John 14:1-14 "If You've Seen Me" Scott Hoezee

It was shortly after World War II when the World Council of Churches decided to check on how its money was being spent in a remote area of the Balkans where the World Council was trying to help needy churches re-build after the war. So it dispatched John Mackie, who was an officer with the WCC and the president of the Church of Scotland. Accompanying Dr. Mackie were two other pastors, both of whom came from a fairly conservative, pietistic denomination. One afternoon they paid a visit to an Orthodox priest in a remote village. The man was clearly thrilled to receive the visit in that he otherwise worked in rather lonely isolation.

Immediately upon seating the guests in his study the priest produced a box of fine Havana cigars and offered one to each of his three guests. Dr. Mackie gingerly took one, bit the end off, lit it, and took a few puffs, saying how fine it was. The other two pastors looked horrified. "No thank you! We do not smoke!" they quickly said. Feeling bad that he maybe had offended the two brothers, the priest wanted to make amends and so left the room only to re-appear with a flagon of his finest wine. Dr. Mackie took a glassful, swirled it, sniffed it like a connoisseur, and then praised its fine quality. Soon he asked for another glass. Meanwhile his traveling companions drew back even more visibly. "No thank you! We do not drink!" they snapped. Well, later when the three returned to their car, the two pastors assailed Mackie. "Here you are an officer with the World Council and the leader of Scotland's Church and yet you smoke and drink!?" "No, I don't," Mackie barked at them. "But somebody in there had to be a Christian!"

"Show us the Father," Philip and the other disciples said to Jesus in John 14. "Show us the Father and it will be enough for us." You cannot blame the disciples for asking that. Nor is that question much of a surprise in this part of John's gospel. Commentator Dale Bruner has called this section "The Father Sermon." Nowhere else does Jesus talk so much about his Father. In fact, in just 42 verses Jesus says the word "Father" twenty-one times--that's once every other verse. How could the disciples not ask about the Father?!

"Show us the Father and we'll be satisfied," they pleaded. Jesus seemed taken aback by the question. "What do you mean? Have I been with you so long and still you do not know me? You've been seeing the Father all along. If you've seen me, then you have seen the Father." The two pious ministers who watched Dr. Mackie puff and sip the rare treasures served up by their host were scandalized because, in their opinion, such things did not make Mackie look like a Christian. Dr. Mackie had a rather different idea on that. So also the disciples who had been watching Jesus all along did not think he looked like the Father. But Jesus had a rather different idea on that. "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father."

But how could that be? Last Sunday in John 11 we saw Jesus weeping. But does that look like the powerful, austere, almighty God? Other times the disciples saw Jesus laughing, cuddling with little children, expressing surprise, rubbing the sunburn on his arm. But does that look like the God of heaven? In the course of their time with Jesus they'd seen him nod off to sleep in sheer exhaustion, use his pinkie to work a chive out from between his incisors after a good meal at some tax collector's house, and exclaim over a particularly good glass of wine. But does that strike anyone like God the Father? It certainly is not the way the God of glory has traditionally been depicted in art, and even in much theology.

Or consider just this 14^th chapter of John. Some while back we noted together the wider context of these famous words. This is such a lovely chapter that it is easy to begin reading only at verse 1, conveniently ignoring what just happened at the end of chapter 13. But look what happened to Jesus in that upper room: Judas just fled (having been singled out by Jesus as the wolf of betrayal in their midst) and Jesus also just pegged the lead disciple Peter as the darkest shadow of denial in their midst.

So when in verse 1 Jesus says, "Let not your hearts be troubled," the reason he says that is because there is currently trouble enough to go around! I picture Jesus as saying those words with his chin quivering, his eyes brimming with tears, his voice thick with emotion. Jesus is hardly the picture of austerity, confidence, and swagger. He is no fire-and-brimstone preacher swaying in a pulpit, a bony finger wagging in the congregation's collective face as he bellows out, "My people! Let not your hearts be troubled because with God it is always smooth sailing!" Nope. Things are falling apart in that upper room. Gethsemane is next on the docket and things will go rather quickly downhill after that. There is trouble enough to go around, which is precisely why Jesus tells the disciples not to let that trouble take root in their hearts.

The ultimate reason is because Jesus has a place for them. Ultimately in this chapter, however, you may have noticed that Jesus does not much describe what that place is like. There is some many-roomed mansion somewhere and we will get to it sometime. Meanwhile, however, the main item to be conveyed at this point is the way to that place. Once Jesus mentions his Father's house the specifics of it are dropped in favor of talking about the way to the place, which Jesus claims in verse 4 the disciples already know.

That was news to them, however. Jesus had, after all, provided no maps, no AAA-like trip tickers plotting out directions. The disciples, of course, were not dolts. Had Jesus said that his Father's house was in Rome or Caesarea or somewhere like that, the disciples could have drawn their own maps. But since Jesus had not given them an address, the disciples felt like they could not even begin to plan out this journey. "Um, Lord, we can't figure out the way to the place until you give us some kind of location. Just where are we headed?"

But Jesus doesn't answer that, does he? Instead he simply identifies himself as the way. Whatever the goal of the journey is, Jesus is the way to get there, and for now that's got to be enough. What's more, it is enough because while they go, they journey with not just Jesus but the Father as well. Apparently, as important as the final destination is, for now the journey itself along the way is the primary thing about which we are to be concerned.

But that is tough to do. Tell your child that tomorrow you're getting in the car and heading to Orlando to spend some time at Disneyworld and the kid will have a mighty tough time enjoying the trip along the way--suddenly she will want to be there yesterday. It would be a foolish parent who would dangle Disneyworld in front of a kid as the final destination but who then also told the child, "But now, Janey, we're going to take our time getting there. There is a neat museum in Ohio where President Rutherford B. Hayes was born which I want to visit first as well as an excellent fabric store in Kentucky where your mother will be picking up quilting supplies. And then . . . ." well, and then nothing as far as the child is concerned! You can't get to Orlando fast enough from the child's point of view--everything else along the way is either just a delay or flat out a waste of time.

In John 14 Jesus dangles heaven before the disciples but then proceeds to talk only about the journey as being more important for now. All along on this journey up until then the very God of heaven had already been in their midst, if only they had had eyes to see him. The goal of the trip, the Father God who makes heaven a worthwhile place to be in the first place, was already with them. The problem was that the Jesus who personified the Father's person and essence and glory did not, to their minds, look like the Father. So far in their walk along the way with Jesus their lives had hardly felt like heaven on earth. Dusty days of footsore travels, rumbling stomachs, and ungrateful crowds did not feel like paradise. Rambling parables that confused their minds, miracles that Jesus kept hidden from public view, and religious leaders who kept threatening them with physical harm did not feel like the spiritual equivalent of Disneyworld! "Are we there yet?" the disciples were often tempted to ask. In John 14 Jesus as much as says, "Are we there yet!? In a way you've been "there" all along, my friends!"

They had been with the Father all along even as Jesus had all along been doing the work of that Father. But a lot of it was so seemingly mundane. So they missed it. They missed it all along until only later, as John candidly confesses in many parenthetical asides in the course of his gospel, only much later after Easter did the disciples piece it together and realize that theirs had been a sacred journey with Jesus and with the Father all along.

The saint Teresa of Avila once said, "Christ dwells among the pots and pans." But we'd rather that Christ dwelled among only the more glorious and obviously pious parts of life. Some would rather fast-forward the sacred journey along the way to heaven so that they can feel like they are in heaven already. And if they cannot quite manage that, then they will at the very least make their lives sound as heavenly as they can. So in some circles Christian people get together and one man talks about what Jesus said to him at breakfast that day just as he was eating his bagel, and a woman talks about what God had done for her yesterday afternoon at about 2:23 right there in the mall, and still another man gushes about how the Spirit had gifted him in so mighty a way that right after he visited old Harold in the hospital, why the very next day Harold was healed.

Like perhaps some of you, I've been with people who talk on and on like this as they detail spiritual lives which seem constantly to pop with explosions of miracles and grace, of words whispered into their ears and visions of the Spirit in the night until finally you want to crawl away as the spiritual slouch you clearly are. Just flip on one of those cable TV religious channels and listen to how those hosts talk--from the sounds of it they hear from God directly more often than someone like Isaiah did. As Christians they have seen the promise of heaven dangled before them. But if they cannot be fully in heaven just yet, they will at the very least try to make their daily lives sound like heaven has already come down.

What is missing from such talk is the texture of everyday life--the kind of life the disciples had led with Jesus all along, the kind of life in which the Father God himself had been hidden and active in their midst yet they somehow missed it. We do, too. As C.S. Lewis once said, we too often substitute religion for God. But that is like substituting navigation for arrival or wooing for marriage. Getting to your destination is wonderful but the trip itself is also valuable. Courtship, dating, the thrill of romance you experience when you are wooing someone to marry you is thrilling, unique, scintillating. But the journey toward a whole, wholesome, and goodly marriage continues long after courtship ends.

The building of a marriage continues as surely in the pots and pans of everyday life as it did in the candles and roses of your early romance. That's why there is something more than a little shaky about couples who describe their married life as a never-ending string of sizzling romance, pyrotechnic sex, or star-struck gazes at one another across the dinner table at every single meal. What are they trying to prove? Couples who talk like that are either a sign that the rest of us have bad marriages after all or it is a hint that these couples are casting their lives in false ways in the mistaken idea that this is the only way to present a genuinely happy marriage.

As Craig Barnes once wrote, many of us spend far too much time trying to become something we are not instead of just being who we already are. Of course, I realize that this could quickly become an excuse not to pursue the spiritual things of God. But the goal here is not to foster complacency but a greater awareness of how God in Christ is already at work in you and how, by becoming more aware of that, you can become more intentional in following Jesus along the way which you are already traveling with him.

As it turned out, Jesus was the very autobiography of God. He was the Son who was his Father all over again. It's just that the disciples assumed that being with the Father would introduce them to something quite different from the road they had been walking up to that point. Jesus had a different idea about that. In and through everything they had seen in Jesus--the very obviously spiritual and almighty things he had done as well as the very typical and everyday things he had done--they had seen the Father. Jesus had been so completely lost in his Father that, as it turned out, everything he did was transformed.

Something like that is to be our goal: to perform our work, to lead our families and raise our kids and take our leisure and worship our God in ways so shot-through with Christ that we won't worry whether our lives now look exactly like how we imagine our heavenly life in mansions of glory will look. Instead we savor the journey, highlight and celebrate what we see and experience along the way whether or not all of it seems exciting and spiritually significant. We won't be like the child en route to Disneyworld who has no patience for the trip's details but we will instead plug along, and with joy at that.

Some years back I mentioned to you one of the many fascinating portraits sketched by neurologist Oliver Sacks. As some of you know, Tourette's Syndrome is a bizarre mental disorder which causes victims to have any number of physical and verbal tics. Some Tourettic people have constant facial twitches, others find themselves uncontrollably uttering verbal whoops, beeps, and sometimes also raunchy swear words. One man with Tourette's whom Dr. Sacks knew was given to deep, lunging bows toward the ground, a few verbal shouts, and also an obsessive-compulsive type adjusting and readjusting of his glasses. The kicker is that the man is a skilled surgeon! Somehow and for some unknown reason, when he dons mask and gown and enters the operating room, all of his tics disappear for the duration of the surgery. He loses himself in that role and he does so totally. When the surgery is finished, he returns to his odd quirks of glasses adjustment, shouts, and bows.

Sacks did not make any spiritual comments on this, of course, yet I find this doctor a very intriguing example of what it can mean to "lose yourself" in a role. There really can be a great transformation of your life when you are focused on just one thing--focused to the point that bad traits disappear even as the performing of normal tasks becomes all the more meaningful and remarkable.

Something like that is our Christian goal as we travel the way that just is Jesus. Our destination is glory in the place Jesus has prepared for us. That is a promise which soothes us, calms us, settles our otherwise troubled hearts. Meanwhile, however, we have the journey to undertake. As we lose ourselves in Jesus and in being his disciples, we find even our ordinary day-to-day activities infused with deep meaning. Because if sacredness happens to us at all, it happens among the pots and pans of the everyday and not just on Sundays when we feel particularly jolted by worship or on Tuesdays when we volunteer for some service project (vital though those things are, too).

As Dr. Mackie told his well-meaning companions, somebody has to be a Christian in life's many and varied situations. According to Jesus that "somebody" is everybody as we all together take the sacred journey with Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life--your life and my life every day and along every way. Amen.