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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Happy Mother’s Day, especially to all those who are mothers in any and every way! As the psalmist says, God sets (or “settles”) the solitary in families (or “a home”) (Psalm 68:6 KJV, ESV), and so God has done for each one of us, in one fashion or another. Not only does God prepare a place for us in a family or home, but God also prepares a place for us in His Church and so also ultimately, as we heard Jesus say in today’s Gospel Reading, He prepares a place for you and for me in the many rooms of His Father’s house, as we understand it, in heaven. This morning our consideration of today’s Gospel Reading is themed “A place for you”.
Although the Easter Season continues for two more Sundays after today, beginning this Sunday our attention shifts somewhat from our Lord’s Resurrection to His Ascension and to “the deeper communion between the Lord and the faithful” that the end of His post-resurrection appearances is “understood to have brought about” (Pfatteicher, Commentary, 294). As we heard, on the night when He was betrayed, our Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples—and so He also tells us—that He was going to prepare a place for us and will come again and will take us to Himself, so that where He is we may be also. That place and the way to it are a central focus of the Gospel Reading’s broader context, as well as of the Reading itself, which also speaks of Jesus’s intimate relationship with His Father, how they work together, even through us who believe.
You do not have to use Global Positioning System navigation to realize that one needs to know where one is going in order to best know the way there. (As I experienced both yesterday going to the Landry’s “new” home in rural Overton and two weeks ago at my sister’s home in Austin, sometimes even GPS navigation’s being told where I was going did not necessarily mean it knew the way there.) We identify with Jesus’s disciple Thomas, who we heard say to Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where You are going. How can we know the way?” And, we may recall from memory Jesus’s answer, that He Himself is “the way, and the truth, and the life” and that no one comes to the Father except through Him.
We may recall Jesus’s answer from memory, but how well do we follow Him as the way, and the truth, and the life? Do we always follow the way of the righteous (Psalm 1:6)? Do we always think, speak, and act in accord with the truth? Do we in the end merit life? On our own, every one of us turns to our own way (Isaiah 53:6). Left to ourselves, we follow the devil and will to do the desires of him who does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him (John 8:44). Apart from faith in Jesus Christ, for our sinful nature and our actual sin we deserve nothing but temporal death here and eternal torment in hell—the place of eternal fire prepared not for us but for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:41).
Honestly, we cannot know the way, the truth, or the life apart from God’s revealing them to us in Himself. “The [Holy] Spirit guides us into the Truth, speaking to us the words of Truth, and the Son, [W]ho is the Truth, is the way to the Father and [so to] eternal life” (Beckwith, CLD III:224). We cannot see the Father apart from the Son, nor can we confess the Son as Lord apart from the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3; Beckwith, CLD III:229-230). So, God Himself calls and enables us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to do better than to keep on sinning. And, when we so repent, then God forgives us all our sin, for Jesus’s sake.
When Jesus spoke about going to prepare a place for you and for me, He did not mean that He had to go to His Father’s house in order to get the place ready, for example, to clean the bathrooms or to put fresh linens on the beds in the guestrooms! Rather, Jesus spoke both about going to the cross to die for your and my sins and about rising from the dead to proclaim His victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil, all for you and for me. By His death and resurrection for us, Jesus prepares a place for us with the Father (Grundmann, TDNT 2:705), as it were, one of the many rooms in His Father’s house. In fact, a few verses after today’s Gospel Reading in St. John’s Divinely‑inspired account, as we heard in today’s Appointed Verse (John 14:23), Jesus says that the Father and the Son—and certainly also the Holy Spirit—come to us and make their home (or “room”) with us. Not some hidden God but that revealed Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each Person wholly dwelling in the others without being merged, blended, or confused—that Triune God is the content of our faith and the One in Whom we believe and trust, and so also Whom we confess with our lips (Romans 10:9-10). That Triune God dwells in us already now and ultimately we will dwell with that Triune God for eternity—the relationship is continuous, permanent, and indestructible (Hauck, TDNT 4:580).
Jesus Himself is the Way made ready to the place for you in heaven, and, until you are there, there is a place for you here, in His Church, in this Pilgrim congregation. In Holy Baptism, such as that at this Font, God brings us into His family of the Church, making us His children and brothers and sisters with His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. In individual Holy Absolution, those who privately confess their sins are forgiven their sins as surely and certainly as if God dealt with us Himself, for thereby He does. And, in the Sacrament of the Altar, we see and taste, in bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus, given and shed for us for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Especially at this Altar and its Rail, we no longer only know God by mental perception but we know Him through our own personal experience.
Word and Sacrament, the Triune God’s words and deeds carried out in this place of His Church, in one sense are greater and accomplish more than the temporal-life-changing miraculous works Jesus did, for Word and Sacrament impart eternal life. God’s works continued through the Church as a whole (Acts 1:1) are greater in number and are more widespread, among Jew and Gentile, benefitting from Jesus’s having gone to the Father and sent the Holy Spirit, working in light of His resurrection and in answer to our prayers. Today’s First Reading (Acts 6:1-9; 7:2a, 51-60) gives us a good example of how God worked through Stephen and others to multiply the number of disciples and ultimately to take Stephen to Himself in heaven. Stephen prayed as we should pray, in accordance with all Whom God is, His revealed will and teaching, especially for carrying forward God’s work, and Stephen was not destroyed but received his place in heaven, where true joys are found.
This morning we have realized that out of His great love God has prepared “A place for you” in your human family, in His family of the Church, and ultimately with Himself in heaven. As we heard in today’s Epistle Reading (1 Peter 2:2-10), we start as newborn infants, longing for the pure spiritual milk of His Word in all its forms, so that by it we may grow up to salvation, truly tasting that the Lord is good. Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people; once we had not received His mercy, but now we have received His mercy; and so, as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, we proclaim the excellences of Him Who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +