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Sermon: The Fifth Sunday of Easter (A) - 22nd May 2011
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 8 & 10am
Readings: John 14:1-12
In this second half of Easter’s Great Fifty Days, we are preparing to look towards the Ascension and Pentecost. Today’s Gospel reading therefore, is part of the evangelist’s presentation of Jesus’ teaching in the form of a farewell address.
The scriptures contain a number of farewell addresses, for example those of Jacob (Gen 49), Moses (Deut 31-33), and S Paul (Acts 20). If you were going to make a farewell address, what would you want to say? Perhaps you have already made a farewell address, for example when leaving a workplace, or a community.
There are some common elements, and often many mixed emotions, that run through farewell addresses: of sadness at leaving; thoughts about those we won’t see so often now, if at all; fervent promises to stay in contact, eventually realizing that this is unlikely to happen; feelings of pride at things accomplished; and expression of real or imagined hope for the future. It may also be that there are things we’d like to say, perhaps in disappointment or in anger, or out of a sense of futility. These are quite possibly the things we shouldn’t say, and may be indicators of areas or issues which we need to address in some other forum. These may be areas where some reconciliation is needed, either within ourselves, or with others.
In this farewell address from today’s gospel, we hear Jesus first of all seeking to reassure the disciples. “Do not let your hearts be troubled...” Yes, he is going to leave them; to go to the Father. But he is going to prepare places for them all, and then he will come and take them to himself. Jesus’ initial reassurance must have quickly turned to puzzlement for the disciples, as Thomas (true to form) and Philip ask questions, trying to make sense of what Jesus has said. What are we to make of this bewildering language of Jesus departing, and coming back; of his preparing a place, and his telling the disciples that they know the way to the place he is going? We need to peel back a layer, and dig beneath the surface to understand what Jesus means here.
The goal of our lives is just as it was for Jesus: of union with God; of communion in love with God. And so Jesus describes himself as “the way, the truth, and the life”. Jesus is how we know what God is like. And even more, Jesus is how we know God. The union between the Father and the Son is such that Jesus can say that seeing him, is the same as seeing the Father. Jesus has been with the disciples; he was God-among-them, which is why he responds to Thomas’ objection that they do not know the way, by saying “I am the way...”. Perhaps you know the feeling of frustration when you are trying to explain something, and no one understands. This may have been Jesus’ experience when faced with Thomas and Philip’s questioning.
A contemporary commentator puts it like this. “The way to the communion of love for which we are created is through Jesus.” Another writer translates Jesus’ words, ‘way, truth and life’ as, “I am the authentic (truth) vision (way) of existence (life).”
The disciples were afraid of the great distance that would be between them and Jesus, on his return to the Father. They would later see that Jesus was inviting them to participate in the love that flows between the Father and the Son.
Whenever we pray in the prayer that Jesus taught us, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven”, we are opening ourselves to this union with God. We need only to hear Jesus words, addressed to us as they were once spoken to the disciples, “where I am, there you may be also.” Jesus speaks in both future and present meanings.
When the people of wartime England were faced with rebuilding their cities, Winston Churchill famously said, “First we shape our buildings, and then they shape us.” There is a far-reaching truth in that phrase that reaches way beyond the reconstruction of bombed cities.
Union with God in Christ who is the way the truth and the life, is our home. In praying that God’s kingdom and will be done on earth as in heaven, we agree to participate in shaping our home on earth, as it is in heaven. We will know our home in heaven, because we have been shaping it on earth. We know God on earth because we have seen Jesus, who shows himself to us as the way, the truth and the life.
This is a far cry from escaping earth and relying on some mathematical formula to calculate the time of departure – such as we have been hearing in recent days. Our home on earth is a positive place, in which we are called to co-operate in shaping the reign of God among us. That is how we shall know our home in heaven. “First we shape our [homes] and then they shape us.”
Jesus’ farewell address is not an ending, but a beginning. Jesus address is a call to live in the way, truth and life; it is a call to live an authentic vision of human existence. The disciples discovered at Pentecost, and in the empowering of their mission in the time that followed, that even in his absence, Jesus was present with them.
Michael Fallon, The Gospel According to Saint John. (Chevalier Press, 1998) 251
John Dominic Crossan quoted in John J Pilch, The Cultural World of Jesus: Sunday by Sunday, Cycle A. (Liturgical Press, 1995) 79