The Rev’d Jett McAlister
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 7, 2023
John 14:1-14
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Last week I had the great joy of traveling to Arkansas where my brothers and I surprised my father by showing up at his home on his seventieth birthday. During the pandemic, my dad and my step-mother moved to a new town—a smaller city in the northwest corner of the state where I’ve never really spent very much time. Everything there was new to me. And they’ve moved into a house that, until last Friday, I had never set foot in. This was my first time in the new place, and our first big family gathering there.
I was struck—despite all the newness of my surroundings—by how quickly and how deeply I felt at home. Because of distance and circumstances, I hadn’t seen my brothers in person since 2019, and there were other family members that I hadn’t seen in almost as long. But it’s amazing how strong
the feeling of being at home can be—how quickly, when we are with people whom we love and whom we know deeply and who know us deeply—how quickly we can feel like no time has passed at all, how easily we can fall back into those old and comforting routines and ways of being. I even found my mostly suppressed Southern accent starting to emerge again!
Being around beloved family or very close friends can help us regain a sense of ourselves, right? A sense of the best versions of who we are—the truest version of ourselves.
Home isn’t a house or a town, so much as it is relationships, history, memory. And to be at home is to be with those people—whether biological family or chosen family, our childhood friends or relationships formed in maturity—who see us for who we are and give us the love and safety we need to be our fullest selves.
To be at home—to feel at home—to be safe, or at rest, or to feel that you are where you belong—this is one of our deepest longings, isn’t it? Saint Augustine gives voice to this yearning in his Confessions, famously calling out to God, “you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine knows that our true home is with God—and perhaps more than any other theologian Augustine knows the various places our restless hearts will look for solace and rest. Augustine looked to all sorts of things for the comforts of home and rest—academic learning, sensual pleasures, the supposed spiritual wisdom of the age—but none of them worked. None of them brought rest to his restless heart—and none of them brought him home.
In today’s reading from the Gospel of John, as the Last Supper draws to a close Jesus offers comfort to his disciples as he prepares to embark on his journey to the Cross. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says. “Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Although Jesus will soon no longer be with his disciples in the flesh, he assures them that the story isn’t over—that his relationship to them will remain strong and vital as he goes to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, places where they—where we—will be with Jesus.
This is our true home—the home that Jesus prepares for us, where we are with the anointed one who is the Word made flesh, who was in the beginning with God and who in the beginning was God.
Not only is our home with Jesus, not only does Jesus prepare it for us—but Jesus is, he tells us, the way to that home. As Jesus talks about the place he’s going to, Thomas asks how he and the other disciples can get there: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus’s response is one of the most famous verses of Scripture: “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
A lot of churches have taught that this means that only people who believe in Jesus can be “saved.” But I’m not so sure that’s what Jesus is trying to get at. Jesus goes on to say that if we have known him, we have known the Father. I love this moment when Jesus says to Philip, “Have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me?” After everything that’s happened, you still don’t get it? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus tells Philip.
If you want to know God, look at Jesus of Nazareth. If you’re think that God is an abstract principle, too vast and removed and transcendent from our world to even talk about, look at Jesus of Nazareth. If you think God is absent, look at Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus, we see a God who quite frankly has a personality. When we see Jesus heal on the Sabbath, we see a God who cares more about health and wholeness than about ritual perfection. When we see Jesus share meals with tax collectors and prostitutes, we see a God who cares more about fellowship and inclusion than about propriety and social class. When we see Jesus tell a rich young man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, we see a God who wants none of our preoccupations to get in the way of our relationship with God. And when we see Jesus tell his disciples that he goes to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, we see a God who wants to be our home—a God who wants to be in relationship with us, who wants us to be the fullest and truest versions of ourselves, who wants our restless hearts to find God’s perfect rest.
So when Jesus calls himself the way, the truth, and the life, what I hear is that God has given us a view into God’s very heart—into God’s vision for how we are to live in the world, how we are to live with one another—and that the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth shows us the way we are to walk. If you want to know God, look at Jesus of Nazareth. “Believe in God, believe also in me.”
To be sure, we don’t know the fullness of God’s plans for us, of the homes that Jesus prepares for us in the Father’s house, in this life. But we can, here and now, experience the reality, the truth of that relationship with Jesus. We know it when we see Jesus in our neighbors, when we welcome the stranger or give comfort to the afflicted. We know it when we come together to serve the vulnerable, when we repent of our own participation in injustice, when we love one another as Christ loved us—when we give of ourselves as Christ gave himself for us. And we know it when we approach the altar to receive Christ’s Body and Blood, knowing that we are loved, that we are God’s own children, that God welcomes us, that we are home.