Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so would I have told you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. (John 14:1-3)
When Have You Heard These Words
Many of us have heard these words at another time and place. I have spoken them often to you in your living room, or when sitting at a kitchen table in your house on the occasion of the death of a loved one. Can you recall hearing them at such a time of crisis? It might be that nearly everything said and done in those first hours after a death of a family member or close friend is blocked out of our memory by the waves of shock that set in upon us in such moments. But I have also seen it happen that people listen as never before to a passage of Scripture such as this one when it is painfully clear that no word but Christ’s word will truly reach and console the heart that is saddened by death.
In the Upper Room
These words which shed such a wondrous light of consolation upon us were first spoken in a dark time. It was on the night of his betrayal, when Jesus was in the Upper Room with the disciples - only a few hours before his own death, that he spoke these words to the disciples.
He was facing the final ordeal, not the disciples. Yet he comforted them, although they had no comfort to bring him. It is all so astounding when you recollect that scene! It is one more powerful testimony to Jesus Christ that he is the word made flesh, the incarnate Son of the heavenly Father who came to reveal to us that which is eternal.
The Father's House Is Spacious
Jesus speaks of the Father’s house, the home of God, a place which he himself has prepared for life eternal. In his father’s house are many rooms, or, as we learned it from the King James translation: "In my Father’s house are many mansions ..." Both words are appropriate: rooms or mansions. The point is the spaciousness, the ample, open, and eternal dwelling place that awaits God’s faithful people after death has closed their eyes on this life. Such a magnificent future is in contrast to the present room in which the disciples and Jesus were gathered. Then and there the obvious thing was the temporary and the transitory, and that is the hallmark of everything temporal. We have here no abiding dwelling place. In this life the dwelling place given to God’s Spirit in our own hearts is too often cramped and crowded in by our faithlessness, our distracted and self-serving spirit. It is a very basic biblical idea that salvation is best portrayed by a wide-open, uncluttered room. The Psalm writer of the Old Testament speaks of God’s rescuing work as "setting his feet in a broad place." (Psalm 31:8) Jesus builds upon that word picture when speaking of the Father’s house as manyroomed, as spacious and ample for a dwelling place that has no end.
The Personal Concern of Christ for Us
Even more important, however, than the emphasis upon the broad and capacious dwelling place that Christ has prepared, is the personal fellowship he promises in connection with eternal life. "I go to prepare a place for you ... where I am, there you shall be also." That is so different from speaking in general terms about a vague "life after death" or the survival of the soul. The Scriptures tell us one thing clearly about our life with God in his house. We shall be there in the fellowship of his beloved Son, and when our bodies are raised from our own graves, we shall be like Christ our Lord and we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2-3) That is what counts, and that is all that we truly need to know. The Bible does not detail for us the landscape of heaven nor its furnishings. It points us to the allimportant personal link with Jesus Christ. Who will be there? Who won’t be there? What will we do? All these questions are natural enough, but they are questions that lead us astray from the main truth. No wonder, then, that God does not answer them! Leave all the rest to him; he will do all things well.
It’s the person who makes the place, and gives us courage and confidence for entering that place. This is the central truth of this text and all that our Lord reveals to us of eternal life. I have an experience in mind that helps me in this regard and want to share it with you. When I was ten years old I distinguished myself one fine August day by falling headlong from one of those long, one-rope swings that boys love to rig up on tree branches. I broke both arms, my nose, and remember a mouthful of Missouri mud and gravel in my teeth. There was nothing to do, of course, but to get me over to a nearby hospital, which my mother did with the help of a neighbor. That was a new place for me, with sights and smells and people very different from my little realm as a ten-year-old boy. I knew, of course, that all these professional-looking people in white were supposed to be there for my good. But that did not stop my heart from pounding. In fact, when the ether drops were being poured over the gauze covering my nose, I thought I was dying. But before losing consciousness under the anesthetic, I saw my father enter the room, come over to me, put his hand gently on my shoulder and say, "I’m here with you, son." Then everything was all right, for that voice and that face I knew and trusted. What a difference it made to me, in that place, that a person whom I knew and loved came to my side!
I think of that episode in my life when, from time to time, my thoughts turn toward death - my own as well as yours. In that inevitable moment, when no one can step into our shoes and do our dying for us, then we shall know in full what these words of Christ signify, "that where I am you may be also." It all stands upon his personal, caring, redeeming love for us. He calls us by name. In our baptism he makes his home in us. At the heart of our Christian faith it is a person-to-person bond which exists. In the ultimate matters of life, death, and eternity, our Lord speaks to us with the deepest level of personal concern. That is what eternal life is: belonging to him now and forever!
Eternal Life Is the Motive for Temporal Life
It has been a long-standing criticism of Christianity by some of its sharpest critics that eternal life is a giant aspirin tablet which is meant to blunt the person’s awareness of harsh realities here and now. Classic Marxist orthodoxy holds such a view, and so do articulate people who are not Marxist but who deny the existence of God and his gift of eternal life which transcends death. Such criticisms can be understood in the light of church history, when there has been pie-in-the-sky escapism. But that hardly seems to be among the current maladies of the church. In fact, we might better be criticized for not holding forth the eternal perspective of the faith more ardently.
We might well pause, at least in thoughtful devotion, when we come to those great words of the Apostles’ Creed which speak of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. It is a startling and revolutionary truth we proclaim. Among the great world religions there are numerous expressions of an after-life that is totally spiritualized. But our biblical faith proclaims the resurrection of the body. And if the living God cares so greatly for this body in which we house our earthly life that he wills to resurrect it and re-fashion it according to the glorified body of his Son, then we have all the reason we need to take care for the body. Here lies the Christian ethic, and the mainspring of our motive that leads us on to reach out in love for the helping of others in their needs as human beings here and now as well as beyond this life. The earliest Christian community recognized the material needs of the older widows and organized them to minister to those needs. Throughout the ages since, Christians have responded to the call of God to care for the body that will one day be resurrected. When this balance is struck, the criticism of Christianity as an opiate of the people cannot stand.
The Hope That Will Not Fall Us
Finally, these words of our Lord summon us to hold fast to the magnetic power of hope. The final test of that hope is our own death; that is the last chance the evil one has at us. What gives death it real sting is not just the anticipation of our heart and brain ceasing to function. It is the terminating of all the relationships, the endeavors, the activities, the dreams, and faithful striving that belong to our living. In the words of Psalm 103, it is the melancholy fear that when our life ends, "its place knows it no more." (v. 16) Christ’s resurrection takes that fear and puts it out of the central place in our life. God does not forget his sons and daughters, and even though our great-grandchildren will know little or nothing about us and what we lived for, that does not matter. The place where we shall be is the place where Christ is present, and all our potential, all our sanctified hopes and dreams will be fulfilled in so great a measure that we have no words to describe it. Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard what good things God has prepared for those who love him. Christian hope makes it possible to look beyond the fulfillment of urgent wishes and pressing desires and offers a vision beyond suffering here and beyond our death.
This hope is not based on our self-confidence or upon any of our specific expectations of the future. It rests upon God’s promise in his Son. This promise not only made Abraham travel to unknown territory; it is also the guiding motive for us who keep pointing to new life even in the face of corruption and death. Such a hope prevents us from clinging to what we have and frees us to move away from the safe place as we enter unknown and fearsome territory. When we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, that good and gracious shepherd of our souls will be our faithful guide. We can go our way, then, also over that final path, with songs of peace and gladness in our hearts.
A century ago John Henry Newman wrote an evening prayer which expresses well the whole spirit in which we see the present in the light of that place which Christ has prepared for us:
Support us, O Lord, all the long day of this troubled life until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, when the busy fever of life is hushed, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen