Fifth Sunday after Easter (Fr. Roberts)

Do not let your hearts be troubled. He says it because they are. They have been at table with him, and he has just told them he is leaving, and the conversation has come to the kind of stop where someone's hand stays half-lifted toward the bread and forgets what it was reaching for. The word he uses for troubled is the word John uses two chapters earlier when Jesus stands at the grave of Lazarus and shudders. The same word he uses one chapter back, when Jesus knows what Judas is about to do and is troubled in spirit. It is not a small word. He is not asking them to feel nothing about his going. He is asking them to be afraid in a different way than they are about to be.

And then he says something they will have heard one way and we have heard another. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. The phrase has had a long career. It has done so much funeral work, in fact, that it has almost stopped doing any other kind. When most of us hear it, we picture rooms somewhere above us, in some better-lit country, with the names of the dead on the doors. That is not nothing, but it is not what the text is doing. The text is doing something stranger. So a question for the morning. Where does Jesus go when he goes to the Father?

The Greek word for dwelling place in this passage means an abiding. It comes from a verb that runs all through John's gospel and means to remain, to stay, to make a home. The word for the dwelling place is built out of the word for the abiding. They are the same word, dressed differently. And that word, in the form Jesus uses here, occurs only twice in the whole New Testament. Once at the top of this chapter, where he says there are many dwelling places in his Father's house. And once again, twelve verses later in the same chapter, where he says, We will come to him and make our home with him. The same word. The dwelling place of the second verse is the home of verse twenty-three. They are not two things. They are one thing said twice. Augustine saw what this meant, sixteen hundred years ago. He says it like this: He prepares the dwelling places by preparing those who are to dwell in them. The dwelling places are not rooms in a country we are going to. The dwelling places are us. The Father's house, in this passage, is not a building we travel toward. The Father's house is what we become when Christ comes to abide. The preparing of the place is the preparing of the dweller. And the going of Christ to the Father, far from being the departure the disciples are afraid of, is the long way home into the only space the abiding could ever happen. That is the surface. We are going further down.

Two of them interrupt him. Thomas first. Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? And then Philip. Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied. What they have in common is that both of them assume separation. Thomas assumes the destination is one thing and the way to it is another, and that you have to know the destination first if you are going to find the road. Philip assumes the Father is one thing and Jesus is another, and that until Jesus pulls back the curtain, the Father has not really been seen. And to both of them Jesus does the same thing. He collapses the distinction. To Thomas: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. The way is not the road to the destination. The way is the destination. There is no Father at the end of a road that runs through Jesus. The Father is in him. To pass through him is to arrive. And to Philip Jesus says: Have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. Philip's request is not a strange one. Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied. That is yours and it is mine. It is the request that hides in every honest prayer ever prayed: that what we have been given might somehow yield to something more real behind it. Show us the Father. Give us the thing itself, not the man at the table. Then we will be satisfied. And the answer Christ gives is not a rebuke of Philip's longing. It is a diagnosis of his looking. Augustine puts it this way: the eye Philip needed was not yet whole. Philip was not wrong to want what he wanted. He was wrong about where it was. The Father had been visible the whole time. Three years visible. Across the table visible. Breaking bread visible. And Philip had been looking past him the whole while, waiting for the real one to step out from behind. There is no behind. The Son is the Father's own face turned toward us. There is no further place to look.

Which means the going of Christ to the Father, the going that has frightened the disciples and frightens us, is not what they think it is. It is not the going of someone who has finished his visit and is putting on his coat. It is not the going of a man stepping out of the room and pulling the door shut behind him. He is not, in the end, leaving them. He says, Where I am, there you may be also. He does not say, Where I am going, you cannot come. He says they will be where he is. The going to the Father is not into a room they cannot enter. The going to the Father is into the only place from which he can finally come inside them. He had to go in order to come. From now on, he tells them, you do know him and have seen him. The from now on is not the moment at the table. The from now on is the whole hour into which he is about to step. The cross. The empty tomb. The wind through a locked room. It is the hour we are sitting inside of right now. Three weeks past Easter. The from now on is this morning. It is the pew you are in. And the abidings, the dwelling places, are being prepared. Not by anything you have arranged. By his going. He went to the Father so that he could come and stay. We will come to him and make our home with him. The same word again. The home is the abiding is the dwelling place. The Father's house is wherever the Son has come to dwell. The Father's house, this morning, is wherever in this room the Son has been let inside.

He says one more thing, and it is the hardest thing in the whole passage. The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. Greater than what he has done. Greater than feeding the five thousand. Greater than raising the dead. What can he possibly mean. He does not mean bigger miracles. He means the works that get done after he has gone inside. Look at what has happened in the two thousand years since he said this. A faith that began with twelve frightened men in a room in Jerusalem now spans every continent. Hospitals were built because of him. Universities were built because of him. The orphan and the widow have been clothed and fed and housed for two thousand years by hands that did not know they were his hands, and many of those hands belonged to people who would have said they were doing it for some other reason. The leper has been touched. The prisoner has been visited. The dying have been sat with through the night. The world is so saturated with his presence that we have stopped recognizing it as his. We call it humanitarianism. We call it progress. We call it civilization. We have, in many places, forgotten whose presence we are living inside of, and we have given other names to his works. But the works are still his. The greater works are these. They are not greater because they are loud. They are greater because they are the works of those into whom Christ has come, and they could not have happened until he had gone.

So the question we started with. Where does Jesus go when he goes to the Father. He does not go away from you. He goes inside you. He goes to the place he could not have been while he was still on the other side of the table from Philip. He goes home, and the home he goes to is the one he is making, slowly, in you. The dwelling place is being prepared. Not in some country above the clouds. In the small ordinary stretch of life you will walk back into when you leave this room. The Father is being seen there too. Not behind a veil that someone else will one day pull aside. In the face of a friend you forgive. In the bread you put on a neighbor's table. In the hour you sit through that you would once have walked out of. The Son has gone to the Father. And the Father, by the strange grace of his going, has come into the house.