Jesus' going to his Father to prepare a place for his followers is also his coming with his Father to make their home with those who keep his Word.
John is read from Easter to Trinity, together with Acts for the eight Sundays from Easter to Pentecost. Luke-Acts shapes our calendar, setting the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (‘fiftieth’), named for taking place fifty days after Passover (the setting for Jesus’ death and resurrection). In these days, Jesus’ resurrection is experienced in encounters where ‘he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (Luke 24.27), ‘appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God’ (Acts 1.3). Then ‘as they were watching, he was lifted up’ (Acts 1.9), and ten days later ‘all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 2.4), as Jesus had promised before he left them: ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1.8).
John includes all these elements, but brings them together into an ‘hour’: ‘the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’ (John 5.25). In this first dispute with the authorities, Jesus says that ‘the hour’ has already arrived to respond to him and come alive. This brings forward into that ‘hour’ the mission of his followers to bring many to believe (17.20-24). They achieve this by, among other things, reflecting on the Scriptures, remembering Jesus, and worshipping the risen Christ (see 2.22, 20.8-9). Indeed this leads to the writing of the Gospel, ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (20.31).
Jesus’ ministry is held together with worship and mission in his encounter with a Samaritan woman. He says to her, ‘the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth’; and she says to her people, ‘Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done’ (4.23-29). And John intimately connects Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, and the proclamation of the gospel to the ends of the earth: ‘Jesus answered… “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”. He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die’ (12.30-33). Jesus’ death, resurrection, ascension and commissioning of witnesses again come together in his meeting with the grieving Mary Magdalene: ‘Go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’ (20.17). And death, resurrection, the coming of the Spirit and the mission of the Church all combine in the room where the risen Jesus shows his disciples his wounded hands and feet, breathing on them the Holy Spirit, and sending them out as his Father has sent him (20.19-31).
Five of our readings from John are from the ‘farewell discourses’ (13.31–17.26). Between Judas’ going out to ‘do quickly what you are going to do’ and the betrayal in the garden, time seems to stand still as Jesus explains unfolding events. His going to his Father to prepare a place for his followers is also his coming with his Father to make their home with those who keep his word (14.3,23). Jesus is both God coming to humanity and humanity coming alive in God. This is true not only for the disciples, but also for ‘those who believe in me through their word’ (17.20), those whom the Spirit of truth guides into this way – the way that leads to life.
The Revd Dr Arnold Browne is an Anglican priest, and a prison chaplain in the Norwich diocese.
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Notes on Passiontide and Easter