“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. … And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”

          Over halfway through the Easter Season, we’ve now taken an important turn in our celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection. After the first three Sundays of hearing about the appearances of the risen Lord to the disciples, and then last Sunday meditating on that beautiful image of our Lord as the Good Shepherd and considering the call to be shepherds in our own vocations, today we start reading from our Lord’s farewell discourse as we prepare to celebrate His Asension into Heaven in two weeks.

          Our Lord’s farewell message to His closest friends does not take place in the way or at the time we would think. If you had to put it on the timeline of the events of His life, you’d guess that it happened right before the Ascension, when He gathered the Apostles on the Mount of Olives as He ascends into Heaven before their eyes.

          But that’s not when He gave them this farewell message. He did so 43 days before at the Last Supper. St. John devotes almost a quarter of his Gospel to the Last Supper, recording in detail the words our Lord spoke to His closest friends that beautiful but fateful night when He shared His Body and Blood with them for the first time as a pledge of the gift of His Body He was to make the next day on the Cross. And so it is that the Church takes us back to the Upper Room today, so that, as was promised on Holy Thursday, at the end of all our journeying, we might return to the place where it all began, and know it for the first time.

          For the second time this Easter season, we hear our Lord speak words that seem evidently contradictory, manifestly untrue. He told the disciples on Holy Thursday that they are His friends because they have understood everything that He has done in their midst. But they evidently do not understand, as their fears and hesitancy to believe in His Resurrection on Easter Sunday made clear. We saw that they have a deeper understanding, an immersion in the mystery, that can be unpacked later as God’s work in their lives is later unfolded.

          So likewise, today he tells them, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. … And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be. Where I am going you know the way.” But Thomas, who is always ready to point out the contradiction, who needs everything to be laid out, clear, ready to be rationally analyzed, or maybe just says what everyone else is thinking insists, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?”

          But “the way” does not refer to when next to turn left or right, how many miles until the next exit. “The way” here is the way to the Father, to way to Heaven, the way to eternal life! “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Our Lord’s words are powerful and true. He is the only path to the Father because He is the one bridge over the uncrossable gulf between God and man, between the divine and the human, which He alone can span as the bridge, the way, since He alone is fully God and fully man.

          It is no accident, then, that our Lord gives this farewell discourse in which He emphasizes that He is the way to the Father, and that He is preparing a place for us in His Father’s house, at the Last Supper, giving His Body and Blood to the Church in the Eucharist. In Holy Communion, He gives Himself to us. He gives us the way, the truth, and the life. You know the way, because the Way Himself comes to dwell in your heart!

          How often in life do we seem not to know the way? How often do the clouds of darkness cover our sight? How often do we not see how God is working? How often do we not know even the first step to take?

          But, “Where I am going, you know the way”! If you know Jesus, you know the way to what is most important, to eternal life! You might not know the way out of today’s trials, but you know the most important way of all. And just like the Apostles who did not understand on the level of conscious rationality what the Lord was doing, but gained a deeper understanding through an immersion in the mystery of His love, even when you do not seem to know the way ahead, He is there, deeper down.

In Holy Communion, the One who promises to prepare a place for you in His Father’s house, prepares a place for Himself in your heart. Thus St. Paul tells us today, “let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

This is why the Church speaks so lovingly of the Eucharist as the pledge of eternal glory, the foretaste of the eternal banquet of Heaven. In Holy Communion, if our spiritual senses have not been dulled by sin and vice, if we have allowed the Lord in His infinite mercy to build us into that spiritual house, we know the way, we experience and touch and taste the Way Himself who takes up His home in the hearts of Christian believers to prepare them for that dwelling place He has ready for us in the house of His Father.

The Eucharist is a lifetime’s death in love, in which the ardor, selflessness, and self-surrender of the only one who could bridge the uncrossable gap between perfect God and sinful man prepares a dwelling for Himself in the most unlikely of places, in our hearts, so that we might come to dwell in the most unlikely of places for the sons and daughters of Adam’s race: His home, His Father’s house.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

V Sunday of Easter, A.D. MMXXVI