Inspired by verses from John 14: 1-4; 5-14
John 14: 1-4 (NRSV)
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 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. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
Elizabeth picked today’s scripture without any awareness that this week we wrapped up our Being Mortal class. In the wake of communal reflections on death and dying, John 14:1-4 offers assurance that, indeed, all will be well.
Worship on The Land ‘At Home” Edition
Laid plain in their beautiful simplicity, these words, “I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” are all we need to fall asleep at night. Staying asleep, however, requires a greater commitment in the human frontal lobe recently evolved to appreciate neither the simple nor the easy. Perplexed by the lack of complications, staying asleep through the night becomes difficult when one wakes to ruminate on the vacuity of Jesus’ eternal relocation plan.
Here in the infinite moments before dawn, Thomas reacts to the absence of logistics in Jesus’ ethereal preemptive goodbye.
“Teacher, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?”
Such details are deemed irrelevant from their Teacher who has shown himself to be “… the Road, also the Truth, also the Life.”
“No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me,” Jesus says, “you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You’ve even seen him!”
Philip is too clever to be distracted by another irrelevant divine disclosure.
“Show us the Father, then we will be content.”
This, of course, is a lie. Perhaps not a lie Philip is attuned to making, but it is a lie, nonetheless. Jesus relaxes into their trappings of anxiety to offer them one last response before laying the issue to rest.
“You’ve been with me all this time, Philip, and you still don’t understand? To see me is to see the Father. So how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act. Believe me: I am in my Father and my Father is in me. If you can’t believe that, believe what you see—these works. The person who trusts me will not only do what I’m doing but even greater things, because I, on my way to the Father, am giving you the same work to do that I’ve been doing. You can count on it. From now on, whatever you request along the lines of who I am and what I am doing, I’ll do it. That’s how the Father will be seen for who he is in the Son. I mean it. Whatever you request in this way, I’ll do.”
Jesus insists that all the information needed to understand has been provided. Nothing has been hidden from them because through the life and death of Jesus everything is being revealed. All that keeps them anxiously awake at night about life and death and our relationship to the divine has already been resolved in the very life of Christ.
Thomas and Phillip are far from alone in their concern that there exists a cosmic conspiracy to hide the true pathway to eternal life. Though the cultural context of western civilization in the 21st century is radically different from that of the disciples living in ancient Israel, similar questions about death and dying keep us up at night too. It is likely the disconnect originates from the common filter of fear through which we see experiences of death and dying. A fear of living in the absence of those we love after they die. A fear of leaving loved ones behind after the time of our own death arrives.
Thomas and Philip filter Jesus’ words with the same fears associated with death and dying as we do today. Their concern, like ours, rests with the reality of our imminent mortality. It is the inescapable anxiety when anticipating death and separation when facing impermanence and uncertainty, that clouds our understanding of the pre-arranged solution Jesus explains. This is not a solution attained by humans recruited to compile and complete a list of tasks for some heavenly entrance exam. Nor is this a research project resulting in mastery over divine cosmological mystery.
Across generations, our fear-tinted focus twists solutions into problems and distorts divine promise into challenges to conquer and control. This manipulation is plainly witnessed in this morning’s scripture. Jesus begins with a solution that the disciples, like us, interpret into a problem that then requires a solution. Jesus listens to the presentation of the problem and repeats the solution. It is as if the human participant in this divine discussion is unable to accept a solution developed in their absence. As is buying into a solution that they were not a part of creating conjures up recognition of subordination, a reminder that we are on the receiving end of some form of spiritual welfare for a service that we ourselves can neither produce nor provide.
To overcome such uncomfortable charity, the human listener requests enough information to critique and construct a solution that reflects their thumbprint in the design. It is grasping for the cheap comfort of control. Instead, Jesus communicates that their problem has already been solved. There is no reason to be anxious because what we fear has already been resolved. Jesus has gone before them. Jesus will come and take them to himself. They know all they need to know just by knowing the Cosmic Christ manifest in human form before them. They need fear not that any part of creation will be abandoned because this solution invites all of creation to participate in a divinely orchestrated process. This solution is a process promising the reconciliation of relationships once separated by boundaries of time and space, by the possibilities of birth and the limitations of death.
We, like the disciples, want the details of the cosmological mystery so that we can master and control our own destinies…so that we can all sleep at night. The grasping of Jesus’ solution, however, does not require mastery by way of a well-studied task list. The solution Jesus presents requires a surrender to the inevitability of momentary encounters with mystery to understand what it means to be fully alive. This is the tradeoff we are being gifted, a willingness to sleep sound at night despite all that we do not know because Jesus has already shared with us the only thing that matters. The reality that where Jesus goes, we go. The promise that where God is, we will be too. That there is no separation whether we are “dead” or whether we are “alive.”
Without outlining the policies, procedures, and architecture of an afterlife, John 14: 1-14 describes a relationship existing both within and beyond location and time. Jesus does not reveal his future location to Philip because Jesus is not going anywhere. The “way” is not a geographical term but a description of the revelatory work of Jesus that all of creation is invited to dwell in. This dwelling is creation’s relationship with the Cosmic Christ who dwells in the Creator of the Cosmos. To say that there are “many rooms” is to describe the inclusive nature of this relational dwelling and to reflect the innate inclusivity of all of creation in this divine relationship. This dwelling is a relational process promised to all of creation because God dwells within and beyond all that has been and will be created.
All these translations are game-changers because, if properly understood, it means most of us have been worried about all the wrong things. As Diane Bergant explains in her book, The Earth Is The Lord’s, “the heavens, the waters, the clouds, the winds, the fire, and flame are not only the constitutive elements of creation, but they are also the substance of God’s dwelling.” It is the belief of God’s presence in an ever-evolving universe revealing that the promise of John 14:1-4 is initiated solely by God’s creative love, a relationship displaying a character that is cosmic, not merely historical. Thus, the solution Jesus offers to creaturely death and dying is a cosmological statement that begins with creation and then moves to salvation. It is, as Bergant explains in her book, that the “natural world itself acts as the agent of God’s saving power.” The solution to our problem with death is inextricably linked to the very creation that we fear losing when we die. To experience salvation from death is to dwell in a creation defined by dying and to be reconciled to the Creator of the Cosmos, the Cosmic Christ.
In the context of Christological cosmology, the (incredibly misleading) description of Jesus’ promised “return,” seals the unfolding of a new reality where all creatures live in full communion as earthly agents of divine acts of cosmological regeneration and restoration. Jesus’ return initiates a process through which all creatures will participate in the healing of creation. This solution, this promise, is the antidote to all that keeps us anxiously pacing around the house at night. This return announces the arrival of the hoped-for age marked by resurrection and reconciliation as we learn what it means to re-inhabit our residence in God’s creation.
As creatures created by the Creator of the Cosmos, we too are agents of God’s saving power. To dwell within Creation as agents of God’s saving power is the definition of living in full communion with the Cosmic Christ. This is the “return” of which Jesus speaks.
Re-inhabiting the dwelling of the divine as creatures in creation means that we cannot selectively separate. If we separate ourselves from Creation, we separate from our Creator. If we separate from our Creator, we are separated from Creation. To understand that the constitutive elements of creation are also the substance of God’s dwelling unveils the localization of salvation to which we are being called to return. This “way” of living as creatures in harmony with creation is expressed as our return to living in full communion with Christ and the Creator, with the Son and the Father.
To know the divinely duplicitous relationality of the Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmic Christ is to begin to accept humanity’s place as creatures called to return to dwelling as God’s earthly creation. This reconciliation with divine reality manifests upon the abandonment of human identification as creation-less demigods designed to extract resources to fuel the egoic social construct of a capitalist machine. To abandon human-centric constructs and dwell in the house of the Father reveals the world to be a life-giving collaboration among creative subjects having intrinsic worth. This intrinsic worth is not defined by their usefulness to humans but by their presence in the kin-dom of creatures. This is a return reminding and re-placing humans in the category of creaturely, sentient beings valued no more and no less than any other creaturely, sentient being.
To see where the Cosmic Christ dwells with the Creator is to understand the location of our return: A return to a creaturely existence aware that the Source of our Goodness is not our own. It is a return rooted in the belief we manifest salvation when we return to our placement within Creation as God’s agents of ecological healing. A creaturely citizenship based on a belief that our consciousness and altruistic care are rooted in and respond to divine life-giving powers from which the universe itself arises. Dwelling in full communion with creation, we are returned to the reality that the Creator is as much a part of us as we are a part of Creation. There is no separation. The goodness in Creation, of which we are a part, is fueled by the creative, cosmic love of the Author of an eternally evolving universe.
Just as Jesus never leaves us, neither do we leave our location within Creation. The return of humanity is not a physical relocation but a radical reconciliation with the reality of the cosmic order. It is return expressed as humility, as a return to the substance from which we were formed. As Brenna Davis explains in her publication, Humus, Humans, and Humility, “humus is the Latin word for earth (a rich and nutrient-filled soil) and is also the root word for human. Humility is derived from the same word, humilitas, one who is grounded or near to the earth…humans were created from the earth, soil, humus and given God’s breath of life.”
Humanity’s return is not an eviction from separateness but an awakening to a reality of indestructible cosmological connectivity bound by the permanence of divine presence in creation. Standing as molded matter rooted in soil, humans descend from their delusional identity above creation and return to true belonging within creation as collaborative agents for divine grace, love, and regeneration.
In humanity’s return to a creaturely dwelling within Creation, humanity is likewise returned to participation in the salvific works visible in Christ. Reconciled in the divine dwellings of material creations, humanity is once again available to advocate for the integrity of creation on behalf of the Cosmic Christ and the Creator of the Cosmos. Full communion initiates, as Jesus models, a spiritual dying to oneself to rebirth into the divine order of creation. From a platform of equanimity, the believer living in full communion promotes the life-giving presence of the divine in all of Creation.
Participation in the ongoing works of Jesus is not a commitment to solving the problem of death. This is a conviction to promote the real and present possibility of a resurrection initiated by our re-placement within creation as creatures. The challenge of dwelling in full communion continues to be relinquishing our lens of fear when we hyper-focus on death. To relinquish such a human way of perceiving life offers a new way of purposefully participating in life. This is the way of John 14 which re-focuses our attention on what it means to live as we were created to live, as Christ taught us to live.
Dwelling in the way of Jesus’ resurrected, relational dwelling, we are expected and empowered to reconcile and restore creation on behalf of all creatures experiencing torment and eradication. The human believer calls their kin to awake and account for their participation and perpetuation of abusive, violent colonialization of creation. The way is a returned witness of re-membering the call of our species to depart from destructive structures promoting arrogant profligate and insatiable domination of any species over all others.
This is the return: a solution to our questions of life and death and all that exists in between. A way of eternal resurrection accessible now to those willing to live dying to a manufactured identity produced and packaged in the age of the Anthropocene. The promise of eternal salvation begins today. A resurrection promised upon our return to the way of full communion present in creation, partnered with the Cosmic Christ, animated and resourced by the Creator of the Cosmos. This is the dwelling through which we can control our death, every day, with every breath, when we choose to die to our egoic inclinations driven by a desire to conquer death and colonialize the afterlife. Dying to the human-centricity of this life, let us live to return to the divine dwelling in which all life is eternally birthed and continuously connected. May it be in our return to the mysterious reality of this divine dwelling that we can finally sleep soundly, cradled as kin in an atmosphere of full communion beyond time and beyond place, beyond life and beyond death.