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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.—Joh_14:2-3.
The Preparation
“I go to prepare a place for you.”
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.]
The Reception
“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.]
Literature
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).