Room to Spare.

John 14:1-14 (November 8, 2015)

I.

The disciples are beginning to understand what’s going on.  Jesus has just said that Peter will deny him that very night.  With the odd departure of Judas right after Jesus washes all their feet, they are probably experiencing and expressing some anxiety right about now.

So Jesus has to reassure them.  “Don’t be troubled,” he says.  “Trust in God; trust also in me.”  Realize that things are going according to plan.  Being troubled, anxious, and fearful doesn’t help.  We see what we want to see in this existence, and if we choose to we can see the events of Jesus’ last day as a disaster, an atrocity, an ignominious defeat, a vicious assault that would inspire either our despair or retribution.

But if we trust in God and Jesus our eyes and minds may be opened to see within and beneath these horrific events to something else: the Human One and Son of God lifted up for the healing and life of the whole world.

Then Jesus says, “My Father’s house has room to spare.”  He has only mentioned his “Father’s house” once before, back in chapter 2, when he was causing a disturbance in the Temple.  “Don’t make my Father’s house a place of business,” he demanded.  It is possible that the disciples might at first have thought he was talking about the Temple here too.  Especially if they imagined he was about to incite the crowd to take over the Temple.

But at this point it becomes clear that he doesn’t mean the actual, physical, historical Temple building in Jerusalem.  He means himself and the new community he calls into being.  The other gospels make it clearer that he is talking about the “temple” of his body, and Paul says that Christ’s “body” refers to the church.  So when he says it has “room to spare” — the traditional language is “many mansions,” or “many dwelling places or rooms — he means to cure them of their fear of not having a place in him, in his new gathering.  

I remind you that we Christians have never cared about the Temple as a building.  When Jerusalem was under Christian control, from the 4th through like the 8th centuries, the Temple area was, well, let's just say it was not developed.   When the Muslims came they turned it into a great mosque, but we had no interest in the Temple because for us Jesus Christ is the Temple, and he is wherever two or three are gathered in his name.  Remember what he said in chapter 4 about how it doesn’t matter where people worship because now true worship happens in Spirit and truth.  It is not, and never has been, about real estate for followers of Jesus.

The important thing to remember here is that when we Christians talk about the Temple, we are referring to Jesus and the church, and even the body of each believer.  Together we are the portable and exploded Temple through whom the life of God is spread and poured across the Earth.

II.

The Lord tells the disciples that he is going ahead to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, and that he will return to take them with him, and they know the way to the place he is going to.

Thomas is confused.  He insists that they don’t and even can’t know the way to wherever the Lord is going.  Thomas is assuming that the destination is somewhere else, somewhere far-off, somewhere difficult to get to.  He wants a map.  He wants a GPS.  

This gives Jesus the opportunity to make one of his most characteristic and central statements.  It expresses the core of our faith and summarizes what we believe.  “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he states.  We are beginning to get a sense of how Christ is everything.  He is the Word, he is the Lamb that takes away sin, he is the Good Shepherd, and the gate of the sheep-pen; he is the living water, the true bread, the resurrection and the life.  He is the Temple, the High Priest, and the offering.  He is the Human One, the Son of God, one with the Father and sent by the Father. 

The great prayer of St. Patrick ends with this confession: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the eye of every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”  

It reminds me of that famous quote by the pacifist, A. J. Muste, who said, “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.”  There is no way to God as if God were some far-off destination.  In Jesus Christ, God is the way itself.  We cannot arrive at God by walking; God is in the walking itself.  God is both destination and journey; indeed, the destination is the journey, and the journey is the destination.

There is no way to Christ; Christ is himself the way.  To follow him is to be him.  To obey him is to participate in him.  To worship him is to become him.  Wherever you are, there he is.  He is the One who shares in and reveals our true humanity; he is the One Word through whom creation happens.  So he is already here with and within and among us.

He is the truth, which is to say that he is whatever is real.  When we find what is true in us and in our world, we find him.  Everything that is not him — that is, everything that does not testify to the goodness of God and all that God has made — is not real.  It is falsehood, projection, illusion, a product of human blindness and ignorance, fear and sinfulness.  It is the result of our belief in the lie that we are alone and at risk in a hostile world where goodness is scarce.

III.

So when Jesus continues by saying, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he does not mean, as self-centered, self-righteous humans have often mistaken him to mean, that “only Christians go to heaven.”  Nothing could be farther from what the Lord is talking about here than to limit eternal life to those who give themselves a particular religious or institutional label.  No one cares less about religious or institutional labels than Jesus.  Labels are just ways we separate ourselves from the truth.  We prefer dealing with a label to having a relationship with a person.

What he does mean is that we come to God only through the realization, insight, and practice of who Jesus Christ is: the living Presence of God-with-us.  We come to God only by knowing and seeing that God is already here, embedded in the creation that God through the Word speaks into being.  Jesus Christ comes into the world not to draw attention to himself as an individual historical figure, but to be the revelation of God’s love and goodness, God’s healing, saving, joyful Presence everywhere.

Christ comes also to prevent us from imagining that our ego-centric, personality-driven selves are who we truly are.  It is one thing to just say that God is within us.  That is not true and the depths of idolatrous megalomania if it means we are identifying our sinful egos with God.  But Christ is saying that God is within us and I am what God looks like.  

So the spiritual life becomes a process of cutting away everything in us that is not God, as God is revealed in Jesus Christ.  Like Michelangelo making that statue of David by, as he said, chipping away every piece of marble that was not David, so we too come to our true humanity when we rid ourselves of everything in us that is not Christ.  That’s why Jesus says that if we know him we know the Father.  Jesus is what God looks like in human form.

That’s a big reason why we read the Bible, especially the gospels.  It’s not just for information.  We want to see the pattern of Christ so we can find and cultivate that within us.  We want to lose everything — every action, opinion, thought, word, hope, dream, or image — that does not fit into the picture of Jesus Christ.  Because he is the truth, which is to say, only he is real.

When he says that he is the life, he means that all this other stuff in us, the things we can’t imagine Jesus, as he is presented in the New Testament, ever doing or saying or thinking, are dead.  They are like an encrustation of lifeless, calcified, rotten, desiccated tissue, an exoskeleton, a hard shell that binds and restricts and limits us. 

IV.

So Philip pipes up.  “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”  I wonder how Jesus kept from banging his head on the table in frustration.  What has he just been saying?  What has be been saying and doing for three years?  “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been with you all this time?” Jesus asks in exasperation.  “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father!”   “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  “The Father who dwells in me does his works.”

Then he provides the kicker.  “Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do.  They will do even greater works than these because I am going to the Father.  I will do whatever you ask for in my name, so that the Father can be glorified in the Son.  When you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it.”

The easiest way to interpret this is that it is just magic.  A super spell you can use to get whatever you want.  How cool is that?  How many 8-year-olds have heard this in church and then gone home to try it?  “In the name of Jesus I ask for a pony!”  “In the name of Jesus I ask that my team win this soccer game!”  And of course it doesn’t happen.  Because Jesus Christ is not a genie.  Sorry.

At this point the explanations of parents and pastors and Sunday School teachers all sounds like making rationalistic excuses about why Jesus can’t or won’t do what he says.  And it’s not always something trivial and childish.  Usually we resort to prayer in Jesus’ name for really important things, matters of life and death.  “In the name of Jesus I ask that our marriage not fall apart!”  “In the name of Jesus I ask that my child’s cancer be healed!”  When we don’t get the desired response then, we may lose our faith altogether.

When Jesus talks about believing in him, or trusting in him, this is not the same as when we have a similar conversation or relationship with anyone else.  Because when Jesus Christ asks you to trust in him, it is not as someone out there, but as someone in here.  It is the “in him” that is essential here.  He is the truly Human One with whom we share our basic humanness.  Through that shared humanness he is within us, he is part of us, he is us, and we are within him and therefore within God.  Praying in his name does not mean just throwing in a few extra words: “in Jesus’ name, amen”.  It means praying in and as him.  It means praying out of our essential identity with him and therefore in God.

Prayer is not a way to get what we, in our selfish egocentricity want.  It is a way to place ourselves at Christ’s disposal and participate in who he is and what he wants for us.  So when he says, “when you ask for anything in my name, I will do it,” what he means is, “when you ask for anything as me,” or “when I in you ask for anything,” or “when your will is attuned to God’s will so that your desires are God’s desires, you will be able to see that God has already done it.”

V.

Yesterday and I saw a post on Facebook from a Russian Orthodox priest, who quoted the Taoist sage Lao Tzu, of all people, when he said: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.”  On one level that sounds like caving in to the world’s evil and refusing to better yourself.  One person commented that if everyone did that there would be no progress.  To which I responded that maybe progress is overrated.  

But on another level, the level that Jesus is on, it means that we need to get to the bottom of reality and know that God is in charge, and trust in this truth.  That’s what Jesus needs the disciples to hold onto, because the next 16 hours are going to be a very bumpy ride.  

It is not a matter of being content with a world tortured by violence, injustice, fear, lies, and threats.  Jesus does not rejoice in the ways of such a world.  Indeed, he takes on himself the consequences of human ignorance, weakness, carelessness, selfishness, and corruption.  He holds himself up as a lightning rod to absorb the world’s evil, and shows it to be empty and false.  For if you are firmly anchored in the truth, the shifting sands of feeble falsehood cannot ultimately harm you.

When we identify with the way, the truth, and the life, nothing can stop or hurt us.  Nothing can kill us.  Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus.  To trust in him is to trust in who you truly are.  To trust in him is to trust in God.

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