Hi Friends,
Today I started a lectio continua series through Christ’s Farewell Discourse from the Upper Room in the Gospel of John. Here is my sermon bridging the foot-washing and the overly familiar verses that follow.
John 13.31-14.7
At the end of the Gospel of Mark, as Jesus utters a cry of dereliction from his cross (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) and then finally breathes his last, the evangelist reports that in that very moment, the curtain in the Jerusalem temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The verb Mark uses to describe the curtain’s rending (schizo) is the very same verb he uses at the beginning of his Gospel to describe the heavens tearing open above Christ at his baptism.
Prior to the crucifixion, the temple curtain served as a barrier, protecting the people of Israel from direct contact with their delivering LORD. The same God who had accompanied them through the wilderness in a pillar of cloud and fire condescended to dwell behind the temple veil. There in the Holy of Holies, the Maker of Heaven and Earth dwelled invisibly enthroned upon the ark of the covenant. The wings of the cherubim formed a seat for the LORD and God’s glory sat enthroned in the space between the angels upon that mercy seat. The Holy of Holies was not a shrine to a memory nor was its veil a symbol; it was, on the scriptures’ own account, a throne room, with the curtain marking the boundary of a real court in which a real king sat, indeed the world’s only true king. The temple and especially the throne room within it constituted the house of the LORD, the Father’s house. Just so, when Jesus— enthroned upon his cross— finishes his royal work and consequently the temple veil is torn in two, the presence of the Father is set loose in the world.
Heaven pours out into the earth.
The LORD’s locatability multiplies.
Whither does God go?
———————
He goes, Jesus says, to his Father’s house. But the promise he makes about that house in the Upper Room is far stranger than it sounds. Its oddness has been sanded away by its overuse— and misuse— in funeral services; the text has simply gone numb from sentimental repetition. After commanding the eleven to believe, Jesus hands over an incomprehensible promise, “In my Father’s household 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, that where I am you may be also.” We assume, most of the time, that this means God watches over us, however lovingly, from somewhere else. We are not, insists Jesus, merely gazed upon by a loving God. A gaze, however loving, still beholds the object of its love from the outside, from a distance. But we are instead gathered into the Father’s household (oikia). It does not behold us; it holds us. Even stranger to conceive and difficult to believe, the Father’s house is not where we think it is.
Jesus is speaking about heaven here.
But only if you let him first redefine the word.
———————
In the Upper Room, Jesus has just laid down his outer garment, leaving him naked but for his linen tunic— the garment of a servant, the very fabric soldiers will soon cast lots to steal as they prepare to make Mary’s boy Pilate’s victim. Dressed like a slave, God tied a towel around his waist, like a grease rag in the back pocket of a mechanic’s jeans, and poured water from a pitcher into a basin. Then, kneeling on the floor, Jesus washed the dirty feet of his disciples.
It is an odd substitute for the sacrament until you recall that foot-washing was a required ritual for priests to enter the temple. As the Book of Exodus stipulates, the LORD instructs that a bronze laver be erected between the altar and the tent of meeting, and there Aaron and his sons must wash their feet before going into the tent of meeting or approaching the altar to intercede for the people. The priests repeat the foot-washing every time they serve in temple. The priests wash their feet, the Torah warns, ”lest they die.” Thus does Jesus— who already five times in the Gospel has connected the Jerusalem temple with the very flesh of his body— warn the hesitant Peter, “If I do not wash you, you have no access to me.” So Peter is not wrong when he responds by imploring Jesus, “LORD, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
Having prepared them for entry into a new temple, Jesus grants Judas leave to betray him. “What you are going to do,” Jesus says to Judas, “do quickly.” And as soon as Judas departs them for perdition, Jesus declares, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.” The Son of Man is finally glorified not when he cures the crippled man at the pool called Bethesda. Mary’s boy is glorified— and his Father in him— not when he multiplies the fish and the loaves or heals the man born blind. Jesus is not even glorified when he raises his friend Lazarus from the dead; he is glorified only when another of his friends betrays him to a cross, for this is not only the greatest of his deeds, it is the work his Father sent him to do.
The Son’s acceptance of this work glorifies the Three Person’d God.
That Judas has forsaken them to set in motion God’s murder is the reason why Jesus next tells Peter and the disciples, “Where I am going now you cannot follow.” They cannot follow him— at least, not yet— because Jesus is going not to heaven but to his cross. He is going not above the clouds but to Calvary. His Farewell Discourse does not point to postmortem geography but to Golgotha. The cross is why when Peter asks, “LORD, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you,” Jesus replies cryptically, “You will lay down your life for me.”
Just not yet.
To enter into the temple is to accept all the temple entails.
Peter will be crucified upside down in 67 AD at the Circus of Nero near the foot of Vatican Hill.
“The cross to which I am going you cannot follow.”
“For now,” Jesus prophesies.
Just so, there in the Upper Room their hearts are troubled. Their hearts are troubled because their LORD will soon be nailed to a tree. And their hearts are troubled because, sooner or later, they will follow him there.
From Iran to Lebanon, from Gaza to Ukraine, we still live in a world that prefers to build crosses rather than bear them. And Jesus says it as inconveniently as he does plainly, the antidote to a world that so troubles our hearts is neither political programs nor armed conflicts. And it certainly is not religion. It is faith, “Believe in God; believe also in me.” Though the LORD says this plainly, what he says plainly is not simple. It is not nearly as simple as it sounds for exactly what we are to believe about both the Father and the Son is not only difficult, it forces us to see both ourselves and one another— and every stranger and enemy— as nothing less holy than the ark or the cherubim throne or the belly of Mary.
But even this is not difficult enough, for the promise Christ makes in the Upper Room is more discombobulating than we have allowed ourselves to realize. Jesus is not saying that he is about to journey to heaven where God lives to prepare a room for us there; God is not so far off from us. His Mother is from Nazareth in Galilee; his Father sits enthroned behind the veil. After washing his disciples’ feet, so as to prepare them for entry into the temple, Jesus alludes to that temple with three different terms.
Oikia: household.
Monai: dwellings.
Topon: place.
“In my Father’s household are many dwellings,” Christ pledges, “If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you.” With the exception of Exodus 23.20, every mention in the scriptures of a specially prepared place refers to the place prepared for the ark of the covenant. Likewise, throughout the Old Testament, the most consistent term for the temple is “the house of the LORD.” Israel’s scriptures refer to the temple as the house of the LORD two hundred and thirty one times; whereas, they refer to the temple as “the temple” only sixty times. And in the Upper Room, during Christ’s Farewell Discourse, the word dwelling repeatedly refers not to spatial locations (“many mansions”) but to the Triune relations. The Father, Jesus says, dwells in him. The Holy Spirit, another Counselor after him, will dwell in the disciples and will be in them. Because of his Ascension and the Spirit’s arrival, Jesus says, he will dwell with the disciples. And because he goes to the cross they cannot yet climb, because through his obedient blood he will cleanse far more than their feet, because he will depart into death and the life-giving Spirit will alight upon them— because of the next three days, because of cross and tomb and resurrection, Jesus says, “The Father and I will come and make (here’s that word again) our dwelling in every believer.”
As Mary Coloe comments on the passage:
“The subject of verb to dwell, throughout John, is not the believers but God. The action therefore is not the believer coming to dwell in God’s heavenly abode, but the Father, the Paraclete, and Jesus coming to dwell in and with believers.”
The promise is not that Jesus is going far away to make a place for you; the promise is that Jesus is going no further than the hill outside of town— to Golgotha— in order to make a place in you for himself and his Father. His cross cuts the veil in two; God is loosed to make his home in you. You are more than a creature upon whom the LORD fixes his loving gaze; you are a temple of the Triune God. He does not behold you from afar; he now dwells in you as surely as he was once carried in the water of Mary’s womb.
This is difficult to believe, certainly. No doubt, it is disorienting to conceive. But it is nothing less than the straightforward claim of the scriptures. “Do you not know,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, “that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” As Father John Behr comments on this passage, through the cross of Jesus, “the Father’s house is no longer heaven, but God’s household or family.”
———————
Nicole is a pastor in Michigan. Over this past year she was a member of the cohort for the Iowa Preachers Project in which I am the Preacher-in-Residence. She and her husband have two small boys. She is short and spunky, energetic and extroverted to an almost exhausting degree. She is also a nerd who hosts a Dungeons and Dragons group in her parish.
During our final cohort gathering in Charlottesville last week, Nicole told me a story— a story that is both difficult to hear and too achingly beautiful not to believe.
“I heard you had a story I needed to hear,” I said to her in the hotel lobby the night before our final day together.
She nodded like she was shifting gears with a tank that never hit empty. Then she took a breath and patted her hand on my shoulder to signal that this wasn’t going to be any story I could guess.
“Two years ago,” she told me, “My husband and I went out for a date night. The babysitter, someone from our community, played with our boys, fed them, and put them to bed, same as any other time we’d gone out for the evening.”
I nodded, wondering where this was headed.
“We have no idea why she did it. There weren’t any warning signs beforehand or clues afterwards. While our boys were asleep, she hung herself in our house. Titus woke up to go to the bathroom and get a drink of water. He found her, already blue. Somehow he had the wherewithal to call us for help.”
“My God,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“In addition to worrying sick about our little guys,” she continued, “I kept struggling with what word I could possibly proclaim the next Sunday. The police hadn’t yet ruled out foul play and forbade me from speaking publicly about it. But I thought, ‘I can’t just get in the pulpit and pretend this thing didn’t happen.’ Word had already gotten out about it, but I was absolutely panicked— bereft— that I had no word I could speak for God.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t do anything?”
“I didn’t have to do anything,” she said, smiling and shaking her head— clearly still amazed.
“I got up to preach after the scripture reading, but as I did everyone in the congregation stood up and, with no one announcing anything (they clearly had determined this beforehand), they came forward. They told me to kneel at the altar.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They had decided they were going to pray over me that Sunday,” she replied, “They said, “Rather than you doing God to us today, we’re going to be God for you.”
His dwelling place.
———————
Just after he turns ordinary water into the best wine for drunk people to drink, Jesus turns over the tables at the temple in Jerusalem, furious at what they had done to his Father’s house. To the shocked and offended bystanders, Jesus hollers, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up!”
To which John the Evangelist inserts the commentary, “But Jesus was speaking about the temple of his body.”
———————
“Rather than you doing God to us today,” Nicole recalled her congregation to me, “we’re going to be God for you.”
“What did they do?”
“They laid hands on me and they prayed for my family and me and that poor girl. It was like overhearing Jesus pray to the Father in the Upper Room.”
“That’s remarkable,” I whispered.
“It felt like heaven,” she said.
———————
Throughout the Gospel, the subject of the verb to dwell is God.
———————
In the Upper Room, Jesus brokers no half-measured conviction. He will not make any allowances for what John Wesley called “Almost Christians.” Nor will he abide our contemporary ecumenical etiquette. Jesus attests unambiguously that faith in him is equivalent to faith in the only true and living God. That is, to believe in Mary’s boy is nothing less than to believe in Mary’s Maker. And to believe in her Maker is not greater than to believe in Jesus of Nazareth.
Straightforwardly, what Jesus posits at the outset of his Farewell Discourse is either blasphemy or it is true.
If it is the former and we have been praying to and orienting our lives around a dead man’s mistaken estimate of himself, then, as Paul admits to the Corinthians, we are of all people the most to be pitied.
But if it is true!
If it is true that faith in the one Israelite fulfills the first commandment given to all of Israel.
If it is true!
If it is true that our troubled hearts can believe also in Pilate’s victim as much as the LORD of Heaven and Earth, then that means that what happens to Jesus when he leaves the Upper Room is what is real in the world. And everything contrary thereto is mere illusion.
If it is true!
If it is true, then what is real in this world is what Jesus works upon exiting the Upper Room:
When he bears in his body upon the tree the iniquity of us all.
When he forgives those who know not what they do— and, with them, so forgives all of us.
When he lays down his life to justify not the good but the ungodly.
When he reconciles all things, making peace by the blood of his cross.
When he enters into death in order to hallow it; so that, even in death he may be found there.
When he is raised on the third day to live with death behind him.
Atonement and forgiveness, justification and reconciliation, peace and presence and resurrection— a future yet for this troubled, troubling world— this is what is real.
Contrary to what the world’s progressive and conservative agendas would have us believe, there is no longer any sin but forgiven sin— he has taken down the handwriting that was against us all. We have no enemies; they have all already been overcome. In him. No one is ungodly because he has made all of us righteous. The fighting may stubbornly persist in Lebanon or along the Hormuz or even in our ordinary politics, but, no matter what the newspapers say, he has made peace. And, just so, the dividing walls between us all have been brought down by his two arms stretched upon the cross. And if all of this news sounds preposterous, just look inside his tomb: he is not there; he is risen. Or as Robert Jenson puts it, “The church is where God sticks his head in our world and giggles.”
Quite obviously, if you are in Gaza or Tehran— or if you are simply grieving a child to whom you no longer speak or if your doctor has recently offered you his last options or if your child discovered the babysitter no longer alive in the closet, then all this talk of the real can sound offensive. Unless of course it is true that to believe in Jesus is to believe in God. If so, then what happens over the next three days nevertheless is what is real in our world. In which case, we have only one real thing to do.
We have a word to get spoken in this world.
We call it the gospel.
There should be no mystery about what word this is though it can be proclaimed in many permutations. In John’s formulation, the gospel word is simply, “God sent Jesus of Nazareth.” The apostle Paul puts it only a bit less brief, “Christ died for our sins, and was buried, and was raised on the third day.” Strip away everything else Paul ever wrote and that gospel summary still stands. Peter, preaching to the very crowd that crucified him, states the gospel just as baldly, “God raised this Jesus— this Jesus whom you killed— and made him LORD.” Martin Luther, meanwhile, pared it down to a mere two words, “For you.” At the beginning of his Gospel, the Evangelist summarizes the gospel by echoing Jesus in the Upper Room, “The Word became flesh and— that word again— dwelt among us.”
However we put it, the gospel is an offensive word.
It is so precisely because of its apparent inadequacy.
It is both too much and too little.
If what is real is what happens when Jesus leaves the Upper Room, then there is nothing in heaven or on earth to which this word of ours is not addressed— from foreign policy to politics, prejudice and poverty.
But if it is true that what is real is what happens when Jesus exits the Upper Room, then this word and only this word— this gospel word and none of the other words we might prefer— is the word that must get said.
By us.
Still, how does a word like “Christ is risen indeed” or “Your sins are forgiven” speak to the scores of Ukrainian parents whose children were stolen by Russia? How do we proclaim to them, “Christ has already made peace by the blood of his cross?” What version of the gospel word puts Nicole’s babysitter back together again? The word we must say must also strike us as implausibly impractical.
Unless it is true!
Unless it is true that when Jesus erupts with anguish upon the cross, the curtain tears in two and the Triune God takes the temple into you. Into me. And into the troubled hearts of all who believe.
In which case, this little word on our lips applied to every issue on earth can accomplish far more than we can begin to comprehend.
Case in point: the table.
This little gospel word pared down to just two words (“For you”) can make creatures of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, in whom your faith is no different than faith in Almighty God.
The loaf and the cup are him.
Because his Father and Spirit are already in you.
Because it is true!
All of it.
(Thanks to Darek Latta for the image!)
