Fifth Sunday of Easter

This week I was chatting with some friends.  My friend Keplyn and her wife Jo have a daughter named Ellie who has special needs.  One friend asked Keplyn how Ellie was doing this week while Jo was on a trip out of town.  Keplyn said, “When Ellie misses her mom she has always said, ‘Home.’ Jo is her home.  It’s so sweet.”  I found that very sweet and very touching.  

It reminded me of what a comfort it is to feel at home with someone.  I think of people at various stages of my life that I have felt at home with.  Some of them were blood relatives, many of them were friends, a few of them were people I had just met on my travels, or at a conference or a retreat.  While they had a variety of personalities, each of them gave me that sense of being at home, a sense that I could relax and be myself, a sense that I was welcomed and cared for exactly as I was, a sense that I belonged.  There are some people with whom we feel we should be on our best behaviour, other people we interact with nicely but at arms’ length, and there’s nothing wrong with those people or with those relationships.  Still, there’s something really special about people with whom we feel at home.

Just like for Ellie, for me, home can be a person.

That sense of home being a person is what Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel passage.  In today’s passage in John 14 we are at the Last Supper.  Jesus has been telling his disciples about his crucifixion, and that one of them will betray him.  Judas has just left the supper to do that.  Here, in what scholars call his “farewell discourse”, Jesus has been telling his disciples that he is with them only a little longer, and that where he is going they cannot follow now, but they will follow afterward. Peter asks why he can’t follow now, and claims he will lay down his life for Jesus.  Jesus replies that before the cock crows, Peter will have denied him three times.  It is at this point, when Jesus’ impending absence is looming, that today’s passage begins.  

Jesus begins by telling them to believe.  And then Jesus tells them about his Father’s house.  The word in Greek is oikos, a word which was used to mean both a physical house and a household, the people who live together in the house.  Jesus says that in his Father’s oikos, there are many and he uses the Greek word meno. This word meno appears only two times in the New Testament, and we will talk about the other time in a minute.  The King James Version translates it as “mansions,” other versions translate it as “rooms”, our New Revised Standard version translates it “dwelling places”.  I get the feeling of abundant, spacious hospitality, and welcome for plenty of people.  And Jesus says he is going to prepare a place for us.  

When I think of someone preparing a place for me, preparing a home for me, I think of what happened seven years ago this week, on April 30th.  That morning, I drove from Buffalo across the Rainbow Bridge into Canada.  I went through the immigration process, and visited various government offices to get my new Social Insurance Number and my new Ontario driver’s licence.  Then I drove to Bowmanville and pulled into the driveway of 124 Queen Street for the first time.  The front door of the rectory was open and I could see Williette inside with a broom in one hand and waving to me with the other.  She was giving the rectory one last “shush” to get it ready for my arrival.   She and Cathie and a few other parishioners were there to welcome me.  They had prepared the place for me, adding some donated furniture from a friend of David Crowe’s, and some pretty touches such as a planter of flowers outdoors and vases of flowers indoors.  I immediately felt cared for.  And especially for me, they had added things like a shower curtain with pictures of Canadian flags, beavers, canoes, totem poles, Mountie hats, moose.  They had stocked my refrigerator and my pantry with food.  But not just any food.  Canon Susan had volunteered to stock my kitchen with food produced in Canada: locally grown fruits and vegetables, local honey and maple syrup, cans of soup from Quebec, dairy products from Canadian cows, and my first box of Girl Guide cookies.  It gave me a feeling of “You belong here.  In this new place, you are at home.”  And even more important, it gave me a feeling of “You are one of us now”.  Because oikos, home, isn’t just about the physical structure or the place; it’s about the household, the connections to the people with whom we are at home.

I find it amusing that people, especially people with pets, use the phrase “crossing the Rainbow Bridge” to refer to going to heaven.  And when I think of Jesus going to prepare a place for me in heaven, the picture that comes to mind is that picture of Cathie and Williette preparing a place for me to be my new home.  Already making me feel at home, making me feel you’re one of us now.

We have pictures in our minds when we think of heaven.  Some of them are based on scriptures, others are based on things like movies or cartoons in the New Yorker magazines.  We need those pictures because our human brains can’t function without some kind of picture, and so we picture heaven as a place.  Still, Jesus is not talking about a literal physical structure of a house; it is a metaphorical home.  Jesus says “In my father’s oikos there are many meno, if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”  Then Jesus tells us something on a deeper level.  Jesus says: “I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”  The point is, our home is a person.  Our home is Jesus.  And since, as Jesus says, he is one with God, our home is in God.  Heaven is not so much a place as it is a person, it is being completely, infinitely at one with God.  It is God and Jesus saying “you are one of us now.”

In the stresses and strains of our daily lives, that kind of heavenly existence can seem far away, and too big for us to wrap our minds around it.  Jesus has said we know the way to where he is going.  But our response is like Thomas’s: “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  And then we get a fascinating twist.  It turns out that the way is not a place either, or even a series of places along the road.  The way is a person, the person of Jesus.  Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” It is not just that we are with God at the destination, when our earthly lives are over.  Even now, Jesus is already here with us, Jesus is already the way to God.  Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father.  Jesus exclaims, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.  Jesus talks about “the Father who dwells in me”.  That word “dwells” is the verb form of the noun meno that Jesus has used for the dwelling places he is going to prepare for us.  Jesus is saying the Father is at home in me.  Jesus then expresses it even more directly: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Not only does God give us, by grace, himself as our true home, at home with him and at one with him in that complete belonging together.  Not only does God give us, by grace, himself in Jesus as the way.  God gives us, by grace, another gift.

We said at the beginning that in the sentence “In my Father’s oikos are many meno” that the word meno is used only twice in the New Testament.  The second time it’s used is also in this chapter of the Gospel of John, in verse 23.  Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our meno, our home, with them.”  We are just passing through this earthly life, and our true home is with God, who is our heavenly home.  But the good news of the gospel is that God in Christ makes his home with us, right smack dab in the middle of this earthly life with all its problems.  God dwells with us.  Some people say God moved into the neighbourhood, or God pitched a tent with us, but I get the sense it’s warmer than that, closer than that.  It is homier than that.  Even with all our problems and our shortcomings and our sins, God is already at home with us.  We are at home in love: God’s love for us and our love for God.

Our home is a person: God in Christ.  Our way home is a person: God in Christ.  God’s home is a person: you.  In some ways, it is a long journey of discovering God.  In other ways, as God loves us and we love God, we discover that we are at home in God, and by grace God is at home in us.