On the Father's House

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 18, 2025]

✠Alleluia, Christ is risen! (The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!)

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer.”[1]

Our Lord uttered these words to His disciples before His Passion at the Last Supper. With those dreadful events leading to His Crucifixion, Death, and Burial, His disciples likely thought this was what He meant, that He was about to die soon. Then, beyond their expectations, they received Him back at the Resurrection. In the days that followed, His disciples hoped that all their hopes and dreams would be realized now, that the Risen Lord would put all things to rights now, and that their time with Him now would never end. But they were wrong, His time among them was still short. When He told them, “Where I am going you cannot come,”[2] He was referring to His upcoming Ascension and Glorification at the right hand of the Father, not the immediate consummation of the age, and He took especial care to remind them of that.

What Our Lord did here, however, was not to kill the disciples’ hopes but to set the stage for reordering His followers’ expectations. While they had and to some degree still believed that He was there to restore the Kingdom of Israel and usher in another Davidic age,[3] Jesus had to remind them that His Kingdom was not of this world, that the old paradigms of power had no traction, that the age to come would be completely unlike the age present. When He told them in the Upper Room before His Passion that He would be going where they could not come, Our Lord also told them, “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?”[4] implying that the age to come was something completely different, and that their separation would not be permanent, and that there was something awaiting them that they could not yet understand.

Something completely different. Human imagination has run rampant trying to understand this concept now for millennia. From a cleaned up Earth to a big house or city with many places to live or dwell or even to the admittedly silly lounging on clouds strumming golden lyres (really, if you do consider it, the joy and wonder would fade off that situation pretty quickly), people have imagined all sorts of states for a blessed afterlife (and for a less-than-blessed afterlife, but that is another sermon on another day). Are any of them correct? Do any of these theories hold water? What did Jesus mean by “many dwelling-places”?

Jesus told His disciples that where He was going they could not come, and that He would no longer be with them. However, that did not preclude the occasional visit. St. Peter had a visit from the Lord in the form of a vision where Our Lord told St. Peter that he needed to expand his horizons and bring the Good News of the Kingdom of God to those outside the House of Israel.[5] Our Lord paid St. Paul a rather dramatic visit on the road to Damascus, and according to the witness of St. Paul’s epistles there were several more visits after that. Our second reading today is near the end of a very protracted visit from Jesus to St. John the Theologian. These visits all served distinct purposes, whether to give course corrections or as in the case of this visit to St. John, not only to give strange and disturbing pictures of things to come, or to give encouragement to meet the trials ahead, but also to give finally an explanation His mission at the right hand of the Father, to prepare a place for us.

In this vision, St. John shows a City descending from Heaven as part of a new Heaven and Earth,[6] like some massive spaceship landing on a newly-minted planet (yes, that particular idea about the life that is to come has also come up in diseased human imagination as purported fact, and no, that is not what he meant). The problem is that St. John is trying to explain, and we are trying to understand, a great mystery with limited human imagination and language. Our Lord was conveying a great mystery to us with the same limited human language and understanding. We therefore have images and metaphors that paint a picture as though we were looking through a glass darkly,[7] but in no wise convey the actual awesome and terrible and joyous reality. Consider, if you will, a limitless Being outside of time and space Who actually created and owns time and space, a limitless Being in no need of shelter but Who is instead shelter from all that would cause harm, a limitless Being Who is everywhere and anywhere, Who has no house, for no house can ever be built big enough to contain the uncontainable, but instead Who is the house itself. “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, they will be His peoples, and God Himself will be with them.”[8]

If we look at Jesus’ statement, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places,” we are confronted again by the limits of language. Translations have used the term “dwelling-places” or “rooms” or even “mansions” to describe the mystery of the age to come. The Greek is wonderfully vague. The word used, μοναí, conveys a place of dwelling, or even the state of existing, resting, doing. One could look at this as Jesus telling His disciples that in the age to come He will have prepared a permanent relationship for them with the Father. Here we are not talking about a physical domicile, even though the new Earth could potentially have physical domiciles, but a permanent status of active fellowship with God the Father. Each would have a deep and profound and fully aware relationship with God with no veil obscuring perception. What we now experience fleetingly and take on faith/trust will in the age to come be fully real, for faith will have passed away in favour of presence and full knowledge.[9] The presence of God will be so immanent that sorrow and death will be no more, for such things are the absence of God, and in His presence can no longer be experienced. There will be no mindless strumming of golden lyres on clouds where the blessed suffer eternal ennui, instead each will have in their resurrected selves the full knowledge and presence and companionship with the inexhaustible limitlessness of the Eternal One. As Our Lord Jesus Christ promised, He prepares such a place for each of us with the Father, where “many dwelling-places” means “infinitely more than enough dwelling-places” or infinite opportunities for communion and fellowship. In His infinite Love and Goodness and Mercy each of us finds and reflects back infinite Love and Goodness and Mercy, participating in the indwelling that is at the very heart of the Holy Trinity, where we are in God and God is in us, always together yet never absorbed, always partaking and partaken yet never consumed.

Of course, thinking too much about that in the present age could have serious side effects due to our mortal limits, which is why in some cases we create metaphors and allegories, or in others shut out the Beatific Vision altogether, or in some sad situations go barking mad. Our Lord, the Holy Spirit, the Eternal Father, our loving and compassionate God does not wish our confusion or harm, and so in extending the hope and promise He gives us a command that helps prepare us for the age to come. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”[10]

If we truly wish to understand what Jesus is preparing for us with the Father, if we truly wish to understand the age to come, we must embrace what it means to engage in the eternal indwelling of the Holy Trinity. We have been told repeatedly that God is Love, and that anyone who does not love has no part in Him.[11] That means we must emulate the selfless pouring out of each Person of the Trinity into the others in the Eternal Dance. That means that we love unstintingly our families, our neighbours, and even our enemies, no matter whether that love is returned. Even the wicked in power who wish us harm, the relative who is toxic, the neighbour who damages our property, the assailant who wishes to rip away our lives we are to love and forgive, because God loves and forgives us, and He makes the rain fall and the sun shine on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Easier said than done. Nothing worthwhile is easy. Nothing worthwhile is without cost. Yet love is not a passive doormat but a positive force. In the face of evil Love compels us to call it out and offer the better way. In the face of injustice Love compels us to call it out and if not to provide justice then to call for it. In the face of suffering Love compels us to reach out to do what we can with what we must address it. In the face of deceit Love compels us to proclaim truth. In the face of death Love compels us to proclaim our hope and to call out the lie that death is the last word, for Christ has risen, Christ has destroyed death, and in dying through Christ we receive life.

Our Lord told St. John that He is the Beginning and the End,[12] the source and the goal, and that He would provide us all the living waters of the Holy Spirit to sustain us through the trials to come. While He prepares for us to spend eternity in full communion with God, we practice for that eternity in loving one another, because in the age to come to commune with God is to commune with all who commune with Him, unlimited by time and mortality, for in God all things are possible.

✠Christ is risen from the Dead, trampling down Death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

[1] Jn. 13.33

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ac. 1.6

[4] Jn. 14.2

[5] Cf. Ac. 10.1-11.18

[6] Rev. 21.2

[7] 1 Cor. 13.12

[8] Rev. 21.3

[9] 1 Cor. 13.12

[10] Jn. 13.34

[11] 1 Jn. 4.7-8

[12] Rev. 21.6