The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.” It is one of the more well-known and beloved Bible passages in the New Testament. But loving it at its hearing and actually living by it are two completely different things, especially when life really turns difficult for you or your family or for our people. These words take on a particular potency for the Christian when they come to realize the context in which Jesus spoke these comforting words. It was Thursday of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday. By the time he speaks these words, the disciples have finished the Supper in the upper room, and now Jesus’s betrayal, trial, and crucifixion are quickly approaching — and Jesus knew it. By the time he speaks these words, Judas has left the room and is on his way to betray Jesus into the hands of his enemies — and Jesus knew that too. So in John chapter 13, Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to be leaving them soon, separated from them for a time, and they didn’t take that news well. Sadness fell over the group. So Jesus turned his attention to providing them comfort by preaching to them and by teaching them what it meant to be the Messiah and what it meant to be believers, followers, people who trusted in the Lord God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This would be his last theological lesson, his last sermon or discourse before his resurrection. The lesson would be comprehensive and pointed. It would begin in chapter 13 and end with the High Priestly Prayer in chapter 17. Jesus would speak in that period of time of his impending glory, of the work of the Holy Spirit and the necessity for him to depart for the Holy Spirit to come. He would speak to them about overcoming the world and turning sorrow into joy. He would again appeal to the image of the vine and the branches. He would speak of the hostility that the world has toward him and that the world will have toward them. And he would give them that new commandment, that they love one another.
Jesus knows that his disciples will soon find themselves in the middle of the most stark and brutal reality check in all of human history. Their whole worldview — everything the disciples believed about their friend Jesus, about the Old Testament’s promised Messiah, about the Lord God, and about themselves — would come crashing down. Against this backdrop, Jesus comforts his disciples by saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. 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.” Jesus faces his own crucifixion, and as the disciples head toward their crisis of faith, Jesus doesn’t speak of any remedy in the here and now. He does not offer conventional wisdom for dealing with tough times. He doesn’t talk about taking lemons and making lemonade. He says nothing of the sort. He speaks instead of the then and there rather than the here and now. They are about to go through an unspeakable 72 hours of terror, of horror, of life-threatening actions by the Jews who now hate them, and Jesus tells them to direct their attention to a future event that is so far distant from them in the moment they cannot actually believe it. While directing them to their heavenly destination, Jesus was also showing them that all that is about to happen has a purpose: his arrest, his trial, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and ascension all serve an ultimate end to which they are to believe and trust and strive to reach. It all began in chapter 13, verse 31, where Jesus begins the theological summary of all that he had taught them from the very beginning: “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.” Jesus is referring to the entire work — to the crucifixion, the resurrection, and ultimately to his ascension.
For the better part of three years, the disciples had served as students, evangelists, aid workers, and church leaders. They listened to, walked with, and worked right alongside Jesus on a daily basis. On Palm Sunday they thought, like the rest of the humanity lining the road, that Jesus would soon ascend to the throne, that he would take back their kingdom, and that the disciples would be his right and left hands in this new kingdom. But then, on the night in which he was betrayed, in the moment of his arrest, all of their hopes and dreams and ideas about the Messiah and the kingdom came crashing down around them. Now we, of course, were not in the upper room, and we did not live through that first Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Our faith isn’t shaken by the news of an arrest or a trial or a crucifixion. In fact, our faith takes hold of the events of the Passion. We can build on them when we employ that faith correctly. Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension are the bedrock of the true Christian faith. Besides, we have to admit, it doesn’t take such a dramatic event to shake us and our faith in our lives. We don’t need arrests and crucifixions and stonings in the street to raise questions about whether God is actually with us or whether his promises are actually good. Some of us have watched our hopes and dreams come crashing down. In those times, the promises that God has given to us in his Word ring hollow in our ears. Promises like providing daily bread, when we’re suddenly thrown out of work and faced with financial difficulties, seem to ring hollow. The promise that all things will work together for good to them that love the Lord — that seems pretty weak too, from time to time. Promises that joys and blessings will come out of suffering and strife — all of that too brings little comfort. This is what happens, you see, when Christians live by sight rather than by faith. It is why Paul wrote in Second Corinthians 5:6–7: “So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.”
In the opening verses of John 14, our reading this morning, Jesus is both comforting and at the same time confronting his disciples because of their weak faith and their weak understanding of the Messiah and of the Christian life. The disciples were on a collision course with the greatest crisis they would ever face, and Jesus knew that too. And what does he do? He does exactly what sinners don’t want him to do in those moments when they are in crisis: he teaches them some more doctrine. He preaches a sermon. He holds a theology class in order to answer their questions and prepare them for what is to come. He assures them and promises them that all will turn out well for those who believe in him and trust in the Lord God, their heavenly Father. He talks about what lies beyond the suffering and what the suffering serves. Now when a person suffers misfortune, they don’t want to hear doctrinal discourses. They don’t want distant solutions. They want their pain to stop now, immediately, and they want a remedy to their problems. They want a how-to book: how to fix whatever ails me. But here Jesus teaches that irrespective of what the disciples are going to see with their eyes — namely, death and loss — and what they’re going to feel with their hearts — namely, fear and uncertainty — Jesus is their Lord and Savior, their complete and permanent remedy, even if it seems like they have to wait for him through the toughest of their days. His doctrine is true, and his words are true, and his promise is our real comfort for those who are able to take hold of them in true faith and trust.
As Jesus moves willingly toward his own death, he turns his attention to comforting, teaching, and preparing the disciples for what is to come, and he says, “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.” He is teaching them and us that separation between himself and his disciples is a truly temporary state. He will be present in his Word and Sacrament ministry, yes, but in the moment he will die and be buried, and he will rise, and he will ascend to the right hand of God, and he will return in the second coming to collect all believers unto himself. That is not a new lesson. He is not saying anything new in chapters 13 through 17. He is simply restating what he has taught repeatedly throughout his three and a half years of ministry. Throughout their three years in seminary, they should have learned it and known it and taken hold of the words and the promises. They should have clung to the words and doctrine of Jesus. It means that they should have trusted that his words are true, that he is the way through this life, he is the truth, and he is the life. In Jesus’s earthly ministry, he made it clear it wasn’t about an earthly kingdom. It was always about the new heaven and the new earth. It was a rescue mission to retrieve believers from sin, death, and the power of the devil. Yet the disciples, especially Thomas and Philip, were among the most confused. Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
In the shadow of his own death and his forsaking by God the Father, Jesus is telling them: I am the way, the truth, the life. If you’re going to go to heaven, it is through me. As he turns his face toward Golgotha, by way of the Via Dolorosa, which is the way of suffering, he is and wants to be known as the way to eternal peace. He is accused of being a liar by liars, but he is the truth. In body he goes to die, but he is the life of the world. The disciples are about to enter the most difficult and terrifying 72 hours of their life, and Jesus is giving them a lesson in doctrine, a summary in Christian doctrine. Think of it this way: when a person becomes sick — serious heart problems, cancers, any other life-threatening condition, or a condition that threatens to destroy everything around them — the first thing that person becomes is a patient, for others to come to that person’s aid. But the second thing that patient should become is a student. You need to learn, to be taught, to study about the illness — and the Bible, and the mind, and the soul. We forget about that last one; very few people think of it. You need to learn and be taught, so that you become a participant in your own treatment and, God willing, your own recovery. But know this: if the recovery does not come, on the other side of this suffering is a great and glorious life in Christ. That is what the disciples should have done on Good Friday. They should have become students once again of the Old Testament, and they should have been armed with the knowledge Jesus had imparted to them, rather than being gripped by fear and hiding like little rabbits.
In John 13–17, Jesus was teaching the same things he had taught all along. In this sense, there was no crisis. There was no reason to make an adjustment to the plan. What was about to happen had been set in motion before the foundation of the world was laid. The disciples found themselves in crisis only because of their weak faith — not because of the circumstances that were about to befall them. The disciples found themselves in crisis only because they were weak, and they had failing courage, and they had lack of understanding, and they didn’t think to go back to study to get the answers. Not that the Bible provides a specific roadmap about what job you should take or what you should and should not do — except repent and believe. Despite all the evil, hardships, heartache, brokenness, and all that was about to happen, nothing had changed at all. There was nowhere else to go, and there was no one else to go to. Jesus was and is the way, the truth, and the life. Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” See that? Show us. Prove it to me, God. Remove this problem, this illness, this difficulty, this family-destroying move. Get rid of it. Show us. Give us something more than your Word. Give us something more than doctrine. Give us something more than promises of the future glory. See, all that is living by sight. And by the way, living by sight never serves a Christian well. It never provides what trust in God gives. When one problem after another assails you in your life, living by sight is always an exercise of the law. It’s not of the Gospel. It’s about doing based on what has happened. It’s about responding to circumstances, not trusting in the Lord God. People who live by sight are constantly looking for evidence that God loves them, evidence that God is present in their life, evidence that God’s will is being done — always looking but never certain, because the ground upon which you stand, if you rely on circumstance, is shifting sand. Living by sight is living by the law, not by the Gospel. It’s living by sight, not by faith. That is what the disciples wanted and thought they needed as Good Friday approached.
Living by sight is really just another version of the theology of glory. Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, theses 3 and 4: “The works of men are thus not mortal sins (we speak of works that are apparently good), as though they were crimes.” By the way, mortal sins are the sins that kill you eternally. “The works of righteousness are done, as it were, in the sight of God”? No — thesis 4: “The works of God are thus not mortal sins (we speak of works which he does through man), as though they were crimes.” The deeds that most people think are good are in fact bad for them. If you go about doing good works trying to prove to God and your neighbor that you’re a good person, in fact those works have become sins. You’re trusting in them and in yourself rather than trusting in the Lord God. But we do it because it’s something we can see, feel, and experience. That is the theology of glory. Thesis 3 of the Heidelberg Disputation: “Although the works of man always appear attractive and good, they are nevertheless likely to be mortal sins.” Converse: although the works of God always seem unattractive and appear evil, they are nevertheless eternal merits. What you think is horrible and terrible in your life, or you think of it as God’s punishment for some sin you’ve committed, is instead an eternal blessing. God is at work in it, but you don’t see it, nor do you realize it yet.
Here Jesus points them to the resurrection — their own resurrection — and their home in the heavenly mansion. The epistle lesson calls Christians to live by faith too. First and Second Peter are epistles about persecution and suffering. The Christians wanted to know why things had turned out so badly for them once they joined congregations and became Christians. They wanted to know why they were being persecuted and suffered. And what does Peter tell them to do? He tells them to go back to the Word. “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” “And he who believes in him will not be put to shame.” Despite what they see, he tells them: you are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.” They don’t look like a holy people yet. They are. I don’t look like a holy guy at all, and it’s by faith that I am. You don’t look like a holy group either. You just look like ordinary people. But you’re holy — except by faith.
Jesus told his disciples that he was on his way to prepare a place for them, and that’s true of you. And then he will come back, and he will collect unto himself all believers and take them to the place where he lives and reigns eternally. So let not your heart be troubled — in any circumstance, any place, any hardship. We don’t diminish those, but we put them in perspective of what’s on the other side, what God has for us, and what we are waiting for. “Believe in God; believe also in me,” Jesus says. For in our — yours and mine and all Christians’ — Father’s house there are many dwelling places, and in his house Jesus has prepared a place for you. Why? Because your sins, your failing courage, your weak faith, your ignorance of his Word, are all forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.