30 May Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year C

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

Sunday 25th May, 2025

Before I begin properly: I am grateful to the commentary on our Gospel passage by Professor Brian Peterson for much of what follows – this sermon was prepared on rather short notice, and I figure that if someone else has said things that I agree with…well, why re-invent the wheel?

So. The final night’s conversation between Jesus and his disciples continues, and things are getting a bit sticky. Jesus has made clear that he is about to leave them, and in a way we stand in a similar place today: Eastertide is almost over, and on Thursday we will celebrate the Ascension, where Jesus, in his physical form, will leave the earth. From then, our focus shifts from the joy of the resurrection to the anticipation of Pentecost, and the coming of the Spirit. For us, this is the well practised rhythm of the year, but the disciples, as we might expect, are struggling emotionally and conceptually. Jesus has just said that he will not leave them alone, even if they will no longer see him. He assures them that he will continue to love them, and that He will continue to reveal himself to them but not to the world. How can all these things be true? That’s exactly what Judas (not Iscariot) has just asked in verse 22, just before we pick up in verse 23 today.

How will Jesus reveal himself to these few? Perhaps Judas had in mind the standard apocalyptic event, like lightning flashing from east to west, a revelation that is unavoidable for all.

But Jesus is talking about a different kind of self-revelation, because of course. God does rather have a habit of turning things on their head, of doing the unexpected.

His answer to Judas’s question, then, is, to begin with, love. “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” Love is the answer, and we all know that loving someone shapes our behaviour towards them. That is true with parents and children, spouses and partners, brothers and sisters. In families, in communities, in neighbourhoods, a necessary consequence of loving our neighbours means actions oriented toward them and their good, just as their love for us means actions from them oriented towards us and our good. And this principle is true for the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. Their love for him will shape their lives so that they keep his word, and his love for them will energise and enable this ongoing shaping, as they learn to live loved.

Included in this shaping is surely the specific command given on this final night that they serve one another, as we heard last Sunday. But it goes beyond that: it also means keeping at the heart of their life together his word about the Father’s love, his promise that the Father will love them. The Father’s love, Jesus’ love, does not wait for the disciples to love first. Part of what the Incarnation means is that God refuses to love from a distance. So both the Father and the Son will come to make a new home with Jesus’ disciples. And here we come to the crux of things.

The word translated “home” in verse 23 – “we will…make our home with them” – is used only one other time in the New Testament. In John 14:2, Jesus assured the disciples that his Father’s house has many “dwelling places”, many “homes”, and that Jesus goes to the Father to prepare a place for them. Now in verse 23, that language is turned inside out: the Father and the Son will make their “dwelling place”, their “home”, with the disciples – with us. Our home is with God, and God’s home is now with us? What might this mean – what might this change? Especially when we consider that the word for “dwelling place” here is related to the far more frequently used verb in John, “remain” or “abide.”

As disciples, then, we are those who “abide” in Jesus, in his love, and in his word, and we are those in whom God also abides. This is clearly broadening our understanding of discipleship: this goes beyond, and deeper than, actions oriented towards another for their good.

The first question that Andrew and an unnamed other ask of Jesus in John’s gospel is “where are you staying?” (1:38); now they have their answer: Jesus is staying with them, even as he is leaving them. The life of the community of the disciples – we might add, of the church – is not finally marked by Jesus’ absence: or rather, it is, but this is an absence that is filled with something even better, if that’s even a thing we can say about different ways of knowing God. The point is not the absence, but the presence that this permits of an abiding God.

And this presence, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, as Jesus calls it, will continue to remind us of all that Jesus has said and been to us. This reminding and re-membering, re-making, has the potential to occur in every moment: perhaps most obviously in our liturgy, but also in all our other moments: as we serve one another, encounter one another, pray for one another, we re-make and re-incarnate Christ in our midst.

In our midst. It’s been said that Christianity is fundamentally a team sport, and I would agree with that entirely. Jesus calls each of the disciples – each of us – by name, in our uniqueness and individuality. The disciples were certainly a varied bunch, to say the least, and so we can expect the church, and indeed all the communities to which we belong to be much the same. After all, we’re there!

And yes, God makes a home within each of us, but also, and at the same time, God makes a home among us, in the midst of us. Our very being together is a dwelling place for God, even before we get up in the morning and start trying to be nice to each other!

Yesterday, we remembered John and Charles Wesley, and particularly John Wesley’s experience at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, where, as he recorded in his journal, “while [the reader] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

This individual encounter with God is a vital part of both the beginnings and the ongoing sustaining of our faith, our life in Christ. But it’s the words that Wesley uttered at his death that, to my mind, get to the heart of things: “the best of all is, God is with us.” Amen.

Sr. Jessica

Image: “When the comforter has come…”, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54976 [retrieved May 30, 2025]. Original source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allyhook/3913720858/