Sermon delivered in-person (in English) by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Palm Sunday, May 4, 2023, drawing from John 14:1-14.
Reading the Bible can be a difficult thing sometimes, but not necessarily for the reasons we like to think. We often think off the Bible as being this intricate, dense tome full of secret details and hidden answers, packed with secret knowledge waiting for the right person to draw the right connections to figure out the great truths of the universe.
And that right there…that’s the challenge. We want our Scripture to be an instruction manual, with very specific and detailed answers written inside which tell us exactly what to do, exactly what to think, and exactly how to believe, so that we can make our way through this difficult life and land - softly, happily, and carefully - into an afterlife that we perfectly and completely understand.
And since, of course, the Bible isn’t written that way, we start to imagine that it must be in some way magical; pages infused with the very breath of the divine, encrypted and encoded, ever changing as we look deeper and deeper, new discoveries waiting just over the horizon if we only look close enough.
Back when I was in middle school, I was obsessed with understanding the Bible this way. I used to just devour every book I could find on obscure prophecy, numerology in the book of Daniel, the entire “Left Behind series;” anything that suggested that it had “cracked the code” of what was really going on. I’m reasonably sure that my viewership alone managed to keep the History channel’s documentary series on “Secrets of the Bible” afloat for those years of my life!
I wanted that juicy, secret, hidden knowledge. I believed that something as powerful as this Bible, as powerful as the Word of God, must be full of fine details that only the bravest, smartest, and most observant people could coax out of the pages. I wanted to believe that there was more to the text than what we saw, that there was literal, specific truth; details just waiting to be found, because the alternative - that there things we just don’t know, that we can’t know - wasn’t something that my middle-school heart could handle.
When it comes down to it, we’re all a little Gnostic at heart, I suppose.
So when I first read this passage, my brain led me to dive into it the way a lot of people honestly tend to; by fixating super hard on verse 6: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
When we start here, by looking at this verse without any of the context around it, it does sound exactly like the sort of thing we want to find, doesn’t it? It sounds like a very specific, detailed instruction, on what exactly you need to do to get into heaven. It sounds like a guidebook to the afterlife, right here. We see this one line and, in our minds, the whole rest of the chapter just disappears, because we’ve found what we’re looking for; we’ve found the verse to base our belief on.
For so many of us, this one verse is central to our very faith, it tells us everything we want to know about this life and the next, so we don’t bother looking at anything around it. Like a middle-schooler skimming through the answer key in the back of the math textbook so that we don’t have to actually try to understand how to do the problem in the first place, we grab this verse like it is the answer to all our questions.
But the problem is that the Bible isn’t a math textbook, and there’s no amount of memorizing answers that can really help us in our relationship with God.
This verse is a part of a larger conversation, one that goes even further beyond the verses we read today. This conversation actually covers several chapters, and it is one big, long conversation between Jesus and the disciples who have just settled in for the Passover feast - yes, that Passover feast - only to find that their teacher, their Rabbi, their sensei if you prefer, is in a bit of a mood. Jesus starts out this encounter by washing all his disciples feet, something that was absolutely never done in those days, and then starts talking about betrayal, denial, and death.
Now, if you were one of the disciples in that place in time, following this great teacher, the promised messiah, sent to turn the world upside-down, wouldn’t you be more than a little freaked out by this? Notwithstanding the immediate threat from the Romans, as well as the religious authorities in Jerusalem, when your spiritual leader starts talking about death not in the abstract, but as something very likely to happen sometime in the next few days…wouldn’t you suddenly have a pressing desire to know more about what comes next?
Wouldn’t you be afraid?
Of course you would. We all would! If we’re being honest, we’re all a little bit afraid of that question every day of our lives. What comes next…it’s a scary thought even in the best of times, isn’t it?
So when we get to this moment in time, the disciples aren’t in a place of scholarly discussion or theological debate, they’re in a place of fear. And Jesus knows, as any good teacher does, that reason doesn’t provide us a path out from fear. There is no way to rationalize ourselves out of fear, or to argue the darkness away.
When you’re scared, you don’t need logic; you need comfort.
Once we’ve understood where the disciples are, now we find ourselves in a place where Jesus’ response to them makes much more sense. Once we see the fear, we can understand the comfort that Jesus is trying to bring in that space, and it goes far beyond what he says only in verse 6.
Jesus knows that reason, rational argument, and theological specifics aren’t the way to drive out fear - only perfect love can do that. And he also knows that, even if that weren’t true, even if the specifics might actually help, that this is one topic he can’t give specifics on. We can’t understand what comes next while we’re still in the world; we can’t understand what it’s like to move into the nearer presence of God because God is so much greater than this world, completely incomprehensible to all of us who are still in it.
When we’re dealing with the fear of what comes next, we’re dealing with an emotion that can’t be reasoned with, and a topic that can’t be explained.
So the solution, the comfort, our only source of hope here doesn’t lie in the specifics. It’s not buried in coded messages or secret instructions. No amount of Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic studies will help you to find what isn’t here in the first place, because our hope isn’t in a list of detailed instructions.
Our hope is in a person.
And that’s how Jesus responds here.
Believe me. Trust me.
He’s taken the whole problem, and re-contextualized it. It isn’t about the specifics any more, not about getting the right details, saying the right thing, doing the right thing, or somehow digging deep enough to find that secret information that gives you access to the unknowable. Its about the relationship.
It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.
Everything he's saying here is pointing to a fundamental truth about what comes next; we can't understand it, so the only way we're going to connect with it has nothing to do with saying the right words, joining the right church, reading the bible in the right way, hating the right people, or anything even remotely like that.
There is no amount of praying that will get you into heaven.
There is no amount of research that will get you into heaven.
There is no amount of tithing that will get you into heaven.
There is no secret information, hidden away, that will allow those who figure it out to get into heaven.
There is no quest to undertake, no battle to be won, and not a blessed thing you can ever do, think, say, feel or believe that will get you into the nearer presence of your Creator.
And there is no way to ever, ever know what that nearer presence will be like for any of us, at least not until we go there ourselves.
So what we are given here then isn't answers, isn’t instruction, because the way to connect with God isn’t a process that can be taught. The fear of death, the fear of the unknown that hangs existentially over our heads every day of our lives, cannot be overcome with right teaching, sound doctrine, or a detailed description of the wallpaper colors in heaven.
No matter how hard we try to invent backstory, develop our mythology, or straight-up canonize Dante Alighieri, there is no possible way we can know what is next, because the way past fear isn’t through understanding.
It’s through love.
In that moment, sitting around the table, the disciples are like a dog chasing a car; desperately chasing after answers that they can't possibly catch, and which would mean death if they ever actually did.
So in that moment Jesus says "don't focus on the details, focus on me. Focus on our relationship"
"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? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also."
In short, we know a guy.
And this isn't a new idea, by the way. The Heidelberg Catechism - which dates back to the mid-1500s but espousing understandings far older even than that - says as much in its very opening lines. Presented as a series of questions and answers, it's very first one reads as follows:
Q: What is your only comfort
in life and death?
A: That I am not my own,
but belong with body and soul,
both in life and in death,
to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins
with his precious blood,
and has set me free
from all the power of the devil.
He also preserves me in such a way
that without the will of my Creator
not a hair can fall from my head;
indeed, all things must work together
for my salvation.
Therefore, by God's Holy Spirit
Christ also assures me
of eternal life
and makes me heartily willing and ready
from now on to live for him.
In short…we know a guy.
The rest of it, all these ideas of heaven, hell, angels, demons, torture and torment, and angels floating in perpetual banality with harps and wings and such….all of it is simply a matter of convenient fiction developed by different groups throughout history not to better explain in detail that which is to come, but to express an emotional truth;
It's ok. We don't have to know everything. We don't have to have a guidebook, because we've got the tour guide himself just waiting for us. Our fears will never be assuaged by answers we can't hope to comprehend, to questions we can barely-if-ever understand to begin with. Our fears will never be banished by rigid adherence to a belief system or a mythology, or by assuming blindly that we alone are the ones with ironclad, inside information as to what comes next.
Because we don't. We don't know anything about what is to come, except for this singular detail.
We know a guy.
And in the end, that's all that really matters.
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