Plenty of Room in God’s Household
Text: John 14:1-10
We are not alone.
This is a central characteristic of Christianity. We gather into groups for prayer, worship, fellowship, and service. Jesus was not a lone prophet. He traveled with a band of followers. The Gospel stories are as much about the disciples as they are about Jesus. The disciples are gathered at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus and live beyond his life on this earth. The book of Acts—which is really the second volume of Luke—is the story of the community formed by the Spirit of Christ after his ascension.
Today’s reading is at the beginning of what is called the Farewell Discourse of Jesus. In it, he prepares his disciples for the end of his days on earth. His long goodbye. It is a troubling time for the disciples and Jesus knows it. Do not let your hearts be troubled, he tells them. The word means stirred up and mixed up. They worry that Jesus will abandon them, which is what happens with humans, who do not live forever. What will they do after his death, about which he has already warned them? No wonder their hearts are upset.
The promise of eternal life is not helpful in this case. Even if they are convinced, Jesus words are a little ominous. Where I am going you cannot come, he earlier had told them. Where and when will they all be in eternal life, they want to know. What will it be like. We do not know where you are going, says Thomas, the practical one, always interested in the details. The response of Jesus is designed to console them, to reassure them about an unknowable future.
In my father’s house there are many dwelling places, Jesus tells them. That sometimes brings to mind a grand hotel in the sky, some luxurious quarters. But it is not a very appealing image. Living out eternity each in a dwelling of our own, even a grand suite, would be a lonely life. God is not a hotel manager. And thinking that eternity is a mansion does not give us any guidance about how to live our lives here on earth, except perhaps to wait for the great vacation at the end.
Thus it seems likely to me that Jesus is talking less about God’s house and more about God’s household. The household then was the center of social, economic, and spiritual life, as it is to a lesser extent even now. People’s sense of belonging was attached to his or her household, and people without a household—the famous widows and orphans—were disenfranchised and alone. Your household determined who you were.
Being part of a household—or part of a family, we might now say—confers benefits and entrusts responsibilities to its members. A family at its best is a constellation of virtues: forgiveness of one another (even for evil deeds); support for each other when one is in time of need; loyalty; and celebration. In one sense, the household is the central ethic of Christianity, providing a model for unselfish acts and unconditional love of others, for worship, and for trust.
Jesus tells the disciples that they are welcome in the household of God. That there is plenty of room there, and that they are expected. Knowing that we are in the household of God guides us in our lives now, to treat others as sisters and brothers, uncles and nieces. And we are of the same household as Jesus is, relieving the fears of the disciples. Where I am, Jesus says, there you will be also.
But how can this be, asks Thomas, whose questions are always variations on the form of “are you sure you know what you are talking about?” Tell us how this works.
It works through me, Jesus answers. I am the way. Not: I am the answer. But that I am the way, a word which means road or path. A way has a direction and boundaries; it goes to a particular place along a particular route. A way is public, others have travelled it before us, and it needs to be maintained. Jesus does not suggest that we wander around aimlessly looking for God, nor that we should bushwhack through the brambles of life.
The disciples are to follow him. Jesus does not talk about the end of the road. He talks instead about the road itself. Lord, we do not know where you are going. He does not answer their question. Instead he says to them, I am the way. I am the journey. I won’t tell you much about where you are going, but I will tell you how you are going to get there. You are going with me.
Jesus claims this authority from God, which turned out to be a problem for his contemporaries and one of the reasons he was executed. But the authority comes from more than a claim. It comes from God in him.
God is in all of us—abides in us, as John says—but there is a lot to us that makes us opaque, so that the God in us does not shine out so that others can see.
But Jesus is not opaque. Jesus is transparent. God shines through Jesus, and people do see God in Jesus. Martin Luther said that to see Jesus is to see God; that what Jesus does, God does. If you have seen me, Jesus says, you have seen God. Jesus reveals God. Not through magical powers, but because Jesus does not hide God in him.
To grow in Christ is to allow us to move toward being as transparent to God as Jesus is. So that others can see God in us more and more clearly. This is not something we need to wait to do until the distant future. It is something Jesus prays for, for his disciples, for us.
A scholar writing recently about cultural privilege said that we are in the system—meaning the social system—and the system is in us. She meant that the system is in us because we have taken the values, procedures, and idioms of the culture inside ourselves. We are not alone. And we are in the system because that it our environment, and we respond to it. Whether you think this applies to privilege and society is one thing. But it is certainly true that something is in us and we are in something. That is how we are made as creatures. What Jesus teaches his disciples is that for the followers of Jesus, that something is God. God is in us and we are in God, in the household of God. God is, as Martin Luther said, where we hang our hearts.
