The House of Many Mansions

In my Father’s house are many mansions.—John 14:2.

1. Simpler words than these it would not be easy to find in human language. There is nothing here either in the words or in the ideas which a child cannot understand. There is a Father, and there is a house of many mansions where He dwells; there is a Son who has been there, and can speak of what He knows and has seen. He has come to His brethren here for a time, and He is about to leave again for home. But He is not merely going home; He is going to prepare a place for His brethren, and He is coming back for them, when their place is prepared, to take them to it—to His Father’s and His own home. If it were not so, He would have told us. That is simplicity itself: the words and the ideas alike strike a familiar chord in our hearts, and we need no one to explain them. What more do we need to know about the life to come than this? If we believe in God and in His Son, it is a going to the Father. Is it not enough for life and for death, for this world and for that which is to come, to know that we are going home?

2. But it is one of the characteristics of our Lord’s teaching that, though it is within the reach of every man, it is beyond the reach of every man. The truths which are contained in these words are stated in forms which are intelligible to those who are incapable of speculative thought; but let a man of the most vigorous and adventurous intellect attempt to explore them, and he will find that year after year they will become more and more wonderful, and that they will always transcend the limits of his thought. The words of Christ have a meaning which can never be exhausted. He Himself had descended from the heights of God to the lowliest human condition; but through His lowly human life those who had eyes to see discovered a Divine glory. His words were like Himself, lowly and simple, but through the lowliest and simplest of them there gleams the light of a diviner world than this. What these words mean we all know; explanation is unnecessary: what they mean none of us know; for as soon as we try to explain them we discover that explanation is impossible. We can travel a little way into the provinces of truth which they reveal, but our strength fails, and we can only sit down and wonder at the glory which lies beyond us.

The Gospel of St. John will ever be the solace and joy of the Christian in his loftiest and his lowliest moods. He will always feel the truthfulness of the language in which the childlike Claudius describes his emotions while perusing this Gospel: “I have from my youth up delighted to read the Bible, but especially the Gospel of St. John. There is something in it exceedingly wonderful; twilight and night, and through them the quick flash of lightning; soft evening-clouds, and behind the clouds, the full-orbed moon. There is something, also, so high, and mysterious, and solemn, that one cannot become weary. It seems to me in reading the Gospel of St. John, as if I saw him at the Last Supper leaning upon the breast of his Master, and as if an angel were holding my lamp, and at certain passages wished to whisper something in my ear. I am far from understanding all that I read; yet it seems as if the meaning were hovering in the distance before my mind’s eye. And even when I look into an entirely dark passage, I have an intimation of a great and glorious meaning within it which I shall one day understand.”1 [Note: W. G. T. Shedd, Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 169.]

I

The Father’s House

1. The Father’s House is both heaven and earth.—The words are usually applied to heaven, and to heaven only; but we may give them a larger yet not opposing meaning, which blends harmoniously with the mind of Christ. There are two glories in the words of Jesus; the one is, that He made heaven so real, and the other is, that He made this present world thrill to its finest chord with the Divine. In spite of all the havoc sin had wrought, this world was full of God to Jesus Christ. There was God in every lily of the field. There was God in every fowl of the air. In all the love of a mother for her child, in the hunger and thirst of the most sunken heart, there was that which spoke to Jesus of His Father, and told Him that the Divine was here.

(1) Perhaps it is best to say that in the mind of our Lord heaven and earth were not separate. And with us also there are rare moments when, standing upon this “bank and shoal of time,” we feel that it is good for us to be here, and that the humblest place where Christ vouchsafes His presence may be none other than a house of God and a gate of Heaven. Disenchantment comes to the Christian worker as to other men. The rough experience of the world damps the ardour of the most courageous, and drives men to look above and beyond for what they do not find here. It is far easier to dream of a Paradise beyond the grave than to reform even a single abuse in this world. The belief, however, that looks forward to another state of being for complete fulfilment of Christ’s promises is not irreconcilable with a persuasion that the words of Christ in the text point to a near, and not to a remote, future—that when He said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” it is in this world, primarily at least, that we are to look for a fulfilment of His promise.

As I read this profound, touching discourse of Jesus, I see no hint in it that the disciples were to wait for the hour of their death before being reunited to their glorified Redeemer. On the contrary, I find many an emphatic assurance that that reunion was to be soon. Over and over again, like a plaintive refrain, come the simple, consolatory words, “I go away and come again to you.” “Now I go away to him that sent me.” “A little while, and ye see me not, and again a little while, and ye shall see me.” Separation, the Saviour insists, shall not be an eternal, shall not be even a protracted, severance. A short interspace of gloom there shall be—a preliminary hour of sadness. Then the broken link will be reunited, and the disciples will enjoy a fellowship with their Lord truer, because more spiritual, than they had ever known before.1 [Note: J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 3.]

(2) Taking this to be the keynote of this part of our Lord’s discourse, we see in it an assurance of speedy and almost immediate consolation. If we must fix some definite note of time for the fulfilment of the promise, everything points to the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. For it was from that day forward that the idea of Christ’s life and death crept—and crept as a transforming power—into the study of the disciples’ imagination, so that the old relationship between them and their Master was replaced by one more distinctly spiritual. Then the merely human tie was dissolved, and the Spirit manifested Christ as a hidden Power to their souls. Then they began to learn that because the Spirit which He sent down upon them was a Spirit proceeding from the Father, therefore in being reunited to Christ spiritually they became the inmates of that Father’s home. Night and day is the Divine home open to all who by faith in Christ come to know themselves as children of the Heavenly Father. The household of that Father is wider than our poor thoughts about it. “We enter it not through the grave and gate of death, but through a willing surrender of ourselves to God as dutiful children.

The Apostles evidently understood their Master to promise that, when He had gone out of their bodily sight, He would come to them again in spiritual presence, and they would dwell with Him and the Father in a spiritual home; and after the Day of Pentecost they were accustomed to assume that the promise had been fulfilled, and that they were living as the Father’s children with the other members of the Divine family, looking up to the Divine Son as their head.1 [Note: J. LI. Davies, Spiritual Apprehension, 351.]

(3) Let us not think of any break at death. The course of life, life of the plant, the animal, the soul, is maintained along lines of uninterrupted continuity. To-day is born from the womb of yesterday, and to-morrow will be the offspring of to-day. There is nothing in Scripture or in nature to sustain the supposition that the highway of our life once begun is gashed with any abyss of meaningless suspension, that threads are broken and have to be knotted together again, and that the little territory we know as our present life is islanded from all that great continent of being that fills to the full the area of the eternal to-morrow. The soul’s celestial life is not distinct from its terrestrial life save in the sense in which the blossom is distinct from the bud. We are never to be rooted out from those beginnings of spiritual life in which we are already planted and secured.

The soul, like the plant, must be uncovered to the airs that blow across it from the distances, and bared to the baptism of the unfathomed sky by which it is overarched. The great world of spirit is nowhere if it is not here. The world of the blessed is not framed in walls. The beginnings of heaven are in the heavenly mind. This is part of the Father’s house and here are some of the mansions. Having referred to some of the lesser blessings by which life is enriched Wordsworth goes on to say:—

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise; …

But for those first affections

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake,

To perish never:

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.1 [Note: Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.]

(4) Is there no comfort in this? Is there no consolation in the hour of sorrow?

I once had a conversation with a lady who years before had lost her beloved husband. The relation between her and him had been emphatically a union of souls, one wherein the physical element had been very, very secondary. And yet when the hour of his dissolution arrived, and all that had been the visible expression of his personality, and all through which the tenderness of his devotion had sweetly disclosed itself, had been laid beneath the sod, the more material side of her nature at first asserted itself and for many days it remained the persistent and despairing passion of her heart to tarry by his graveside, and to seek comfort and to find a kind of companionship in clinging as it were to the silent and hidden memorials of a life that was done, of a spirit that was fled.

But one day looking upon the grave she suddenly said to herself: “The thing that lies there is not my husband. His spirit and his love do not belong to the realm of decay. Soul lives: love is one of the eternals.” And there in the midst of an acre dedicated to corruption she gathered herself up from the morbid debility of despair, forsook the grave, bade a permanent good-bye to putrefaction, and in the sweet and chastened vigour of a nature to which a new revelation had come, flung herself out upon the support of the great love of the heavenly Father, and in quietness and absolute assurance went on into the years brightened and warmed by an experience of the things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard.1 [Note: C. H. Parkhurst, A Little Lower than the Angels, 226.]

Faithful friends, it lies, I know

Pale, and white, and cold as snow;

And ye say: “Abdallah’s dead”—

Weeping at the feet and head.

I can see your falling tears;

I can hear your sighs and prayers;

Yet I smile and whisper this:

I am not the thing you kiss!

Cease your tears and let it lie,—

It was mine, it is not I.

Sweet friends! what the women lave

For the last sleep of the grave

Is a hut which I am quitting,—

Is a garment no more fitting,—

Is a cage from which, at last,

Like a bird my soul has passed.

Love the inmate, not the room;

The weaver, not the garb,—the plume

Of the eagle, not the bars

That kept him from the splendid stars!

Loving friends, oh rise and dry

Straightway every weeping eye!

What ye lift upon the bier

Is not worth a single tear.

’Tis an empty sea-shell—one

Out of which the pearl is gone.

The shell is broken, it lies there;

The pearl, the All, the Soul, is here.

’Tis an earthen jar whose lid

Allah sealed, the while it hid

That treasure of his treasury—

A mind that loved him; let it lie.

Let the shards be earth once more,

Since the gold is in his store.

Allah glorious! Allah good!

Now thy world is understood—

Now the long, long wonder ends;

Yet ye weep, my foolish friends,

While the man whom you call dead,

In unbroken bliss instead,

Lives and loves you,—lost, ’tis true,

In the light that shines for you.

But in the light you cannot see,

In undisturbed felicity—

In a perfect Paradise,

And a life that never dies.

Farewell! friends—yet not farewell;

Where I go you, too, shall dwell.

I am gone before your face—

A moment’s worth, a little space.

When you come where I have stept

Ye will wonder why ye wept;

Ye will know by true love taught

That here is all, and there is naught.

2. The Father’s House is heaven.—When a saint draws near the appointed span of life, more and more do his thoughts go out to heaven. He dwells on heaven with an increasing joy, as you may read in many a biography. And it is, indeed, one of the last rewards of a life that has been spiritually true, that when the shadows of the twilight fall, it hails the glory dawning in Immanuel’s Land. So it was with Jesus Christ our Lord. He did not hail the cross, He hailed the glory of which the cross was a God-appointed part. And ever, as He drew nearer to the end, He dwelt more intensely on Immanuel’s Land, until at last for the joy that was set before Him, He endured the cross, despising the shame. For these reasons, as well as from the context, there is no doubt as to the first meaning of our words. Primarily, and as spoken to the Twelve, the House of the Father was the heavenly glory.

(1) And so, first of all, Christ’s words give us assurance of life beyond death. Nothing evinces more conclusively the difference between Jesus Christ and other men who have lived and died upon the earth than the confidence and certainty with which He spoke of the invisible world. Not only is there no doubt or hesitation in His language, but there is no ignorance. He never says: “Now I know in part.” On the contrary, we feel that He knew much more than He has disclosed; and that if He had chosen to do so, He could have made yet more specific revelations concerning the solemn world beyond the tomb. For all other men, there are two worlds—the one here and the other beyond. Their utterances respecting this visible and tangible sphere are positive and certain; but respecting the invisible realm they guess, and they hope, or they doubt altogether. But for our Lord, there was, practically, only one world. He is as certain in respect to the invisible as to the visible; and knows as fully concerning the one as the other.

No mind unassisted by revelation ever reached the pitch of faith in the unseen and eternal that was attained by Socrates. But he was assailed by doubts; and he confesses his ignorance of the region beyond the tomb. After that lofty and solemn description in the Phaedo (113, 114) of the different places assigned after death to the good, and incorrigibly bad, and those who have led a middle life between the two, he adds: “To affirm positively, indeed, that these things are exactly as I have described them, does not become a man of discernment. But that either this or something of the kind takes place in regard to our souls and their habitation—seeing that the soul is evidently immortal—appears to me most fitting to be believed, and worthy of hazard for one who trusts in the reality. For the hazard is noble, and it is right to charm ourselves with such views as with enchantments.” How different is the impression made upon us by these noble but hesitating words, from that which was made upon John the Baptist by our Lord’s manner and teaching upon such points, as indicated in his testimony: “He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth.” How different is Plato’s dimness of perception, his merely hopeful conjecture respecting another life, from the calm and authoritative utterance of Him who said to Nicodemus: “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen. And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.” How different is the utterance of the human philosopher from that of Him who said to the cavilling Jews: “Ye are from beneath, I am from above; I go my way, and whither I go, ye cannot come; I proceeded forth, and came from God; Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?” How different are the words of Socrates from the language of Him who in a solemn prayer to the Eternal God spake the words, blasphemous if falling from the lips of any merely finite being: “O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” Christ, then, speaks of heaven and immortal life as an eye-witness. The eternal world was no “dim, undiscovered country” for Him; and therefore His words and tones are those of one who was “native, and to the manner born.”1 [Note: W. G. T. Shedd, Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 171.]

I am persuaded that Tennyson and Lightfoot were right when they said that the doctrine of the New Testament is the doctrine of the other life. Many are the blessings that spring up, flower-like, in the track of faith. Here, by fidelity and by love, we may enjoy God as well as glorify Him; but the hope of the New Testament is beyond the years of time. As Bunyan put it, “Children, the milk and honey are beyond this wilderness.”2 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 166.]

Yes! of all words that have been spoken upon earth, these have done the most to dispel the darkness beyond the grave, and to give secure expectations to men as they approach it.3 [Note: Bernard.]

For ever since from the portal

Of chaos came forth man,

The longing for life immortal

Hath coloured every plan.

Yes, life, new life, is ever

The surety that nature shows,

And to this one law for ever

The infinite system goes.

So close up your ranks, my brothers,

And with hearts too high to fail,

Let us say “Farewell” while the others

On the other side cry, “Hail!”

(2) Again, the words tell us that we may conceive of heaven as a place. The disciples watched Jesus disappearing into the cloud which received Him out of their sight, and stood for a long time gazing up into the sky after Him as if expecting to catch another glimpse or see Him come back. Where did He go? We believe that He took with Him our human form, bearing even the marks of the crucifixion. He must be somewhere, and God’s house in some sense must be a place. Doubtless we are usually too crass in our conception both of Christ and of heaven, and before it can be a place, heaven must be first a state; yet we can scarcely resist the conclusion that in some sense it must be a place also. If we, at least, are to live again and be clothed upon with our body which is from heaven, we must have some place to live in. God is a spirit, for Him a house seems not so necessary; but as for us, we must live somewhere, and the Father’s house, into which at the last we are to be gathered, must be a place. Somewhere in His great universe, in the infinite realms of space, God must have a place which He calls His home—a house of many mansions to which, one by one, He welcomes His children.

It is here distinctly implied that heaven is a place, a definite locality. I do not contend, indeed, that the phrase, “I go to prepare a place for you,” of necessity involves the assertion of locality; for the word “place” may simply mean here, as elsewhere, space or room. But the whole description of heaven here given implies locality. It is a father’s house, and there are many mansions, i.e., residences in it; and the disciples are to have a place in it; and, what is equally suggestive, Christ has to go away from the earth to get to it, and to come back again to the earth to fetch His people to it. The whole of the discourse seems built upon the idea of definite locality.1 [Note: W. Roberts.]

(3) But the words of Jesus tell us also that if heaven is a place, it is before that a state; it is the knowledge of heavenly things; it is communion with God, the vision of God as Father, and consciousness of ourselves as His children. He manifests Himself in many ways. The whole earth is full of His glory, but some of the manifestations are higher than others. From nature up to Christ He reveals Himself, and in heaven that manifestation will be perfected.

Sometimes it is a pain that we know so little of God and of the things that are unseen and eternal; sometimes they lose their reality to us, and our vision of God is dimmed and obscured and clouded, our sense of His presence vague and dull, our consciousness of His Fatherhood fitful and uncertain. How seldom we truly feel at home with God! Like the Psalmist, we remember Him and are troubled; instead of the love and affection of the child there is coldness, distrust, and a sense of distance; we are not brightened as we should be by the perfectness of His sympathy and the abundance of His provision. In a world that is full of God, in lives that are daily loaded with His benefits, we fail so to see Him as to be made glad with the light of His countenance. Times there are, doubtless, when God is very near, and joy fills our hearts, and our devotion seems perfect; but for most of us, it is all our trouble that God is not nearer, consciously nearer, dwelling in our house, standing at our right hand, a source of constant inspiration and gladness. Oh, the pain of those days and hours when He seems to have forsaken us and left us to our own poor resources and devices, when we begin to wonder if we have ever known Him, if He has ever called us to His service, if He is really on our side to help and shield and strengthen us! Oh, those days, when we cannot pray, when the heavens are as brass, and no prayer will move in our hearts, and life seems joyless and labour in vain! If you have felt that pain, if ever in your heart you have known what it is to struggle for the consciousness of God’s approval and the knowledge of His presence, it will be a kindling, inspiring, uplifting thought that the time is coming when we shall be children again in our Father’s house, trustful, glad, free from fear—a household dwelling with God under the same roof, knit together as one great family brightened by the Father’s presence. There will be nothing then to hinder our communion; there will be no days of darkness and uncertainty and doubt; we shall know God in His own home, know Him as children know their father in the freedom and unchecked familiarity of our common domestic life.1 [Note: D. Fairweather, Bound in the Spirit, 155.]

3. Heaven is home.—In presence of the shadow of death which was casting its thick gloom over the company of the disciples in the upper room, Jesus pointed them to His Father’s house of many mansions, where, after all the separations of earth, they would be gathered together with Him. So then heaven is only another name for home, that sacred, much-loved, familiar name which calls up thoughts we love to linger on, of all that is best and holiest in our life. There is nothing we know so much about, where it is, how it looks, the familiar walls and rooms and windows, the faces of loved ones who move about in it, inseparably bound up with our tenderest associations and brightest hopes.

One of the first things of which we become conscious in this world is—home. It grows and clings around us with multiplied associations and deepening spell during all our growing years. To leave it is to young man or maiden sometimes like the pangs of death. To turn to it again in thought and desire from scenes of change and strife, or from the shores of a distant land, is like the daily bread of the heart, a part of religion itself. To come home again after absence—either in health and joy, laden with the fruits of prosperity, or wearied, and baffled, and sick, and dying—is the very instinct of the soul. Home! the soldier thinks of it on the battle-field, and the sailor on the stormy sea, and the traveller amid the strange scenes of a foreign land, and many a stricken man in the fever-ward of the hospital, and many a lonely wanderer of the street, and many a criminal in the jail. Visions of its freshness and purity come floating around some men all their life long; and follow them whithersoever they go. Sometimes, when they have gone all the allotted way, and the end is coming fast, they go back again in memory, and with instinctive and mysterious love, to the home of childhood, and its tender sunshine and its sweet shade come flickering over the dying bed, and often amid these simple hallowed thoughts the dying comes. The strifes and the honours of manhood are all forgotten, and the thirsty home-sick soul must drink at the fountains of the youthful time, and see in that light of heaven that “lies about us in our infancy,” and so fall asleep like a child, unknowingly, rocked by a loving hand, in the cradle of death. Thus full many a time the first home becomes the type and the very threshold of the highest and the best. The wearied soul in its dreams and yearnings is seeking the first home, groping through the shadows of death to find the door, and looking for father’s or mother’s face, when lo! there is the glow and warmth of the heavenly “House,” and chanting in the air the music of the new song, and the sweet light of the perfect love on every face, and for the newcomer the encircling of the everlasting arms! Oh, sweet sleep of death that has such glad awaking! Happy close of life’s day, whether it has been spent in storm or in calm, if it brings us safely within the portals of that house from which we shall go no more out.1 [Note: A. Raleigh, Quiet Resting-Places, 394.]

What joys are lost, what hopes are given,

As thro’ this death-struck world we roam.

We think awhile that home is heaven;

We learn at length that heaven is home.2 [Note: Bishop Moule.]

4. How, then, is heaven a home?

(1) The Father is there.—It is the “Father’s house.” It is a paternal home. This is needed to make it a home in any sense; needed to give the heart rest either on earth or in heaven. Men who inquire into the facts and laws of the world, and find no God in it, have made themselves homeless. Men who have found human affection, but no God beneath it, have found only the shadow of a home. Thought and affection are shallow, short-lived things without Him who sets the solitary in families,—the Father of spirits. It is to teach us this that God has made a father’s love the bond of a true human household.

God will not only reveal Himself to us in wonderful ways, and give us a constant sense of His presence with us, He will reveal Himself as our Father. We can imagine many forms of Divine revelation that would give us no permanent delight, and that would contribute very little to the development of the higher forms of moral and spiritual perfection. It is possible to become weary of the grandeur and the vastness of some of the aspects of physical nature,—weary of the ocean, weary of the immensities of the starry heavens, weary of the roar and rush of the waters of Niagara, weary of the awful loneliness and desolation of the Matterhorn. They reveal God, but they do not reveal those elements of His life which are nearest to ourselves, which solicit trust, which create love, and which inspire delight. At home God will reveal Himself in other ways. There may be within sight the most majestic achievements of His power and wisdom; we may be environed with the most gracious illustrations of His delight in beauty; but we shall know Him as we have never known Him before—as our Father. He will be righteous,—but He will lay aside something of the awfulness of His righteousness; infinitely wise and strong,—but His wisdom and strength will appear, not in forms to oppress and confound us, but in forms to excite our wonder and delight. We shall be very near to Him—near as the children of a king to their father when he has laid aside for a time the pomp and cares of State, and is at once finding and giving joy among those who are dearest to him.1 [Note: R. W. Dale, Christ and the Future Life, 41.]

You recollect how Joseph, when he spoke with his brethren and asked them of their welfare, could not rest until he had drawn an answer to his question, “Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spake? Is he yet alive?” And when the hope of seeing him was near, how he made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel his father, and fell on his neck and wept; and Israel said unto Joseph, “Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive.” We may feel sure that the restored affection of his brethren, even Benjamin’s, could not have filled the place in his heart had his father been no more; and the good of the land of Egypt would have been empty, and its glory gone, without his father to look on and share it with him.2 [Note: J. Ker, Sermons, ii. 258.]

(2) The children are there.—It is one of the loveliest of the ideas of Christ that the Kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of the child. As men hover round a thought dear to them, and though they leave it still return to it, so Christ came back again and again to this as if He could never tire of it. Children were sacred in His eyes, the Kingdom of God belonged to them, and to them God revealed His secrets. Children were the examples and model of the Christian life. The disciples were to be as children. Except they became as little children they could not see the Kingdom. To be humble like them was to be greatest. When they prayed, they were to begin, “Our Father”; they were to live as children taking no thought for the morrow; and when they died, they were to go home to the Father’s house and still be children.

Do you want the key to the religious life? Most of you have it at hand in your own families. The Word of God is very nigh you if you have ears to hear it. Christ could find no better illustration of that trust and love and sympathy which should exist between God and us now, and no better illustration of the future life of communion between God and His saints, than that with which any happy home amongst ourselves can furnish us. Christ says we are to be young again: we are to be as children in the happy, free, unanxious days of old when no care crossed our minds, and the world of thought and feeling had no perplexities, and all things were our own by the joy they gave us, by the love we bore them. These were the days when we inherited the earth: we had a kingdom fit for any king, greater than any possessed, and our wealth brought no pain or envy, because our hearts were simple and our minds were pure, and every day was bright, and everything a wonder. Does it not soothe our hearts, tired with pain and sorrow, with very weariness that nothing is fresh and new, that over all the dull light of commonplace is cast, when, in the light of Christ’s words, we realize that God regards us still as children who will yet dwell with Him and with each other, one family, in His own house?1 [Note: D. Fairweather, Round in the Spirit, 157.]

(3) Christ Himself is there.—Our Lord has taught us to connect heaven with the thought of Himself—“My” Father’s house. Heaven is the house of Christ’s Father. It is as when an arch is built, and last the keystone is put in which binds it all into one; or as when a palace has been raised with all its rooms and their furniture complete, but it is dark or dimly seen by lights carried from place to place. The sun rises, and by the central dome the light is poured into all the corridors and chambers, and by the windows there are prospects over hill and valley and river. The Lord Jesus Christ is the sun of this house.

Let us remember that these are His words. We must not take them rashly out of His lips or borrow them for ourselves, without considering very reverently that they belong in their first and proper sense to Him who is the only begotten of the Father, who was with God and was God in the beginning. As He left the world, Jesus said indeed, “I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and my God and your God.” That and links us to Himself; but it is a bridge thrown across an infinite chasm, spanning the distance between the Divine and the human. For He had given it to be understood that God was “his own Father making himself equal with God.” Heaven was to Jesus Christ “My Father’s house”; by this title He brings it near to His disciples and lights it up with welcome.2 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 187.]

Heaven is the Father’s house of Jesus Christ; and as “a son over his own house,” He invites His friends and promises them places in it,—He, the well-beloved, unto whom the Father has committed all judgment. “Father,” He prayed in the hearing of these men, “I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am”; and He said to the dying robber on the cross: “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” His word opens heaven to men His fellowship assures our place there as nothing else can do.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 190.]

II

The Many Mansions

The Greek word here translated “mansions” is the same as that in the 23rd verse of this chapter, where it is said, “We will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” It is a somewhat uncommon word, not elsewhere found in the New Testament, and once only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Possibly its use a second time in this chapter may not be unintentional. As the Father and the Son make an earthly abode in the hearts of those who prove their love by keeping Christ’s commandments, so also shall heavenly abodes be prepared for those who love Him. There is an interchange, as it were, between earth and heaven, man abiding with God, and God with man.

Three things seem to be suggested by the phrase “many mansions”—Permanence, Spaciousness, Variety.

1. Permanence.—It is a place of “mansions”—both the English word and the Greek intimate this—a place where the dwellers shall abide, like a city to wanderers in the wilderness. “You have known Me,” He says to His disciples, “for a few years, moving to and fro, but I leave you for the city of God, where you also shall enter in, to go out no more at all.”

Indeed, the assurance of an abiding union fills the entire discourse. With this thought our Lord would soothe the hearts of His friends, and His own heart that suffered with them. He seeks in this way to heal the sore wound of their bereavement. A dreadful change is coming for them. They will be scattered, He tells them, as sheep without a shepherd—sheep in the midst of wolves! They are to be friendless, homeless, hunted, martyred men. But beyond it all, for them as for Him, there is rest, safety, permanence,—an everlasting home. “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go out thence no more.” This is the crown of comfort,—the promise of an eternal inheritance.

The child asks you when you give him anything: “Can I have it to keep?” It is the immortal spirit within him that speaks. Here our Lord satisfies this immortal craving in man, and speaks of abiding places in the heavens—not tents, which you no sooner erect than you pull down again, and give back to the waste that spot which for a brief night you have associated with your hearth and home, but abiding places, from which we shall “go no more out for ever.” Some time ago I revisited the village in which I was born. I looked for the chapel-house where as a child I spent many happy days. To my surprise, it was no longer there, but another house had been built on the same site. Then I turned to the garden where I had often played; but the greater part of it had been added to the adjoining graveyard. “Ah!” I thought, “there is no abiding home on earth, and every garden, sooner or later, has graves dug in it; but in my Father’s house are many abiding places.”1 [Note: D. Davies.]

In Lord Tennyson’s biography a story is related of Napoleon. A friend was urging on him how much more glorious the artist’s immortality is than the soldier’s. He asked how long the best-painted and best-preserved picture would last. “About eight hundred years,” he was told. “Bah!” he exclaimed with contempt, “telle immortalité”—Such a poor immortality! It is my feeling. I want to live not for eight hundred years, nor for eighty times eight hundred, but for ever and ever. And God gives me my desire.2 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 377.]

2. Spaciousness.—“Neither pray I for these alone,” Jesus said, referring to His first followers; “but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.” The heart of the Redeemer went out to the unnumbered multitude of all kindreds and tongues, who should wash their robes and make them white in His blood and pass through tribulation to His Kingdom. The Heavenly City is a place of vast dimensions and boundless hospitality. Jesus is not afraid of inviting too many guests.

Death is not a closing so much as an opening—not a falling so much as a rising—not a going away so much as a coming home. It is the passing of a pilgrim from one mansion to another, from the winter to the summer residence, from one of the outlying provinces up nearer the central home. “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” This is not a chance expression, far less a mere figure of speech. There are many other expressions quite as large. We read of the third heavens, as if there were heavens above heavens, and again heavens above those. We read of Christ having “passed through all heavens” on His upward way, “that he might fill all things.” And of “heaven, even the heaven of heavens,” a place evidently spoken of as being of inconceivable grandeur and largeness, for it is said that even that cannot contain the infinite presence of God.

The Vatican is the largest palace in the world, with more than eleven thousand apartments. Nicholas v. (1447–55), the builder Pope, wished to make it the centre from which all the messengers of the spiritual empire should go forth. His aim was to unite in that palace all the Government offices and the dwellings of the cardinals. He died before he could carry out his vast design, and only a portion of it has ever been completed.

3. Variety.—Out of the idea of vastness arises almost necessarily the idea of an endless variety. At least it is so in this world. And surely we must not think of heaven as less than earth. The variety existing in God’s works here is one of the principal charms of the natural world. Not only has every country in the globe its distinctive qualities and natural productions, but within any one country what variety exists! In the land of our birth, without crossing any sea, we can find the region of perpetual snow, and some favoured spots where the flowers never die; ruggedness in one place, beauty in another; productiveness here, sterility there; and a never-ending variety running through the whole. No two faces in all the world, no two trees, no two flowers, no two blades of grass, could be pronounced exactly alike. Then we are almost bound to apply the analogy to the future life, and to believe that as there are “many mansions,” so the furnishing and adorning of them will be very various. One will not be as another. There will not only be room for all, but interest for all.

Do not the words “many mansions” bear witness to us of the largeness of God’s love, and the infinite varieties of His redeeming grace? May we not behold there the great intellect, now emptied of all pride? and the dull intellect, now learning, as it never learned in life, the wondrous things of God’s law? and, again, the penitent whose sins were as scarlet, but are now white as snow; who wandered far from his Father’s house, and felt the mighty famine, and almost perished with hunger, but at last—at last came to himself; and arose and came to his Father, and was welcomed with a warmth he had never dared to expect, and now in one of those “many mansions” yearns that others too may return while yet there is time? Yes! and there must be “places of abiding” where those who knew God but dimly learn to know Him more; where the poor and the neglected marvel at the breadth and depth of the gospel; where the children who died in infancy marvel at the blessedness of their elders who came out of great tribulation, and wonder what was that strange earth which has been the scene of so many tears, and so much repentance; where those who in early boyhood have slept in Jesus can see that the call was a summons of love, and that the blow which well-nigh broke the hearts of parents, and saddened the musings of companions, saved them from perils unsuspected, and kept them safe in Christ’s arms.1 [Note: H. M. Butler, in Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 308.]

(1) There is variety of Race.—The Father’s house is ample enough in its great hospitality to receive all God’s children from far and near. In it there are many abodes, many dwelling-places; within its hospitable shelter there will be room for saints of all ages and types and beliefs, of all nations and kindreds and tongues. They shall come from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of heaven.

(2) There is variety of Disposition.—Was there ever a little company of men more diverse in disposition than the Twelve? That little company who followed Christ would almost seem to be the world in miniature. Thomas was there, the man of melancholy, who haunted the dim margins of despair. Peter was there, with his big and generous heart, swift to act, equally swift to speak. Philip was there, practical and cautious; and Simon Zelotes, a fiery insurgent. And John was there, with a mighty heart on fire, and ready to call down fire on the Samaritans, and yet even already, under the grace of Christ, taming its passion into the flame of love. Would there be room in heaven for all these, so diverse and so different from each other? If they quarrelled as they journeyed to Jerusalem, would the New Jerusalem hold them all in peace? We can picture Jesus at the table, smiling upon that strangely assorted company, and saying to them, “Let not your heart be troubled: in my Father’s house are many mansions.”

There was an article in a religious weekly the other day, suggested by the recent death of Mark Twain. The article was headed, A Land of No Laughter? In other words, as the writer put it further on, “Can we find a place for laughter in heaven, or is it a land of no laughter?” The point is that it could be put in that way at all.1 [Note: R. Whyte.]

(3) There is variety of Experience.—There are those who have often doubted their acceptance and forgiveness, who have walked in darkness and with difficulty stayed themselves on God, questioning whether they might not in the end be castaways; and it stands inscribed, “Thy sins, which are many, are forgiven thee.” There are those who have felt the want of the likeness they should bear to God, and of the love and gratitude which should bestow it on them. They take home to themselves the reproach, “Their spot is not the spot of his children: is not he thy Father that hath bought thee?” For them it is written, “Ye backsliding children, I will heal your backslidings.” “And they shall see his face; and his name shall be on their foreheads.” There are those who have felt all through life as if God were turned to be their enemy, and were fighting against them. Their desires have been thwarted, their hearts pierced through and through with losses and crosses and cruel wounds, and failure upon failure has followed their plans. But it is written, “Whom the Lord loveth he correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth”; and under it, “All things work together for good to them that love God.” And there are those who have yearnings of heart to feel God’s presence close and constant, to hear Him and speak with Him, and be sure He is not, as some would say to them, a voice or a vision or a dream of their fond imagination. They have felt it at times so certain that they could say, “The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” But clouds roll in on the assurance, and the voice seems far off or silent, as if it were among the trees of the garden; and it is toward evening, and there is doubt and fear. But it shall be “as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain”; and His name shall be written as the “Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

By comparing my experience with that of others, you may perceive how different ways God leads different souls. But though a man should be led in a way different from that of all other men: yet, if his eye be at all times fixed on his Saviour; if his constant aim be to do His will; if all his desires tend to Him; if in all trials he can draw strength from Him; if he fly to Him in all troubles, and in all temptations find salvation in His blood—in this there can be no delusion. And whosoever is thus minded, however or whenever it began, is surely reconciled to God through His Song of Solomon 1 [Note: John Wesley’s Journal (Standard Edition), ii. 47.]

Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all,

Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold,

Rend each man’s temple’s veil and bid it fall,

That we may know that Thou hast been of old:

Gather us in.

Gather us in: we worship only Thee;

In varied names we stretch a common hand;

In diverse forms a common soul we see;

In many ships we seek one spirit-land;

Gather us in.

Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow-light,

Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven;

Thou art the fulness of our partial sight;

We are not perfect till we find the seven;

Gather us in.

Thine is the mystic life great India craves,

Thine is the Parsee’s sin-destroying beam,

Thine is the Buddhist’s rest from tossing waves,

Thine is the empire of vast China’s dream;

Gather us in.

Thine is the Roman’s strength without his pride,

Thine is the Greek’s glad world without its graves,

Thine is Judæa’s law with love beside,

The truth that censures and the grace that saves;

Gather us in.

Some seek a Father in the heavens above,

Some ask a human image to adore,

Some crave a spirit vast as life and love:

Within Thy mansions we have all and more;

Gather us in.

The House of Many Mansions

Literature

Abbey (C. J.), The Divine Love, 269.

Campbell (R. J.), A Faith for To-day, 331.

Cox (S.), Expository Essays and Discourses, 106.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.

Davies (J. Ll.), Spiritual Apprehension, 348.

Ellicott (C. J.), Sermons at Gloucester, 233.

Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.

Findlay (G. G.), The Things Above, 188.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 219.

Hall (N.), Gethsemane, 314.

Horder (W. G.), The Other-World, 99.

Ker (J.), Sermons, i. 245, ii. 247.

MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 71.

Morison (J.), Holiness in Living and Happiness in Dying, 202.

Morrison (G. H.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 83.

New (C.), Sermons in Hastings, 311.

Oosterzee (J. J. van), The Year of Salvation, i. 442.

Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 214.

Parkhurst (C.H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 227.

Pierson (A. T.), The Hopes of the Gospel, 121.

Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting-Places, 387.

Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 167.

Shepard (J. W.), Light and Life, 1.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 377.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 87.

Tipple (S. A.), Days of Old, 123.

Wilkes (H.), The Bright and Morning Star, 272.

Christian World Pulpit, ix. 90 (Roberts); xxix. 10 (Davies); lviii. 21 (Aked); lxv. 14 (Hale).

Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 307 (Butler).

The Reliability of the Redeemer

If it were not so, I would have told you.—John 14:2.

One of the most striking traits of the teaching of Jesus is its reticence concerning many things which one would like to know. Through all Christian history people have gone to the Gospels for answers to questions which seemed to them of the highest importance, and concerning which churches have quarrelled, and they have been met by silence. It is the same with the first disciples of Jesus. They bring Him their questions about His own fate, and He answers, “Let not your heart be troubled: I go to prepare a place for you.” They ask Him whither He is going, and He replies, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you,” as though it were not necessary that He should tell them more.

I have wondered most of my life why Christ spoke these words at the time He did. They seem unsatisfactorily explained, whether connected with the first clause of the phrase or with the last clause. Dr. Marcus Dods comments: “Had there been no such place and no possibility of preparing it, He necessarily would have told them, because the very purpose of His leaving was to prepare a place for them.” Somehow this does not find me. Neither is Dr. John Ker, also a writer of genuine insight, much more satisfactory. He says: “There might be some misgivings in their minds, and these words are thrown in to quiet them. Had you been deceiving yourselves with falsehood, I should have felt bound to undeceive you.” It is along these tracks that most of the explanations run.

But should we not rather say that Christ spoke these words with a smile? “If it were not so, I would have told you. You know My way by this time. It has been My wont to check and thwart and dash your hopes. Things you desired, things you believed, things you dreamt of mightily—I have told you over and over again that they were not so. Now you are right at last. You thought that there were many mansions in the Father’s house. You clung to that faith when the rest went. I knew it all the time, and I never said a word to contradict you, because it was a true and sure hope, truer and surer and sweeter than you knew. If it had not been so, I would have told you; but it is so. This time you may let your hearts go free; beyond death there are no disappointments.”1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.]

Still on the lips of all we question,

The finger of God’s silence lies;

Will the lost hands in ours be folded?

Will the shut eyelids ever rise?

Oh, friend, no proof beyond this yearning,

This outreach of our hearts we need;

God will not mock the hope He giveth,

No love He prompts shall vainly plead.

Then let us stretch our hands in darkness,

And call our loved ones o’er and o’er;

Some day their arms will close about us,

And the old voices speak once more.

There are many matters in the short parenthetical sentence, and they all make for strength. Let us touch four things—Christ’s Knowledge, His Tenderness, His Confirmation of our Human Instincts, and His Encouragement.

1. Christ’s knowledge.—The text is a simple parenthesis in the midst of one of His greatest teachings, but it seems more than the most elaborate argument. He is speaking about the future life as the hope and consolation of those whom death bereaves, and He affirms concerning it some very definite things—things which are a clear addition to human knowledge about it. And the manner of His affirmation is as remarkable as its matter. He calmly assumes His own certain knowledge. He is not an inquirer about the unseen world. He does not, like Plato, rest His teachings upon reasonings and probabilities. He speaks with absolute certainty. Clearly He believed Himself to have certain knowledge.

We have in this testimony of Jesus our surest guarantee of the existence of the heavenly world. Others have guessed, hoped, dreamed, speculated, poetized about heaven: Jesus knows. For He has come down from heaven. The world into which our dead pass one by one, the veil closing instantly behind them without a sign or token sent back to tell us how they fare, the world into which our prayers are sent evoking no audible response—He has dwelt in that world, ruled over it, and is the Master of its secrets; and He calls it paradise, He calls it My Father’s house. “I speak unto you,” He says, “the things that I have seen with the Father.… We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” So He declared to Nicodemus, referring to heavenly as well as to earthly things. How these quiet words of Jesus reassure us, bewildered with the haze of our modern doubt!

Away down in the darkness, in the heart of the great steamer, the engineer stands. He never sees how the vessel moves. He does not know where she is going. It is not his duty to know. It is his only to answer every signal, to start his engine, to quicken or slow its motion, to reverse it, just as he is directed by the one whose part it is to see. He has nothing whatever to do with the vessel’s course. He sees not an inch of the sea.

It is not our part to guide our life in this world, amid its tangled affairs. It is ours just to do our duty, our Master’s bidding. Christ’s hand is on the helm. He sees all the future. He pilots us. Let us learn to thank God that we cannot know the future, that we need not know it. Christ knows it, and it is better to go on in the dark with Him, letting Him lead, than to go alone in the light, and choose our own path.1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 85.]

Who knows? God knows: and what He knows

Is well and best.

The darkness hideth not from Him, but glows

Clear as the morning or the evening rose

Of east or west.

Wherefore man’s strength is to sit still:

Not wasting care

To antedate to-morrow’s good or ill;

Yet watching meekly, watching with goodwill,

Watching to prayer.

Some rising or some setting ray

From east or west,

If not to-day, why then another day

Will light each dove upon the homeward way

Safe to her nest.2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 138.]

2. Christ’s tenderness.—“If it were not so, I would have told you.” It is a parenthesis of singular significance and emphasis, full of human considerateness and tenderness. It is a measure of the greatness of the revelation which He was making to them. He would not trifle with this great human hope of immortality. Had there been no such satisfaction for it He would have told them. It was impossible for Him to deceive them with a false or uncertain hope, or to permit them to be deceived. He came to teach them about spiritual realities, and this was one of them.

Somewhere in the East Tennessee mountains a craggy bluff of limestone rises sheer from the plain, some five hundred feet in height. At its base lies the peaceful valley stretching away into the distance. A storm gathers on the horizon. The clouds fly rapidly together, the lightning leaps, there is one terrific thunder-clap. The bluff echoes the roar of the storm. Down on the side of the bluff a stunted bush is growing from the scanty soil that has drifted into a fissure of rock. On the bush a bird sits and swings and sings. The bluff echoes the song of the bird. At the base of the cliff a little child has fallen on the stones and is crying over the hurt of the fall. The bluff echoes the child’s cry. Yonder in the cabin door a woman sits at her work, and as she works, the words of an old hymn float out on the open air. The bluff echoes the woman’s hymn. Christ is like the echoing bluff. He catches every note that issues from human hearts, and in responding He joins the strength of the rock to a tenderness that beats swift and helpful sympathy for every sob and song that trembles in the air about Him.

3. Christ’s confirmation of human instincts.—There are some beliefs embedded in the native soil of our hearts; they grow there of themselves, and we need no proof of their existence or reality. One of these is the hope of immortality. No savage so barbarous, no religion so material, as to be without its hope and its paradise, and its realms of the blessed, where there is rest and peace after the toil and battle of life. And Jesus in adding, “If it were not so, I would have told you,” seems to guarantee to us as correct interpreters of God’s mind to men these deep instincts of human nature. He who ever told His disciples the truth, who kept back nothing that was for their good though He should pain and shame them thereby, would surely have told them if these hopes of future blessedness were doomed to disappointment. It is impossible that Christ should deceive.

The unspeakable value of these words of the Lord Jesus is that they vindicate a native and ineradicable instinct of the soul. They set His seal on the sanctified use of the imagination in religion. They proclaim the soul to be a freedman of the universe, with a right to exercise its faculties in picturing to itself an authentic ideal. “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” As though He had said, I know you have your dreams of God, of heaven, of a perfect life beyond the tumults of time and the river of death. You think of Him as the Father, the Holy One and the Good, too wise to err, too good to be unkind; whose love is as the salt sea, “washing in pure ablution round earth’s human shores,” whose mercy is infinite as the sky; whose will for all is eternal life;—you dream of a state where that holy will is ideally done, and where the spirits of just men made perfect serve Him day and night in blessedness. And these dreams are true; “If it were not so, I would have told you.”1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones, Faith and Verification, 220.]

4. Christ’s encouragement.—Life for many of us is grey and dim. Let the glory of eternity break through the clouds. We are wanting, many of us—how many!—in decision, in earnestness, in elastic energy: let us find vigour where a thousand saints have found it—at the fountain of immortal strength. Life is full of disappointments; the horizons narrow with the advancing years: let the sadness sometimes forget itself in the anticipation of eternal joy, and the poverty in the anticipation of eternal wealth. The hopes that look for fulfilment within these mortal years often fail, but the great hope is beyond the reach of vicissitude and peril; and while we are learning with sorrow the narrowing limits of our mortal strength, let us exult in the ages which are to bring a perpetual expansion to all our powers and to all our joys. Half a gospel will never give any man the whole of the Christian redemption. In the gospel of Christ, life and immortality have been brought to light, and a universal spirit that should distinguish the children of God, a magnanimous superiority to the vicissitudes of this earthly life, the courage to attempt great duties, and the fortitude to bear without complaint great sorrows—these come not merely from the pathetic memories of the past, from the incarnation of Christ, from His sorrows, from His death, but from the endless ages of righteousness, of wisdom, of peace, of joy, and of glory, that Christ has promised us in the home of God.

He has brought life and immortality to light. Trusting Him, we can think of our bereavements calmly, and look forward joyfully to the hour of our departure. For those who believe in Christ, death is not annihilation but victory, not separation but reunion; it is not the soul’s extinction, but its birth into a brighter, purer, larger life. It means “ease after toil, port after stormy seas,” home after changeful, perilous journeyings, the frail tents of the wilderness exchanged for the shining gates and undecaying walls of the city of God.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 210.]

As it were better, youth

Should strive, through acts uncouth,

Toward making, than repose on aught found made;

So, better, age, exempt

From strife, should know, than tempt

Further. Thou waited’st age: wait death nor be afraid!2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi ben Ezra.]

The Reliability of the Redeemer

Literature

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 151.

Cobern (C. M.), The Stars and the Book, 123.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.

Dawson (W. J.), The Church of To-morrow, 105.

Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.

Findlay (G. G.), The Things Above, 188.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 219.

Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 222.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210.

Morrison (G. H.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 83.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 150.

Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting-Places, 387.

Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 167.

Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 307 (Butler).

The Preparation and the Reception

I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.—John 14:2-3.

One does not wonder that the disciples were troubled when told that their Master was about to die. There is no anguish so sharp and desolating as that which bereavement causes. He who had been to them infinitely more than friend or brother, whom they had loved with a love having all the reverence of worship and all the intensity of passion, whose life had been their ideal of goodness, whose love had been their blessedness, whose Divine teaching and working had been their glory—He was about to be taken from them; they are to be bereaved of more than affection ever lost before. Never had sorrow so great an occasion. The grief of bereavement is measured by the greatness of possession. Only those who had known Him could know what it was to lose the man Christ Jesus. Therefore “sorrow had filled their hearts,” the depth of which was attested alike by the vehemence of St. Peter and the tenderness of St. John. His comfort for them was, trust in Him as the immortal Christ, who would go to prepare a place for them, and come again to receive them to Himself.

I

The Preparation

“I go to prepare a place for you.”

These words are so simple that a child or an unlettered peasant might understand them. Christ has gone to prepare a place for us in the house of His Father; what more need we know? This is enough to give us the exhilarating hope and joy which are necessary for righteousness; this is enough to invigorate the faith which is agitated by the mysteries that environ us; this is enough to sustain the fortitude which is likely to give way under the recurring shocks of earthly trouble.

1. The Going.—It is not so much the going as the preparation that is in His mind. Yet what a way was that by which He had to go. It was the way of Gethsemane, and the judgment-hall, and Calvary; it was the way of the cross and of the grave; the way of the resurrection and the ascending on high. It was thus He opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers, and thus He rendered possible for us life in the Father’s house.

(1) He goes because He first came. Christ came into this world not as a native but as a visitor, a messenger from another sphere. “I go my way,” He cries, “to him that sent me.” He returns to His rightful place, as a voyager setting sail to his native shore, as a son wending his way joyfully homewards when the task on which he set out is finished. What poets and philosophers have sometimes imagined concerning man, that he has descended by the passage of birth from some diviner realm of which he brings dim recollections with him, that

Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home,—

this was true in a sense deeper and grander than they had imagined, in the case of the Son of Man, our Lord Jesus Christ. He came from the bosom of the Father.

Nothing is more evident from the narrative of the Gospels than that Jesus made this claim; nothing is more certain than the fact itself, if His words are in any wise true. Listen to Him: “I came out from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father.” Language cannot be plainer or more positive than this. The gates of birth and of death alike are transparent to Jesus Christ; through both He sees His Father’s heaven.

(2) He goes because for our sakes He must go. It was necessary to part, necessary to leave them behind; nothing else would have snapped the chain which held them to this visible life which they knew, and in which they had known their Master; nothing but losing Him, and knowing why they had lost Him—that He had gone to prepare their place, the place where at last they should be with Him, and where He was with the Father for over. He went up on high: and then with tears and with great joy they understood the lesson that to give Him up was not to lose Him. Then they knew that to have Him out of sight was to have Him none the less. Then they knew that they parted with Him on earth to have One whom they had followed and conversed with, on the throne of heaven. Then they perceived that though their work and their sufferings might be for a while on earth, they themselves belonged to where their Master was gone; the place prepared for them was nothing less than the unutterable and never-changing glory into which He was withdrawn.

Wherever He would have His disciples go, He goes first Himself, and through the door which He has opened He draws them by His love. That is the whole philosophy of Christian culture. And that is the meaning of the Incarnation. God entered into human life; made Himself one with it as He only could have done with a nature that was originally one with His own. He became man as He could not have become brute or stone. Then in that human nature He outwent humanity. He opened yet unopened gates of human possibility. He showed what man might be, how great, how godlike! And by the love and oneness He has always been claiming man for the greatness whose possibility He showed.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 179.]

2. The Preparation.—“If I go,” He said. But “go” is a cold word. It tells of parting. There is a sigh of desolation in it, like the moaning of the wintry wind as it sweeps through the leafless branches of the trees in the dead of night. It was a word which filled the heart of the disciples with sorrow. They thought it the coldest word that they had ever heard from Him. It seemed to hang like an icicle upon the lips of the Christ. Only the satisfaction that He was going to prepare a place for them made the word bearable. “I go to prepare” are His words. To go, then, does not mean to forget. Christ’s exaltation is an exaltation to service. No trouble will be too great for Him in our interests. “Prepare.” God believes in preparation. He did not place man on earth without having first prepared the earth for him; and as the ages move we are more and more impressed with the extent of the preparation. From this we can understand better the meaning of the word “prepare” as applied to heaven. And, more, we can see better why our Lord should speak of “abiding places.” A home which takes so long in preparing must not be a transient one. In the Divine economy there is always a sublime relation between the means and the end.

When a guest is coming to the house, the hostess prepares. The rooms are there, the furniture is there, but the thoughtful, tender-hearted woman has something to do beyond making them ready. She prepares for the guest. This, she says to herself, is his favourite flower, his favourite book, and that little touch of kindness makes the welcome perfect. It may not be much that she is able to do, but the little means that she would fain do all. So Christ prepares for Peter, prepares for John, prepares for Thomas. He knows what they like, and He does not forget. So He prepares for His people through the generations till the end arrives.1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 169.]

I remember how once travelling in Syria the guide upon whom we wholly depended disappeared. By and by he came back to us as we rode along and told us where he had been: that in the village which we were approaching, and where we were to spend the night, his family lived; that he had ridden on to see that they were ready to receive him and to prepare quarters in their house for us, the travellers under his charge, and now came back to conduct us thither; and by and by he brought us where he belonged, and where through him provision had been made and a welcome was waiting for us.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 173.]

(1) There are two remarkable things about this statement. The first is that the master should prepare for the servant. This upsets the ordinary course of procedure. You are expecting to entertain some chosen friends. All your appointments are made; you have sent before your face servants in whom you have confidence, and have told them to do as you have commanded, that all things may be in readiness for the invited guests. This is customary; this is considered right. But Jesus Christ says to His servants,—such poor, incomplete, and blundering servants, too,—“I, your Lord and Master, go to prepare a place for you.” This is quite in keeping with the method which Jesus Christ adopted in His ministry. This is no exceptional instance of condescension, self-ignoring, self-humiliation. He took a towel, girded Himself, and washed His disciples’ feet and dried them, and having finished this lowly exhibition, He said, “If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have given you an example. So His whole life was a humiliation.

Suppose we had a near relative and friend who had long been away in far-distant lands. At length he determined to return home, and settle down quietly after his long, and tiresome, and wandering life. He wrote to us to provide a house for him, to prepare it, to furnish it completely, and even to lay out the grounds, all ready for his arrival and immediate occupation. That preparation would cost us very grave anxieties. How carefully we should endeavour to recall his old disposition, his old fancies and partialities! We should provide everything that we imagined could be pleasing to him. We should be all the while thinking about him. And yet, when we had it all ready, if a mutual friend should come to look over the house and grounds, he would see a great many signs of our own peculiar taste, our own individual preferences. We could not help making the house a little expression of ourselves, and a little expression of our friend. So it must be with the Lord Jesus. He is preparing a place for us, and He is thinking of us; of our real wants, and of our varied wishes. But all the while He is impressing His own character upon it; He is filling it with indications of His own likings and sympathies. And the exceeding charm of our Heaven will be to us this: it will be so largely, and so evidently, Christ’s Heaven, but at the same time it will be so manifestly our own Heaven—Christ’s preparation, but prepared for us.1 [Note: R. T. Light for Life’s Eventide, 27.]

(2) The second remarkable thing about the text is that the Divine being, God the Son, should ever have occasion to “prepare” anything. To prepare may signify to get ready, to put things in order, to look after arrangements, appointments, and the like, so as to have all things in due proportion and relation, that the eye may be pleased, that the ear may be satisfied, and that all our desires may be met and fulfilled. Jesus Christ talks in the text as if there were a good deal of work for Him to do somewhere, and He must make haste and get it done. Go to prepare? Can He who fills infinitude and breathes eternity have anything to do in the way of arranging and ordering and getting things ready for His servants. He accommodates Himself to our modes of thinking. He does not always “throw the infinite at us.” He often steps out of His tabernacle of glory and talks our own speech,—makes a child of Himself that He may be understood in this little rickety nursery of a world. He knows we are all in the cradle still, that the mightiest speaker among us is only a lisping babbler, and that He must continually break up His words, in order that He may convey the very dimmest hint of His unutterable meaning!

There are some things which only the Master can do. Will you go and prepare summer for us? You might try. You have seen half a hundred summers: now you go and try to make the fifty-first! Come! You are an artificer: you have the organ of form largely developed; you have an eye for beauty; you can buy oils and paints and colours and canvas and brushes of all kinds. Why don’t you go and prepare summer for us? The great Master, looking down upon this little under-world of His—this basement-storey of His great building—says, “I am going to prepare the summer for you.” And He makes no noise, He makes no mistakes in His colours, never gets things into discord. He continually renews the face of the earth, and not a man in all the busy, boastful world can do it! If the servant cannot prepare the summer, how could he prepare heaven? If the saint exhausts himself when he lights a candle, how could he fill the great heavens with the morning that should never melt into sunset?1 [Note: J. Parker.]

II

The Reception

“I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

“If I go, I come again” (He uses the present tense, not the future), “that where I am, there ye may be also.” There is the Father’s house, there is the place prepared, and there is the coming of the Christ to take us to our place. He will not leave His disciples to find their own way; He will come again and receive them to Himself, that they may abide with Him for ever. The going was preparatory. It was with a view to returning, and the returning, again, is with a view to the final reunion of all with Himself. “If I go, I come again.”

1. The Coming.—There are many comings of Christ to the world, and to the individual. The words no doubt refer to the Second Advent, but the promise must not be limited to that one coming which is the consummation of all comings. In many ways and times Christ has come and is coming. From the day He ascended to His Father, He has been continuously coming, manifesting Himself as the risen Lord and the life-giving Spirit to the Church and the world. The signs of His advent are everywhere around us. Christ has come again already, and come to dwell. His is an abiding presence. “Lo,” He said, “I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age.” Especially is there one coming of Christ to us which we all await with mingled feelings of awe and fear and hope. May we not say that death is for each individual a true coming of Christ, that through it Christ’s words, “I receive you unto myself,” have a true fulfilment?

When our Lord departed, to confirm our assurance He returned again for a little while, with the keys of death and the grave hung at His girdle; He “shewed himself alive after his passion,” Master of both worlds, “Lord of both the dead and the living,” and moving as He would this side or that the veil. By the resurrection of Jesus Christ we know that there is an exit from the grave, and that our holy dead live unto God. Paradise is no fable then; the celestial hills gleaming beyond the dark river are no cloudland born of our wishes and our fancies. When Jesus speaks of His Father’s house, He does not invite us to a castle in the air, to some palace in the fairyland of childhood, but to that which is the most certain and solid as it is the most glorious of realities. It is this world that is unsubstantial, that is the realm of dreams and shadows. “The things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The earth beneath our feet is but a little flying dust, the everlasting mountains fade and dissolve as the morning mists that cover them; we look for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

He will come again!

Sometime He will surely stand once more

On the earth which His own hand hath made—

Only never as before,

Weary, lonely, and in pain,

As the Lamb on whom our sin was laid—

Stretching out His hands in vain,

All the day,

To a people gone astray.

He will come again!

O, the word

Which our joyful ears have heard

Cannot fail, nor pass away.

He hath spoken! It shall be!

Our expectant eyes shall see

Him for whom we watch and wait,

Coming soon to claim

All whose trust is in His name—

For the hour is growing late;

Time wears on,

And the little while is almost gone.

He will come again!

In the hope our hearts grow strong—

Strong to bear the watching and the strain

Of the time between—

Strong to bear His cross—to undertake,

For His sake,

All the burdens of the day—

All the roughness of the way—

Reaching out toward the things unseen—

Finding not our rest below—

Counting all the joys of earth,

All things here,

Sometime dear,

Of but little worth,

Since we know

That at His appearing we shall see

All the glory, and the light—

Hidden now from human sight—

Of the risen One,

And, beholding, in His likeness be,

While eternal ages run.1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 68.]

2. The Reception.—One of the best tests of the truth and reality and vigour of our Christian life lies in this, that when we anticipate the great life to come, however far speculation may endeavour to trace its course in the province of that mysterious land, we return to this thought, which satisfies completely all the deepest and best desires of our hearts,—that where Christ is, we are to be also. But there is a personal delight in these words of Christ’s: His joy would be incomplete if we were not with Him in the Father’s house. It would diminish our gladness, our anticipation of supreme bliss, if we did not know that our presence with Him would heighten His own happiness. He is not so absorbed in the splendours of His Eternal Throne, or in the great tasks which belong to Him as the Lord of the heaven and the earth, as to be indifferent to the affection that binds Him to us and to God. Nor is He so absorbed even in the blessedness of His eternal fellowship with the Father. If on the one side of His nature He is eternally one with God, on the other side of His nature He is eternally one with us; and fellowship with us, in the perfection of our righteousness and the perfection of our blessedness, is as necessary to the heavenly glory of Christ as His fellowship with the Father Himself. The joy that was set before Him when He endured the Cross, despising the shame, was this,—that He might redeem us from sin; and knowing as only He knows the blessedness of living in the eternal love of God, He wanted us in our measure to know that blessedness likewise.

Heaven is the Father’s house, where we shall be young again, the ideal home life here revived and sanctified, where friend will meet with friend, where the many mansions will extend their ample hospitality to people of every kindred and tongue and nation; yet even this is not the chief feature of that life to come. Its chief feature is the fellowship not of friend with friend, but of all with Christ—“That where I am, there ye may be also.” The Father’s house is not a perfect place to Christ until He gathers into its mansions all those for whom He died. Not until He has His loved ones beside Him where He is, and has made them what He is, will He be satisfied. That is heaven,—to be with Christ, to see Him as He is, to be as He is. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”

The Tannese called Heaven by the name Aneai; and we afterwards discovered that this was the name of the highest and most beautifully situated village on the island. Their best bit of Earth was to them the symbol and type of Heaven; their Canaan, too, was a kind of prophecy of another country, even a heavenly Canaan. The fact that they had an Aneai, a promised land, opened their minds naturally to our idea of the promised land of the future, the Aneai of the Gospel hope and faith.1 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 121.]

I used to think of heaven and its golden streets and pearly gates, and it was the place I thought of; but as I grew older and my loved ones passed on before, my thoughts of heaven changed altogether. I no longer think of the place, but of the great company I shall meet there, of my Poly. boys who have gone home, of the mother who loves me none the less because her love has been made perfect in her Saviour’s presence. I believe that when our opening eyes first pierce the mysteries of that land beyond the river, our first feeling will be a deep inward sensation of being at home; the surroundings that are so often antagonistic to our better nature will be gone: there will be no more sea.2 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 309.]

Let not thy heart be troubled; in the vast spaces there is a home for thee. The Son of Man has gone before; there is a region prepared for humanity. There is a spot in this stupendous universe where human nature dwells. That spot is thy one comfort, thy one glory. No other glory would make up for it. There may be golden streets and pearly gates and sapphire thrones. There may be rivers clear as crystal, and trees rich in foliage, and flowers full of bloom. There may be suns that never set, and hands that never weary, and lives that never die. But about these many things thy heart is not troubled. One thing is needful, without which all were vain—the sympathy of a brother’s soul. Content mayest thou be to have no revealing of the many lights in the upper chamber, since thou hast been allowed to gaze on one glimmering light of love—“I go to prepare a place for you.”3 [Note: G. Matheson, Searchings in the Silence, 212.]

Dr. Story, speaking of his last interview with Mrs. Oliphant, then on her death-bed, says: Her voice was still strong with its old, familiar tone; her wonderful eyes were as lambent as ever; and her mind was as calm and clear as a summer’s sea. “I am dying,” she said, “I do not think I can last through the night.” Thinking of the “Little Pilgrim” and the “Seen and the Unseen,” and the many touching efforts her eager imagination had made to lift the impenetrable veil, I said, “The world to which you are going is a familiar world to you.” “I have no thoughts,” she replied, “not even of my boys; but only of my Saviour waiting to receive me, and of my Father.”1 [Note: Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 288.]

The city’s shining towers we may not see

With our dim earthly vision;

For Death, the silent warder, keeps the key

That opes the gates Elysian.

But sometimes, when adown the western sky

A fiery sunset lingers,

Its golden gates swing inward noiselessly,

Unlocked by unseen fingers.

And while they stand a moment half ajar,

Gleams from the inner glory

Stream brightly through the azure vault afar,

And half reveal the story.

O land unknown! O land of love Divine!

Father, all-wise, eternal!

O guide these wandering, way-worn feet of mine

Into those pastures vernal!2 [Note: Nancy Priest Wakefield.]

The Preparation and the Reception

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 365.

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Brooks (P.), The Mystery of Iniquity, 171.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 176.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.

Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.

Findlay (G. G.), The Tilings Above, 188.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 135.

Lewis (F. W.), The Unseen Life, 119.

MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 71.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210.

Moody (D. L.), Heaven, 61.

Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 268.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.

Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, v. 86.

Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 214.

Parkhurst (C. H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 227.

Smith (D.), The Pilgrim’s Hospice, 97.

Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 10 (Davies).