life in himself, even so he gave to the Son also to have life in himself.” Jesus is the life and it is because He is the life that we trust that, when this life ends, our existence and life before God is by no means over. Because we are in Christ, because, as Jesus will say at the beginning of the next chapter, we are united to Christ like branches on a vine, we really do receive life from Him. And if we are personally joined, body and soul, to Christ, who has life in Himself, we will enjoy His life for all eternity.

This is what Jesus means when He tells us that we will have eternal life. We do not have the promise that we will remain in these broken bodies that we have today. We have instead the promise that there will come a day that we will put on new bodies, that are free from decay and destruction, and we will join Jesus who is our elder brother and stand in the very presence of God, and enjoy all the wonderful things that Jesus spoke of as the kingdom of God. Things like the great banquet that is described several places in the Bible and the celebration that is in heaven because sinners turn to God.

We are only two weeks from Pentecost, so we should be thinking more and more about what role the Holy Spirit plays in our lives and considering the things that Jesus says that should help us expect to see God’s mighty work in our lives. This passage indeed gives one of the most extravagant, and therefore potentially frightening promises to the church about the kind of astonishing work that the Spirit will do in and through us. Throughout His ministry on earth, Jesus did amazing thing after amazing thing. He healed the sick, He gave sight to the blind, He made the lame walk again, He even raised the dead. Bear all that in mind when He says to His disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

The question that we need to ask ourselves when we encounter passages like this one is, “Do we believe that we will do the things that Jesus is doing?” Are we healing the sick, taking care of people’s physical needs in such a radical and complete way that we can say that we are indeed doing the things that Christ was doing? However, the question that I think is even more important is, “What in the world are the greater things that Jesus was talking about that He says that we will do?” because, to be perfectly honest, it is sometimes hard for us to think of anything that is greater than raising the dead to life.

And yet, He gives us a clue. The greater things that we will be doing are based on an actual historical event. Jesus says we will do these things, “Because I am going to the Father.” What does His going to the Father have to do with it? Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus going to His Father is a euphemism to say that the Holy Spirit was going to be imparted to the disciples and all who follow them. The reason that we will do greater things than Jesus is because the Holy Spirit has been given to us. God Himself has returned to God, but because God has returned to God, God has imparted God’s own self to each and every one of us in such a way that God can be said to be “in us.”

When we read the book of Acts, we see the words that Christ spoke here to be completely fulfilled. First, it is indeed true that the apostles were doing what Jesus was doing, because they were healing people, raising the dead, and performing all kinds of miracles wherever they went. But that was not all, because we read that something else happened that is even greater than what happened during Jesus’ ministry.

Think throughout all the stories we have heard in John’s Gospel. Recall back in your memory all the stories you have heard from the other Gospels where you see Jesus ministering among the people. Over and over again, we see people misunderstanding Jesus. We see this first and foremost in the Pharisees, who make no secret of their hatred of Jesus. However, we see it among the people, who follow Him because He gives them bread, but abandon Him when He says things they don’t want to hear. Even the disciples themselves don’t get it. The strongest example I can think of, aside from Peter’s denial of Christ on the night He was betrayed, is the scene where Jesus asks His disciples who people say He is. After a bunch of answers are given, He asks them who they say He is. The response that Peter gives is, “You are the Christ.” This is, on one hand, the correct answer because Jesus is the Christ. However, Peter and the other disciples’ understanding of what it means for Jesus to be the Christ was so completely warped by popular culture that, even though the word was right, the content was very wrong.

But when the apostles go out into the world after Pentecost, filled with the Holy Spirit of God, who is the very same God as the Father and the Son and just as much God as they are, all of that changes. There are indeed some who still resist, who beat the apostles, put them in prison, and even execute them, but this is by no means the only response. After the very first Christian sermon is preached, a full three thousand people were so overwhelmed by the presence of God that they felt compelled to join with the apostles, even selling their property and giving all their money to the work of God in their midst.

As amazing a thing as it might be for a body to be raised from the dead like Lazarus, it is a far more amazing thing for the life of God to be imparted into our lives. Sometimes, in our culture where we all too often collapse Christian faith into a system of ethics, we forget how amazing it is that, broken as we are, the Almighty God of the universe has actually taken that very brokenness upon Himself, even being willing to suffer and die on our behalf and in our place, just so that you and I would not get what we deserve. And as if that were not enough, God does not just save us for pie in the sky when we die, but enters into the very depths of our lives in order to give His life to us, to empower us to live our lives with abundance, to be Christ for our neighbors and to participate in God’s work in their lives as well.

Brothers and sisters, God’s promise did not end with the disciples. You and I are part of that very same tradition and we have been united to Christ, who does these miracles in our midst. You and I have been entrusted with a sacred calling, to take the words of Christ into the world and to make disciples of all nations, starting right here in Hudson, Iowa. If you are here today, it is because someone at some point in time, reached out to you. Maybe it was a parent, a friend, a pastor, or someone else altogether, but everyone here has encountered God through another person. I declare to you today that you are called to be that person to others, to be the one who presents the promises of God, to be the one who does the greater works than even Jesus did on earth because the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in your life. The Gospel is real, brothers and sisters, and it changes lives. It has changed my life and it has changed your life. Let us go into the world and participate in the changing of the lives of others.