Farewell? Goodbye?
Is the Gospel about a place or a Person?
John 13:33-38
Pastoral Prayer: Gracious and Merciful God, you know our hearts and it is terrifying. LORD, you know our hearts and there could not be better news. For in spite of and despite what You know, You determined not to be God without us and that is evidenced in the love Jesus describes in his love for the disciples whose hearts are no different than our own. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in Your sight O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And all God’s people say, Amen.
We made our way to the sanctuary of Christ Church. The front door was locked. We walked around back and found the unlocked door. We went in through the door giving us entrance into Gibson Hall. In these older high church buildings, areas are given names. To us, this might be our Fellowship Hall. We walked through that area, through a door that opens to the kitchen and turned left. We ventured up two staircases, then through a small maze of short hallways that opened into a grand sanctuary.
The stained glass, the wood adornments, the pipe organ, the grand piano, the chancel, the elevated and uncentered pulpit and the Eagle Lectern. If ever there was a space that by its beauty could lift one’s eyes to the heavens it would be a place like this.
Construction on Christ Church’s first building began in 1826 after Thomas Jefferson gave the first donation of $200. Their current building was completed in 1896. Given the era of construction, this means that over time bathrooms were installed in less than obvious locations. After Monday evening, for instance, we could not imagine the disturbance of almost 25 of us taking turns in one very small restroom. It was as if we would only find relief by playing hide-n-seek with bathrooms. By Tuesday afternoon we had located three or four more restrooms giving us all a sigh of relief. What had been hidden to us had been found.
The thought occurred to me when reading John 13, that Jesus who has been out in the open with his disciples and his adversaries begins to play hide-n-seek with his words. For example,
Little children, I am with you a little while longer, You will seek Me; and as I said to the Jews, I now say to you also, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’
We begin our new series through the Farewell Discourse and Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer, or what are sometimes called the Upper Room Discourses. Alex read the familiar line of John 14,
Let not your hearts be troubled.
Many a funeral message begins with Jesus’s words, aiming to bring comfort to those now hidden from us in coffin and grave, from sight. It makes sense that the loss of a loved one is a rupture in our sense of wholeness.
For our series, though, these words strike us as needing some context; after all, at this point, Jesus is very much alive. Notions of his absence, his departure, his farewell, and his goodbye are at least confusing and clearly troubling for the disciples.
Starting with John 14 sets us one chapter into Jesus’s Farewell Discourse (John 13-17). And while the theme of our series takes up with those first words, Let not your heart be troubled, describing in brief the troubled hearts of the disciples, the following verses of John 14 do not give us the full weight of what scholars mean when they began using Farew” in the 19th Century. We need to gain some sense of what deeply troubles the disciples, such that we grasp the weight of the moniker farewell under which these five chapters fall.
What earns these chapters the title, Jesus’s Farewell Discourses, is that Jesus tells the disciples three times in these five chapters that he will be leaving them. As with any goodbye, it stirs all sorts of emotions. What could he possibly mean, leave them? They have declared their allegiance, even if they are wholly unaware of what they have committed to. How could Jesus say something that would mean a rupture in their future?
Ruptures that result from departures, from separations, are not new in the Scriptures. Take, for instance, the scene described in 1 Samuel between the best of friends.
And Jonathan said to David, “Go in safety, inasmuch as we have sworn to each other in the name of the LORD, saying, ‘The LORD will be between me and you, and between my descendants and your descendants forever.’ Then he rose and departed, while Jonathan went into the city.
This rupture between friends stayed with David. When he assumed the throne, one of his first actions was to look for anyone left from Saul’s house, hear that as reference to his friend Jonathan. The loss was real. He wanted to show his kindness.
Or listen to Luke’s description of the aftermath of the Apostle Paul’s long goodbye to the elders in Ephesus, likely a place Paul stayed the longest of any stop on his missionary journeys.
And when he had said these things, he knelt down and prayed with them all. And they began to weep aloud and embraced Paul, and repeatedly kiss him, grieving especially over the word which he had spoken, that they should see his face no more. And they were accompanying him to the ship.
Hearing of Paul’s impending departure meant a rupture in his relationship with the Christians in Ephesus. They would no longer see his face or hear his voice. So deeply grieved they wept and hugged Paul. They followed him until his ship sailed.
Describing this long section of John as a Farewell Address caught my attention. The etymology of farewell is “fare thee well.” We might say today, “I hope your travels go well.” What we find in John 13-17 is much more than well-wishing.
What if scholars had referred to this as Jesus’s Goodbye Address? Is that better? The history of the word goodbye is something like “God be with you.” Another similar expression would be Godspeed. According to the Google Machine, the first use of goodbye dates to just more than 500 years ago. It was used as a blessing, meaning that God be with the one leaving. After just 200 years, God was replaced by “good.” Even though we do not offer farewells these days, we do say goodbye. What was once “God be with you” has now been replaced with something like “Later.” What we find in John 13-17 is much more than a future chance meeting.
By the time we have reached verse 33 of John 13, the disciples are already trying to put the pieces of Jesus’s words together. John 12 offers this collection of words to cipher.
The hour has come.
Now my Soul has become troubled and what shall I say, “Father save me from this hour? But for this purpose I came to this hour.”
And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself.
For a little while longer the light is among you.
The disciples do not get the way John advances the story as he begins chapter 13.
Now before the Feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that he should depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
Reading this foreshadowing, leaves us reading the Farewell address shouting at the disciples in the screenplay, “Don’t you get it?!” But, they find it troubling and so would we. In fact, we still grapple with the Crucifixion, referenced in Jesus’s words, if I be lifted up. We find it easier to gloss any role human beings play in the death of Jesus. We prefer a reductionist explanation declaring it the plan of God before admitting responsibility.
What’s more, we are the sort that never want to be told we cannot do what we want or go where we want. And now he tells his closest friends they cannot follow him. That is, Jesus spends his teaching ministry ratcheting up expectations to real human levels only to tick off just about everyone to the point of murderous plots. No one tells us!
Isn’t that how we could read the account in Genesis? Adam and Eve hear one restriction, just one. And the prohibition birthed the desire because someone told us anywhere but there, anything but that.
Maybe we should admit it. Early and often. The influence of our self-perceived freedom is disrupted every time we are told we cannot. We are told we are not old enough and we pout. We are told we are not ready and we protest that we are. We are told we do not qualify and we take it as a slight and overstate our ability. Not one of us likes to be told we cannot in a world in which freedom is our highest achievement.
In a recent sermon, my friend Ken Sundet Jones, a retired Lutheran professor in Iowa, made the point we did two weeks ago. No longer do we worship Astarte or Chemosh, but we do worship the Self as the ultimate to who we give all allegiance. No wonder we resist being told we cannot do or go where we want, after all we are our own highest interest.
Imagine the disciples hearing Jesus say he is going where they cannot. Jesus had invited fishermen, a tax collector, and other unremarkable fellows not just to a front row seat to his life work, he inducted them into his very own work by giving them authority and freedom to do what he did. But, the freedom to do what Jesus did was not just any freedom. It was freedom to bring Good News to others.
Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You shall seek Me; and as I said to the Jews, I now say to you also, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’
Farewell.
Goodbye.
On his way off stage, or at least as the disciples perceive it, he gives them the impossible.
A new commandment I give to you that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
Talk about raising the bar! There is no “that you should” love one another but instead “that you” love one another. There is no loophole or crack into which we could slip any excuse. This is what we call the Law. That is, the Law kills our excuses and closes our loopholes. It leaves us looking for rationalizations. It leaves us looking for help.
And, frankly, it is what we need. Talk of authenticity and accountability fail to achieve their goals of trustworthy relationships when we do not admit that what is most important to us is US. Yet, when Jesus gives the command to love one another, he is calling us into our true humanity, that for which we were created. And he is calling us to life in himself.
Thus, by the time we get to John 14:1, we have more than one reason for the disciples to be troubled at heart. Jesus tells them they cannot go where he is going and they are to love as Jesus loves.
Troubling.
There is Good News. The Gospel is God’s Word to us. Tucked away in Jesus’s first direct word to the disciples that he will be departing, he adds,
Where I go, you cannot follow Me now; but you shall follow later.
We use farewell and goodbye that describe a rupture in the nearness of or proximity to those for whom we care. We speak these words knowing we cannot be with them where they go. Put another way, we are where we are and they will be wherever it is they go without us. Something is wrong. Something needs to be repaired.
Jesus makes a Promise.
You will follow later.
Maybe this is specifically for Peter. We could easily understand this as Peter’s future. Tradition has it that Peter was crucified upside down. I am going to the Cross, you will follow later.
Yet, when we read the Apostle Paul in Romans, we understand that following Jesus means being buried with him in death and raised with him in the Resurrection. In other words, though we may not reach the bar of loving one another like Jesus, His love will bring us into fellowship with him for he does not leave us with Farewell or Goodbye.
We often hear John 14 at a funeral where the aim is to offer comfort that those now taken from us are safe in God’s mansion over that hilltop enjoying all the food at the big, big table, in the big, big house with lots and lots of room. But, is Jesus telling us that a place soothes our grief, resolves our loss? Aren’t we more consoled at the thought of being with those now absent? Can we really hear John 14 as if Jesus replaces life with and in him by emphasizing a place? Such a shift away from Jesus to a place prompt us to obsess about what is Heaven like. Is it about living forever, a claim that implies we keep track of time in eternity? What will we do there, as if eternity requires something worthwhile that can be described as what we now enjoy? What will my room or mansion look like? If we are going to spend eternity there, it would be good were my room in the mountains I love, or near the beach, or on a lake, or whatever your most ideal location.
Is our troubling, the feeling of rupture healed by the promise of a place? Or when we feel something is terribly wrong, that we are no longer whole, that what is ruptured leaves a gaping hole in our lives, does it point us to the One who loves us to the end? Fleming Rutledge gets our attention.
Something is wrong and must be put right. When we feel that in our bones, when we admit that something is wrong not only with the whole human situation in general but also with one’s own self in particular, then God is at work bringing us closer to the cross of Christ.”
We cannot ignore Jesus’s Promise, not of a place but Him. The line that gets to the telos, the aim of the Promise is not where but who. And Jesus’s own words give us He who is our Promise.
That where I am you may be also.