May 7, 2023 Text: John 14:1-14
Dear Friends in Christ,
While I still like my Rand McNally Atlas when traveling I have gotten used to the directions that are pulled up on Toni’s phone. But the system is not foolproof. Last year when we were searching for our house in Savannah, Georgia, the directions took us over the large bridge there and into an area with just a hotel, golf course, and Department of Transportation. No house. We recalibrated and found our destination. When we, or mostly I, want to go a different route than the one prescribed you get that annoying, “make a U-turn in 100 feet.”
Like the directions on the phone can send us the wrong way, so many people in our world are headed the wrong way in seeking God. There is only one right way and Jesus clearly spells it out in our text, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (v. 6)
In today’s Gospel Jesus makes statements like that that are very bold. For starters, He thinks He is the Son of his Father, the Son of God. Jesus backs up this claim throughout the book of John. All that the Father is and does is equally embodied and personified in the Son.
“LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON”
Too often we take for granted the way Jesus lets the words “my Father” slip so naturally from his lips as in “my Father’s house” (v. 2) and “known my Father.” (v. 7). These words were shocking and brazen. As Leon Morris comments: “The expression ‘My Father’ is noteworthy. It was not the way Jews usually referred to God. Usually they spoke of ‘our Father,’ and while they might use ‘My Father’ in prayer they would qualify it with ‘in heaven’ or some other expression to remove the suggestion of familiarity. Jesus did no such thing, here or elsewhere. He habitually thought of God as in the closest relationship to Himself. The expression implies a claim which the Jews did not miss.” Like Father, Like Son.
Jesus speaks the very words of God. They are the “words of eternal life.” (John 6:63). They are spoken by the one who is “the truth.” (v. 6).
Jesus does the very works of God. Jesus has the power to bestow life as we see in His miracles of raising the dead. Jesus is Creator. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:1-3). Jesus is the world’s Judge. John 5:22 says, “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son.” Jesus is Savior. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son. That whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) Like Father, Like Son.
Jesus reveals the very character of God. Jesus is truth and faithfulness together. True to his word, Jesus faithfully carried out the mission he was sent to do by his Father. His mission was to save you and I from our damning sin. His mission was to save us from hell. His mission was to save us from the devil. His mission took Him to a cross and to a tomb that was found empty. And true to his word, this same Jesus will “come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (v. 3). We will be with Him in His Father’s house. Like Father, Like Son.
Jesus works and words confront every human with the question “Who is this man?” When we have grasped the “who”, the “what he came to do” falls in place. The Gospel today shows that Jesus is God incarnate. To know Jesus is to know God. To see Jesus is to see God. No one short of God could do the things he said and do the things he did. When Jesus made statements like “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), he was identifying himself not just with the Father’s works and ways but with his very being. Like Father, Like Son.
C.S. Lewis the former agnostic from Cambridge turned Christian wrote: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about (Jesus): ‘I’m ready to (believe) Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.”
Because he is who he is and did what he did, he will also make good on his promise to do what he said. It is a promise we hold dear: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:2-3)
Like Father, Like Son . . . for us.
Amen.