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Summary
I’m troubled about my nation. I’m troubled about broken personal relationships. Mostly I’m troubled about being troubled; I don’t feel at home in myself or in the world around me.
It wasn’t that way in 1969. I lived with people who knew me before I even knew how to impress them or disappoint them. I was getting picked on by kids at school — but if I could just get home and sit on my father’s lap, I could rest and be who it is that . . . I am.
I hope my nine-month-old grandson, James — who lives with his mom and dad at my house — is starting to feel at home. I think he does; he doesn’t even know how to put on an act. He has no pretense and no private life but seems to be very much at home. The cover picture for this message is James on Easter Sunday in our cry room at church, reaching for me on the TV as if I belong to him.
Recently, praying with my wife in our kitchen, I told the Lord, “Everything here just feels so strange…” After a time, Susan said, “Peter, I just heard Him very clearly. He said, ‘Of course it feels strange. This isn’t your home.’” And strangely, I didn’t find that troubling.
By the end of John 13, Peter must have been quite troubled.
John 13:36-38, “Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.’ Peter said to him, ‘Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times.’”
Peter was troubled by his nation; they wanted a king (messiah), but not Jesus. Peter was troubled by his personal relationships; Judas had just been possessed by Satan and then left to betray Jesus. But mostly, Peter was troubled about himself: Not long ago, just after Jesus said that he would build His Church on Peter, Jesus looked at Peter and said, “Get behind me Satan”; Jesus had just washed Peter’s feet, when it should’ve been the other way around; and worst of all — when Peter publicly vowed his undying allegiance to Jesus, Jesus informed Peter that he would deny Him three times. If I’m Peter (and I suppose I am), I’m bracing for a massive rebuke at this point, like, “You should be troubled as hell! How am I to build my church on you?”
John 13:38b-14:1a, “… The rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times. [NEXT VERSE (The chapter divisions were added 1500 years later)] Let not your heart be troubled.”
“Let not… be troubled” is in the imperative tense; it’s the Commandment. …And I find that to be quite troubling. I’m a pastor; I’m supposed to be Mr. Peace and Patience. However, when I’m encountered with troubling situations, I not only “don’t let my heart be troubled,” I trouble it until I attain more knowledge, have applied that knowledge to the situation at hand, and have no more troubling situations. Troubling my heart is how I get things done! And weirdly, John has just informed us (John 11:33, 12:27, 13:21) that Jesus was troubled, after three years of seeming to be so untroubled.
When I’m troubled, I feel forsaken by Logic (I don’t know how to make things work), Goodness (I don’t know what’s good), Life (I think someone might die), Truth (I don’t know where it is), or the Way (I don’t know which way to go). I feel forsaken by “I Am”; I feel that I am not enough.
On the tree in the garden, Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s troubling. Yet, Jesus is “I Am that I Am” in human flesh. And Jesus is quoting David in Psalm 22. So, if you feel forsaken, and you tell God that you feel forsaken, maybe it’s Jesus in you, feeling forsaken with you, and helping you talk to His Father — the way He talked to His Father through David, 1000 years before He died on the cross. He’s made all of our troubles His own.
St Augustine wrote: “If there is faith in us, Christ is in us. For what else says the Apostle: ‘That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.”
John 14:1, “Believe (‘pisteuete,’ the verbal form of ‘pistis,’ that is ‘faith’) in God. Believe also in me.” [Or, “You believe in God. You believe also in me.” It can be translated in both ways — as a command or statement of fact. Maybe it’s both: A command, like “Let there be faith in Peter” and a statement of fact; we know that Peter had at least a little faith. “If we have faith as a grain of mustard seed,” wrote Karl Barth, “it suffices for the devil to have lost his game.”]
John 14:1-2, “Y’all, let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God. And you believe in me. In my Father’s house are many abodes [mone].” [“Mone” is the noun. “Meno” is the verb, translated “abide.”]
An abode is where you abide. And if you want to know what it means to abide, Jeff Lebowski is a fairly good definition. This was his catch phrase: “The Dude abides.” In the opening sequence of the movie, The Big Lebowski, The Dude goes to the grocery store in his bathrobe and just starts drinking the half in half in the aisle. He has no pretense; he just makes himself at home wherever he goes.
So, if Jesus were to ever say, “Abide in me as I abide in you,” He’d be saying, “Make yourself at home in me, as I have made myself at home in you… my abode.” Are you at home in Jesus, OR are you always on your best behavior, always trying to impress and so acting your very best?
John 14:2-3, “In my Father’s house there are many abodes. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go and prepare a place for [or ‘in’] you? And if I go and prepare a place for [or ‘in’] you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.”
This is so strange. Jesus is leaving them to come back to them to take them to Himself, as if they’re not with Himself or themselves already. Some remind us that this is what a bridegroom would say in that day, after a bride had accepted his proposal by drinking the cup. And this is what he would do: He would go and prepare a room on the side of his father’s house and then return to take his bride to himself and a marriage feast. And, of course, according to The Revelation, this is also what’s happening to all of us. We are the Bride AND the Father’s House.
“In that day,” says Jesus in just a few more verses, “you will know that I am in my father and you in me and I in you (He’s leaving, and yet not leaving, and will not forsake them.)” “In that day, you will know.” —And yet, this is Friday… In just a few hours, they will think He’s gone. Why would He even let them think that? Why would He let any of us wonder, “Is everything lost? Is everything a lie? Is death all that there is?” Why would He let us yearn for the Light in the dark, or Logos in chaos, Life in a graveyard, Truth in lies, the Way in confusion, or Love in the depths of our own isolation and hell?
Susan and I started dating in high school but were separated for the first year of college. One night, she prayed a desperate prayer and stuck her finger down on this verse: Philemon 1:15. “Perhaps he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever.” That year, I yearned for Susan like I never had before. I think I was parted from her, that I would want to be with her forever; I wanted her to be my home, and I wanted to be hers.
Now, think of all the broken relationships in your life: friends, relatives, your ex-wife or ex-husband.
Perhaps you were parted from them for a while, that you might have them back forever . . . Or would you rather not go home? You have to want to go home to actually go home, because home is your abode where you abide. In other words, the Father’s house must become your home in order to go home.
One day, James will take knowledge of good and evil, try to please me — which will make him hide from me — but that will create a yearning for me. And one day he’ll come home to me — in this age or the next — and he’ll know me for the first time… thinking, “There’s no place like home. No place like home.” And I will be thinking exactly the same thing. Perhaps God was parted from you to make a space in you for Him, and a space in Him that is actually you — happy to be home in Him forever.
John 14:4-6, “’And you know the way to where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am [ego eimi] the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
The Way, the Truth, and the Life, who is “I Am,” is hanging on the tree in the garden like fruit. What do we do with it? What do the principalities and powers of this world do with it? Don’t we try to own it, use it, maybe sell it? Don’t we say that it belongs to us so that the only way to the Father is through us? Don’t we take the Way and turn Him into a map, take the Truth and turn Him into laws, take the Life and place Him in a tomb that is ourselves? We consume the fruit to make ourselves live… and everything dies.
The Book of Philemon is a letter, written by Paul to a slave owner named Onesimus. “Perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while,” writes Paul, “that you might have him back forever; no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a dearly beloved brother.”
Human religions reduce Jesus to laws, programs, principles, body broken and bloodshed… our slave. But what does Faith do with Him? We surrender to Him and worship Him, and He makes us His Bride, Body, and Temple; He makes us His home, that we would forever make our home in Him. The false self gives birth to the true self, and I become who it is that I forever Am; I go home.
The distance between who I am alone in darkness and who I am alive in Jesus is the width of Me-sus, my arrogant and self-righteous ego. The Journey from one to the other is the journey from earth to Heaven. And the Way from one to the other is the Truth. Truth in me is a Life in me, and I think we call him HONESTY. I cannot recognize the Truth out there until I commune with the Truth in me. I surrender to the Truth when I see that the Truth is a friend to me — when I see that He has made himself at home in me, so I can be at home in Him in the garden sanctuary of my soul.
I used to do this because I thought I should, but now I do it, for it’s become my life, and without it, I think I’d be so troubled and lost that I would not have the will to live. I get up, put on my robe, grab some coffee, and just abide in my abode — like the Dude. Maybe I’ll recite a prayer or read some Scripture. Maybe I’ll imagine what’s true: I’m in Jesus in the “bosom of the Father,” sitting on my Father’s lap. Whatever the case, I’ll just expose my soul to God in “the naked now.” Or maybe it’s Jesus in me, exposing our soul to our Father, for Jesus is my Faith in “Our Father.”
I can’t trouble myself into being not troubled, but when I abide in Jesus, we surrender our troubles to God our Father and find ourselves at home in Him. Your unique experience of the absence of God in space and time will become your unique experience of the presence of our Father in eternity.
John 14:7, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From NOW you do know him and have seen him.”