Scripture Reading: John 14:1-17.

Sermon text: John 14:18-31.

“He looks just like his dad.” We’ve all heard something like this before; perhaps someone referred to us when saying it. I met a cousin of my cousin’s husband this week. (Southerners immediately understand what I just said and its importance; for anyone else, just try to follow along.) I listened as my cousin’s husband and his cousin described family traits that had carried through the generations, even at times skipping generations. In my case, my blue eyes come from neither of my parents, but many of my great-grandparents possessed blue eyes.

Sometimes, character traits pass through families, too. People notice when someone inherits the family temperament, for better or worse. Some families seem to produce more patient people than others, while other families are well known for their impatience. Some families are well known for their love, while others, unfortunately, have a reputation for spitefulness and hatred.

In today’s passage from the Gospel of St John, Jesus needed to demonstrate a family trait to His disciples. Jesus needed the disciples to understand that He embodied all they had ever heard about God in the Old Testament. After today’s sermon, I hope you forget everything you ever heard about a vengeful God in the Old Testament and understand His love instead. I hope you understand that the God you fear is the God whose love will preserve and lift you into a glorious eternity filled with His unadulterated love.

At the beginning of this chapter, Jesus needed to calm the disciples. Read the previous chapter to see why. If you had just heard your Master and Lord declare that someone in the room would betray Him and His foremost disciple would abandon Him, you’d need calming, too.

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me,” Jesus told them. Every disciple in the room knew of the Jewish God; after all, Jesus called only Jewish men as His first disciples. Every man in the room believed in the God of their fathers, the God who had called Abraham from Ur. The God in whom they believed had delivered their Hebrew ancestors from slavery in Egypt, from exile in Babylon, and preserved their nation through conquest and oppression.

Now, Jesus expanded their understanding of the Jewish God. Since their belief in an eternal, unshakable God had sustained them for generations, the Jews could now believe in Him as the fulfillment of God’s promises to deliver the Jews and restore their nation. However, Jesus would not restore Israel in a political sense; the Jews first needed redemption from their rebellious ways and their sinful pride. The Jews needed deliverance from sin more than they needed the defeat of the Romans. Jesus would provide that victory, even at the cost of His life.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms.” The King James translators translated the Greek work “monē” as “mansions,” following the Latin translation. Whether or not it makes sense to some that a “house” contains “mansions,” we shouldn’t allow this to sidetrack us from the basic premise: The Father, in His overwhelming generous love, will provide a glorious eternal dwelling for everyone who believes in the Son.

Since the Father will generously and graciously accept everyone who believes in the Son, Jesus, the Son, would now “go to prepare a place” for all who believed, including the disciples. Jesus here gave the disciples a promise: “And if 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.” Jesus had told the disciples in chapter 13 that He would soon leave them. Now, He promised that He would return; Jesus will come again, and when He does, He will take all believers to His eternal dwelling place.

Jesus had told the disciples they could not go with Him now, but they “know the way to where I am going.” This confused them, because the disciples didn’t understand where Jesus planned to go. Thomas spoke up: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

Jesus’ answer stands as the greatest explanation of our faith. Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Christianity alone teaches the true way to come to God. You’ll find no other true path to Almighty God except the path of belief in Jesus, the Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.

Jesus then told them to remember His true identity: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” Simon Peter had already identified Jesus as the “Christ, the Son of God” in their last visit to Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:16). Jesus now wanted the disciples to understand the true meaning of this confession. Since they knew Him, they knew the Father as well, because the Son always demonstrated the Father’s will.

Jesus reiterated this point following Philip’s question regarding the Father, saying, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Don’t let this statement confuse you into believing that Jesus was merely a “mode” of God, that the God of the Old Testament now appeared as a human but did not exist simultaneously in heaven. The Father remained in heaven while the Son walked the earth. (Welcome to the deep waters regarding the Trinity. You didn’t think Christianity was always easy to understand, did you?) Rather, anyone who saw Jesus in action saw the Father’s heart.

I’ve often heard that I resemble my father. If you see us together, you’ll understand how someone once confusedly referred to us as brothers. I can say that, in some way, you’ve seen my father if you’ve seen me. This also applies to some of our actions and temperaments. I’ve tried in my life to imitate my father’s best attributes.

In Jesus’ description of the Father, you can see the Father in action. The Father, in love, promised the Jews that He would send a Deliverer to redeem them from the sin that enslaved humanity. They simply didn’t understand that God Himself would come to provide that redemption.

Jesus explained, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me;” Jesus remained in His Father’s will, and through the Holy Spirit who descended upon Him at His baptism, the Father remained “in” Jesus to guide Him in His ministry. When Jesus spoke, He spoke the Father’s words; when He performed His miracles, He did so in the Father’s power.

Jesus then said gave a startling promise: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”

I don’t think this needs clarifying or explaining away. Many Christians, unsure of the power we possess as believers in Christ and under the massive influence of the Enlightenment, will try to deny that believers in Jesus posses any power. The Scriptures don’t leave us that option. Jesus’ words speak as clearly now in 2011 as they did in A.D. 33. However, we must not separate this promise from the next verse: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

We will perform no great feats unless commanded to do so by Jesus Himself and in the power of the “Helper” that Jesus has sent, the Holy Spirit Himself. And, regarding any “miracles” that Christians might perform, I’ll say what I’ve said before: The Holy Spirit is not a command performer. He does not cause miracles to happen at our every beck and call, and He does not wait for a camera to record the experience. We don’t perform the works of Jesus to bring glory to ourselves, and by its very definition, as miracle won’t happen every day.

The “Helper,” the “Spirit of Truth,” “dwells with” believers; He reminds us of Jesus’ teachings and His attitudes. He remains with us “forever,” even into eternity. As the Spirit of Truth, He will not guide us into heresy or falsehoods. Because of His guidance, we will remain in Jesus, who remained constantly in His Father’s will.

Jesus told the disciples, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Only those who love Jesus will keep the words of Jesus; only those who love Him will enjoy the deliverance from sin and the eternal life He wishes for all humanity. We will know Jesus’ words because the “Helper, the Holy Spirit,” sent by “the Father,” “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The Holy Spirit helped guide the disciples as they witnessed, as they spread the gospel of Jesus, and as they wrote the books of the New Testament as a record to posterity of Jesus’ words.

Jesus knew the next few hours would traumatize His disciples; they would see Him arrested, hauled before a kangaroo court, beaten, and then crucified. Even those who didn’t follow Him between trials and to His crucifixion would live with the guilt of knowing they abandoned their Master and Lord; they would endure the despair of seeing their grandiose plans of conquest shattered by Rome on Golgotha. Jesus told them, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” The peace Jesus wanted to give His disciples would help them through the next 3 days before He rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.

That peace remains with us today. We can have peace with God, the Father of us all, because we look at Jesus, His Son, and we see a key attribute of our Father: Love.

Jesus told the disciples, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” In last week’s chapter, Jesus told the disciples, “Love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” When the disciples looked at Jesus’ life, they saw the presence of overwhelming love.

Think of what we’ve read so far in the Gospel of St. John. What do you see when you read of Jesus’ life? Jesus saw friends in need at their wedding; He loved them and provided wine for their guests. Jesus met a woman, a Samaritan, who needed living water; He loved her and led her to the water that would satisfy her longing for love. Jesus saw a man who had suffered paralysis for 38 years; He love him and healed him. Jesus saw a hungry crowd; He loved them and fed them. Jesus, confronted with a woman condemned to death by her accusers, instead loved her and delivered her. Jesus saw a man needing his sight; in love, He healed him. Jesus saw His dear friends Mary and Martha in grief and pain; in love, He raised their brother Lazarus from the dead.

When we see Jesus in action, we see the love of God, His Father. St. John, the author of this Gospel, would later write in His first catholic letter, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). When we look at Jesus, we see godly love shining in every action He performed.

This love ties chapter 14 very well with chapter 13. Jesus had commanded the disciples to “love one another” (13:34). Jesus asked no more of His disciples than He had lived in front of them.

Jesus also expects us to show this love as well. The Father loved the world enough to send the Son to redeem the world (John 3:16). Jesus would send His disciples into the world to tell all peoples about His victory over sin and death. As believers in Jesus, we must fulfill their mission and demonstrate the Father’s love in our lives.

Every person who sees us should see the Father. Every person who meets us should meet the Father. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his sermon “The Weight of Glory:”

1. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point…. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods or goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature, which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations…. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously — no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner — no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
   

As you go into the world this week, show the love of God to every immortal you meet. Let the world see your Father in you.