Fifth Sunday of Easter; 7 May 2023; Easter 5A (RCL); Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14.
We often hear this passage from John’s Gospel at funerals, and the usual translation reads “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” or “many dwelling places.” The word in Greek is μοναὶ (monai) plural for μονή, a cognate of the verb μένειν, to remain or abide, a favorite verb of John’s (the Father abides in me, and I abide in the Father, and we abide in you). When the first two disciples of John the Baptist follow Jesus, he turns and asks, “What do you seek?” and they reply, “Rabbi, where do you remain?” And he answers, “Come and see.”
If you look up the word μονὴ in the dictionary, however, it means something like a stopping place or a station. We might very well translate it “rest stop.” In my Father’s house are many rest stops. John imagines the Christian life as a journey. And when Thomas says, “We don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus replies, “I AM the road, the truth, and the life.” The Father’s house is not a place for staying still, but a road along which we may stop now and then for rest.
When Philip asks that Jesus point out the Father, Jesus replies that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. “The words that I speak to you, I do not speak on my own; but the Father who abides in me does his works.” I think this is a reference back to the beginning of chapter nine, when he encounters the man born blind — neither the man nor his parents sinned, but that God’s works might be revealed in him. When he goes on to say that anything we ask in his name, God will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son, it is these kinds of works that we are to be doing — bringing people to deeper insight.
The Christian life, as John imagines it, is a journey ever deeper into the life of God, of ever deepening co-inherence, or co-abiding. The Father’s house is not a destination, but has many stops along the way as we journey ever deeper.
The passage from the Letter of Peter continues what I think is a sermon preached at baptism. Peter imagines the Christian life, the life of the baptized as both a priesthood and a temple. John would agree. In John, Chapter 6, Jesus compares the Christian community to the altar on which the blood of sacrifices is poured (whoever does not drink the blood of the son of man has no life in him). The community of the baptized has become the point of contact between the divine and created orders.
As we offer the created order to God, and receive it back sanctified as the very flesh and blood of the Son, we are moving deeper into the life of the Trinity, the life of self-gifting love that is the heart of the divine. And the journey “further up and further in” is already in the Father’s house.