“I Go to Prepare a Place for You”
May 10, 2020
John 13: 33,36 14:1–6 — “Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.”’ … Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward …. 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 that I go to prepare a place for 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. And you know the way where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” –
This passage takes us back to just days prior to Easter. When Jesus sat down to eat with a handful of his closest friends, he knew it was the last time. The Romans and the Jews were out to get him. Even one of his own friends was out to get him. He knew that his time had all but run out and that they would never all of them be together again.
It is an unforgettable scene in that upper room — the hushed voices of people speaking intently and listening carefully. Imagine the way it must have haunted them for the rest of their lives as they looked back on how they had sat there with Jesus, eating, and talking.
I think of the Last Supper as a kind of foreshadowing of an event not all that far in the future, by which I mean our own last suppers, the last time you and I will sit down with a handful of our own closest friends. Yet we live thinking there is always going to be another time. The chances are we will not know it’s the last time, so it won’t have the terrible sadness about it that the Last Supper of Jesus must have had. But not knowing is sad in another way, because it means that we also will not know how precious is this last time with these friends.
Who are these friends for you? Picture them. Hear their voices. Feel the spirit of the time with them. They are our nearest and dearest. The sadness is that we do not see that every supper with them is precious beyond all telling, because the day will come when time runs out for us too. Every one of our suppers points to the preciousness of life and to the certainty of death.
There in that shadowy room the disciples turned to Jesus. All hell was about to break loose. They had no other place to turn. They had drunk the wine he told them was his blood and put into their mouths the bread he told them was his body. Thus, with something of his courage in them they asked him a question they had never risked asking so helplessly and directly before. It was Simon Peter who spoke and said, “Lord, where are you going?”
As if they did not know. He was going out the door and into the night. He was going to pray in a garden to God to not let the awful thing happen to him
When Peter asks him, “Lord, where are you going?” the question is also our question both about him and about ourselves. When time runs out, does life run out? Did Jesus’s life run out? Do you and I run out?
“You will seek me,” Jesus says, and no word he ever spoke hits closer to home. We seek for answers to our questions — questions about life and about death, questions about what is right and wrong, questions about the unspeakable things that go on in the world. We seek for strength, for peace, for a path through the wilderness. But Christians, maybe more than for anything else, seek for Christ. From the grass-built churches in the middle of Africa’s savannahs, to the mud brick churches in Haiti, to the greatest cathedrals, all churches everywhere were erected by people like us, with the wild hope that in them, if nowhere else, the one we seek might finally somehow be found.
“Lord, where are you going?” Peter asked. Jesus answered, “I go to prepare a place for you … that where I am you may be also.” Can we put our money on that? Are we children enough to hear with the ears of a child? Are we believers enough to believe what only a child can believe?
Author and preacher Fredrick Buechner tells the story of finding himself missing his brother Jamie three years after his death. One day he decided to call Jamie’s empty New York apartment. He writes: “I knew perfectly well there wasn’t anybody there to answer and yet of course, I couldn’t know it for sure because nothing, nothing, is for sure in this world, and who could say that at least some echo of him mightn’t be there, and I would hear the sound of his voice again, the sound of his marvelous laugh. So, I this skeptical old believer, this believing old skeptic, who you would have thought had better sense — let the phone ring, let it ring, let it ring.
“Did Jamie answer it? How wonderful to be able to say that by some miracle he did and that I heard his voice again, but of course he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and all I heard was the silence of his absence. Yet who knows? Who can ever know anything for sure about the mystery of things? “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus said, and I would bet my bottom dollar that in one of those many rooms that phone rang and rang true and was heard. I believe that in some sense my brother’s voice was in the ringing itself, and that Jesus’s voice was in it too.” (From “Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons” HarperCollins 2007)
Jesus said to those close friends, “I go to prepare a place for you … that where I am you may be also.” He was speaking about death because that is what was uppermost in his mind (and theirs) as they had their last supper together. I suspect it is also in our minds more often than we let on. He says he is not just going out like a light. He says he is going on, going ahead. He says we will go there too when our time comes. And who can resist giving our hearts to him as he says it?
“You know the way where I am going,” he says, and then Thomas speaks out for every one of us. “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?”
When it comes to the mystery of death, like the mystery of life, how can any of us know anything? If there is a realm of being beyond where we now, and it has somehow to do with who Jesus is, for us and the world — then how can we know the way that will take us there?
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” is how Jesus answers. He does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings are the way, or what people for centuries have taught about him. He does not say religion is the way, not even the religion that bears his name. He says he himself is the way. And he says that the truth is not words, neither his words nor anyone else’s words. It is the truth of being truly human as he was truly human, and thus at the same time truly God’s. And the life we are dazzled by in him, haunted by in him, nourished by in him is a life so full of aliveness and light that not even the darkness of death could prevail against it.
How can we know the way? How do we find the way when so often we are lost in our own thoughts, fears, questions, and pursuits? Who of us can say? And yet who of us doesn’t search for the answer in our deepest places?
As we wonder “how do we know the way to where he is? I think we keep on ringing and ringing and ringing, because that ringing and longing, the faith, the believing, the intuition that keeps us at it, and the loving of others — is the grace of the truth trying to come true even in us — and in the world.
