Welcome Home
Have you noticed that when you travel it seems to take forever to get where you're going? You might be able to avoid saying it out loud, but you're still thinking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" just like you did when you were seven or eight years old. The summer I was eight, we drove from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Homestead, Florida, just outside of Miami. It took three interminable days of coloring, magnetic checkers, and whining that my sister was moving into my space in the car's bench seat. What I remember from that trip is that Virginia had brick red earth and we couldn't drink the water in Georgia.
Getting home seemed faster. And after those weeks in paradise, with my first view of the Atlantic Ocean and alligators and parrots and a glass-bottom boat, I still couldn't wait to get home, and couldn't beat sleeping in my own bed, and hanging my toothbrush where it belonged. Home.
In today's gospel, Jesus and the disciples are not home, but in an unfamiliar, borrowed second floor room in Jerusalem. In recent Sundays, we have been with them in this Upper Room after the crucifixion of Jesus. They were amazed to see the risen Christ. This morning, through the miracle of scriptural time travel, we join the disciples in the Upper Room just before the crucifixion. The disciples know the darkening mood in Jerusalem, and Jesus is saying good-bye. Home seems very far away from them right now.
Until Jesus speaks.
"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also."
Reassuring words. This passage is often read at funerals, and rightly so. We are comforted to hear that those we love are held within the protective mantle of God, and that our hopes to see ourselves one day – secure and at home with God – will be fulfilled one day. We are strengthened to know that we will have a home more secure and more loving than any in our wildest dreams.
Unfortunately, as we move on in the passage, we find one of the most unsettling sentences ever attributed to Jesus:
"No one comes to the Father except through me."
"No one comes to the Father except through me?" What does this mean? Does it mean that only Christians will be saved? Does it mean that decent Jews, and Hindus, and Buddhists and others are left out? We're accustomed to a global community. Our immediate families include people of different faiths. We work with and love good people who have never heard of Jesus. We are shaken because this single sentence has been a weapon to pit Christians against one another and to cut off Christians from non-Christians. It has been a battle cry demanding conversion to Jesus at the risk of death and eternal damnation. That doesn't sound like the God I know.
How can Jesus say that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life in the same breath that this remark bars the door to good people who are not Christian?
Let's think about this Gospel's first audience. It's about 80 CE. Jesus has died and been resurrected for almost 50 years. About five or ten years before this Gospel was written, the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of Judaism, has been leveled by the Romans. About a million Jews have been killed in the battles, tens of thousands of others taken into slavery. Judaism is reeling, struggling to come together without its spiritual and political center. Judaism is defining itself. It is purifying itself. How? By excommunicating problem Jews, such as that small minority who follow Jesus of Nazareth.
That minority is small but not silent. Despite the danger, they want to proclaim their beliefs. They want to set themselves apart from the chaos of Jewish groups. They proclaim Jesus as God. They proclaim that in becoming human, Jesus shows us the face of God. He makes God's face shine upon us.
For these Christians, Jesus is home. You notice that after Jesus says, "In my Father's house, there are many dwelling-places", there is no further description: no pearly gates or streets of gold, no harp music. Why not? Well, when John's Christians heard "In my Father's house, there are many dwelling-places", they heard a way of being and not a location. As the Way, Truth, and Life Jesus braids Christians then and now into his own life with God. He creates a synergy with us and God. That is his whole point, and his only point.
Only our arrogance would allow us to believe we can keep that gift to ourselves. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus said "I have other sheep not of this fold." In other words, it's not all about us. Paul reminds us that Jesus came to reconcile all the earth to God. If we live the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we will have the humility to let go of our own narrow expectations of God. We will be able to let Jesus and God grow to reconcile all the earth. We will be able to embrace those of all folds, as Jesus does. Or as a wise priest I know likes to say, "God receives mail from all zip codes." (1)
We live in a global village rich with traditions and cultures that hold God, with God's many names, very dear. Christ leads us, and our baptismal promises urge us, to reconcile all the earth to God. This is not a small matter. It is one that will allow "this fragile earth, our island home"(2) to thrive with God's grace, to bind us to our God and to one another. This is Christ's Way, and Truth, and Life. Let us pray that we are up to receiving this extravagant gift.
Notes:
1) Fr. John Hester, chaplain at Stanford University Medical Center
2) Eucharistic Prayer C, Book of Common Prayer, page 370