In the opening words of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke
informs us that Jesus “presented himself alive to [the disciples] by many
convincing proofs”. We read about half a dozen such incidents in the gospels:
Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb; Cleopas and his fellow traveler along
the road to Emmaus; the eleven disciples and later Thomas in the upper room; Peter,
John and five others on the lakeside in Galilee… To these Paul adds an occasion
when Jesus appeared to more than five hundred of his followers.
My suspicion is that Jesus’ relationship with the disciples
following his resurrection was quite different from what it had been before.
When you think of it, how could it have been otherwise? While they had once
admired and followed him, now they could only worship and adore him. The one in
their midst was no longer just the carpenter from Galilee. He was their
crucified and risen Lord.
Besides that, I picture Jesus’ presence with the disciples
not as a continuous experience as it had been previously, but rather as a
series of fleeting, often unexpected, interchanges. In between those
appearances there were periods, perhaps of days, when they had time to
contemplate all that they had experienced over the previous three years. I
imagine too that in those weeks between Easter and Pentecost they must have
gathered numerous times. And on those occasions they must have spent much of
their time bringing to mind Jesus’ words, discussing them, puzzling over them and
relating them to their experience as they awaited “the promise of the Father”. Among
those words, spoken perhaps in the very room where they were now gathering,
were the ones which formed our Gospel reading this morning: “Do not let your
hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s
house there are many dwelling places…”
In many ways what we are embarking upon in these verses is
John’s equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount. Over the next three chapters Jesus
gives his disciples some concentrated teaching as he prepares them for his
death and resurrection. It was only in the days following the resurrection,
however, that the disciples would have had either the opportunity or the
coolness of mind to go over what Jesus had said—and I imagine that that was
what they spent much of their time doing, again and again and again.
Jesus begins with an invitation—an invitation to trust him.
Have you ever noticed that John’s gospel never uses the noun “faith”? For John
believing is always a verb, always an action word. In the New Testament the
word denotes believing in someone, trusting someone, relying on someone,
entrusting yourself to someone. In the verse before us, the action is
especially clear because, translated literally, Jesus is saying, not just, “Trust
me,” but, “Trust into me.” There is
that sense of casting ourselves into his arms, of giving ourselves totally and
utterly over to him. On the eve of the crucifixion that would have been a hard
sell. But now, after the resurrection, it all began to make a little more
sense. And in the verses that follow, Jesus begins to tell them a little bit
about what that faith looks like and where it leads.
A place for the homeless
I think that for most of us a sense of place, of having a
place where we belong, is an important part of who we are. I am told that the
average American moves 11.7 times over the course of his or her lifetime. (I’m
not sure what it means to move .7 times!) In my own case I remember as a child
moving every two to four years. There can be benefits to that, but it can also
lead to a sense of rootlessness, of not having anywhere that you can really
call home.
Years ago, when I worked as a student intern in a
psychiatric hospital, a number of the patients were Hungarians who had left
their country as refugees nearly a generation before. They had not parted with
their homeland willingly or voluntarily. They had been forcibly uprooted, and ever
since there had lurked deep within them a sense of homelessness. I can only
imagine that the same must be true of many of our Karen refugees, who have had
to leave everything behind to begin a new life in a strange land, in a foreign
language, amid an alien culture and in a forbidding climate. It is a formidable
challenge and it reaches right into the core of who we are as persons.
Yet when we read the Bible we discover that at a much deeper
level we are all refugees. The cherubim still stand at the gate of Eden
brandishing their flaming swords. Generations after Adam and Eve, God promised
to Abraham and his descendants a home in the Promised Land. More than three
thousand years later Jews still claim Israel as their home. Yet Israel is only
a temporary home; and Jerusalem but a type of that city whose architect and
builder is God.
If they didn’t know it already, the disciples would soon
come to discover their own homelessness in a very blunt and physical sense, as
they were driven from the familiar surroundings of Jerusalem and Galilee into
the far corners of the Roman world. So it is that Jesus assures them, “In my
Father’s house there are many dwelling places… I am going there to prepare a
place for you.”
Faith begins, therefore, with the recognition of our own
homelessness in any ultimate sense—and the parallel recognition that at the
same time that we have an eternal, unshakeable home that no one can take from
us in Jesus Christ and in our relationship with him. That does not mean that we
need to become ascetics or that we sever all attachments to this world. But
rather, amid the transitoriness and even the outright evil that we experience
in this world, it gives us an anchor, a guiding star, that rock of which we
will sing later in the course of this morning’s worship, on which to base our
lives.
A way for the lost
Jesus gives us the promise of a home, permanent, safe and
secure—and Thomas’s question that follows it is a natural one. “But Lord, how
can we know the way?” To which Jesus replies with one of the most quoted verses
in all of Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes
to the Father except through me.”
I am afraid that more often than not Christians (myself
included) have used these words of Jesus as a kind of club to beat down the
followers of other religions. We concentrate on the second half of what Jesus
said and give too little attention to the first. As I read them today, it seems
to me that Jesus is offering a wonderful, exciting invitation here and we have
turned that invitation into a message of “You’re not welcome.”
Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that there
are other ways to the Father, or that we can find ultimate truth or genuine
life outside of Jesus. What I am saying is that so often we have concentrated
on telling other people that their ways won’t work, that they are dead ends,
and somehow in the midst of it all we have neglected to focus on the one way
that does bring us to God. The result is that Christian faith ends up looking
from the outside as exclusionary. To many we appear to be more interested in shutting
people out than in inviting them in—and in many cases we are doing a very good
job of it, too!
No doubt there are times when we need to alert the world to
the fact that it is on a collision course with destruction, that there is indeed
a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death (Proverbs
14:12). The apostle Paul wrote about warning everyone. Yet that is not the
focus of our message. The focus is on Jesus in all his transcendent beauty and
majesty. I think Graham Kendrick puts it well in the words of his song:
Knowing you, Jesus, knowing you,
there is no greater thing.
You’re my all, you’re the best,
you’re my joy, my righteousness,
and I love you, Lord.
there is no greater thing.
You’re my all, you’re the best,
you’re my joy, my righteousness,
and I love you, Lord.
When Isaiah stood in the temple and had his great vision of
the Lord seated on his throne in all his heavenly glory, no one needed to tell
him he was a sinner. He simply cried aloud, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a
man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:1-5).
When Peter pulled in his miraculous haul of fish after Jesus had told him to
let down his nets on the other side of the boat, he didn’t need anyone to tell
him how sinful he was. He fell to his knees before Jesus and exclaimed, “Depart
from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:4-8)
I do believe that the great majority of people in their
heart of hearts and if the truth be told, know that their lives are not right.
And I believe that if we, as individual believers and as the community of
Christ’s followers were living and proclaiming him in power, they would come to
him as the way, the truth and the life.
A power for the faint-hearted
This brings us to a third and perhaps the most puzzling of
Jesus’ statements in this morning’s passage: “Very truly, I tell you, the one
who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do
greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” It seems
impossible to believe. After all this was the man who cleansed lepers, gave
sight to the blind, gave paralyzed limbs the power to walk again—who even
raised the dead. What did Jesus mean?
People have put all kinds of interpretations on these words.
Some point to the foundation of hospitals and other charitable institutions by
faithful Christians that have brought Christ’s healing and love to millions all
over the world. Others point to the miracles that continue to happen in our own
time, well-documented accounts of remarkable healings and even people being
raised from the dead. New Testament scholar Leon Morris thought of Jesus’ words
in a numerical and geographical sense. He wrote,
During his lifetime the Son of God was confined in his
influence to a comparatively small sector of Palestine. After his departure his
followers were able to work in widely scattered places and influence much
larger numbers. But … they were in no sense acting independently of him.
On the contrary in doing their ‘greater works’ they were but his agents.[1]
I believe that all these interpretations are valid, and no
doubt there are other ways in which we might understand Jesus’ words as well.
But underlying them all is the power of the Holy Spirit.
So often as Christians we allow our vision to be limited by
our resources. We look at the world around us and we compare ourselves with the
vast wealth of governments or multinational corporations and we sigh and say,
“We could never do that.” Yet we forget that our God is the one who (in the
words of the psalm) owns the cattle on a thousand hills, whose resources are
limitless and whose power is infinite. It was not that long before those first
Christians who sat in the upper room musing over Jesus’ words were being
accused of turning the world upside down—and I suspect that no one was more
surprised than they were.
Today, as we continue to rejoice in our risen Lord, may we
rest in the assurance of an eternal home, may we show him to be the way, and
may we know his power, which is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or
imagine, at work within us.
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