Scripture Reflection for the Fifth Sunday of Easter:
Acts 6:1-7
Psalm 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19
1 Peter 2:4-9
John 14:1-12
What is that place? Where is it? “I am going to prepare a place for you,” Jesus said to his disciples (John 14:2). What did he mean?
It’s Holy Thursday, the night before his crucifixion and death. The Church in this Sunday’s gospel reading takes us back to that time. It’s a time when maybe the disciples were beginning to worry what they would do in Jesus’s absence. Sometimes today even we worry like that. What will we do when Jesus is gone?
The anxiety of absence, the absence of God and of Christ: What do we do with that anxiety? Jesus’s answer to this question is firm, to the point, commanding. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me,” he tells the disciples (John 14:1).
It’s possible to translate this as an imperative. Have faith in God, have faith in me; that is, it’s possible to hear these words as a command. The disciples are worried that they’re about to lose Jesus, about to lose it all. Yet the Lord doesn’t wallow in their anxiety; he doesn’t share it. Rather, he exhorts them to keep the faith. Jesus is our Lord and Master even in the darkest pits of our anxiety.
But then Jesus talks about “a place.” Again, what does he mean? Does he mean heaven, the heavenly Jerusalem? Yes, quite possibly, quite probably. But it could mean more than that; it likely does. We know that in John’s Gospel the words of Jesus often bear multiple meanings at once. That is, Jesus is speaking in spatial and temporal terms here, but he certainly is not speaking literally. Rather, he speaks mystically, sacramentally. That is, he is talking about a place not limited by the normal measure of space and time.
Hence the Lord’s exchange with Thomas. “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” he asks Jesus. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” the Lord answers (John 14:5-6). Ah, now we see that Jesus is not speaking in merely spatial and temporal terms. He is speaking spiritually, mystically, personally, Christologically. Jesus is the “place.” The Lord is telling his disciples that they will be with him even after the Passion.
What Jesus is trying to do is to tell them that what they’re about to experience, the arrest and death of their Master, will not be the end. He’s trying to tell them that what they currently perceive as defeat is in fact glory. He’s inviting them to lean into their faith to see the darkness differently. Or as he will say to them in a moment, astoundingly, “be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
But think again of Jesus as “place.” That’s just another way to talk about our union in Christ. That’s the way St. Paul so often described our relationship with the risen Lord, that now we are in Christ. It’s the same theological reality Jesus was talking about when he called himself the vine and his disciples the branches, saying that his disciples should “abide” in him (John 15:1-5). It’s what he was talking about at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy of Emmanuel, when he said, “behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
But what does that mean for us? Well, remember the story from Luke’s Gospel which we heard a few Sundays back, the story of the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. Remember how they recognized him in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:30-31). Remember also Jesus’s nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, how the Lord told him that no one can enter or even see the kingdom of God “unless one is born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5).
These passages, and others like them, clearly point to the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. And here, to put it simply, is where we find the place that is Jesus, our union in him.
And here further we discover the Church’s enduring Easter lesson about where our risen Lord is to be found. He’s to be found in your nearest Catholic parish, upon the nearest Catholic altar and in the nearest Catholic font. That is, he’s to be found in those innumerable humble and holy places mystically rooted in the place of Christ. I’m sure very close to you.
Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of “The Crisis of Bad Preaching” (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books.
