Real Hope: 5th Sunday of Easter

“When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me, so that where I am you will be too.” (John 14:3)

Well, it appears that we're all still here. Yes, I chuckled slightly at the ads for pet care, post-rapture, and the invitations to post-rapture lootings. But throughout the week, my sense of humor was tempered by the stories I heard of people desperate for a sign of God's presence in our broken world.

“Knowing the date of the end of the world changes all your future plans,” said a 27-year-old wife and mother. She thought she'd go to medical school, until she began tuning in to Family Radio and heard the Rev. Earl Camping. She and her husband lived and worked in New York City. But a year ago, they decided they decided to spend all their remaining time on Earth with their infant daughter. “My mentality was, why are we going to work for more money? It just seemed kind of greedy to me. And unnecessary,” she says.

Now they are in Orlando, Florida, in a rented house, passing out tracts and reading the Bible. Their daughter is 2 years old, and their second child is due in June. But acoording to the husband, they were spending all of their savings, so that, on May 21, they would have nothing left. Nothing, except for the fervent hope that all of them would be raptured. In the same news story, a single man said this: “I no longer think about 401(k)s and retirement. I'm not stressed about losing my job, which a lot of other people are in this economy. I'm just a lot less stressed, and in a way I'm more carefree.”

I appreciate the faith and the love that you could hear in the comments of these three Christian souls. But it was based on a false hope peddled by a false prophet. Jesus warned us about them. What we need is real hope that we can hold on to when we would be tempted to look for a rapture, a quick end to all our worrys and pains. And that is exactly what Jesus Christ offers us today when he says to us, as he said then, “When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me, so that where I am you will be too.”

Jesus has to give them something. He has just told Peter, tonight, you will deny me three times. He has just told the disciples, where I am going you cannot come. He is about to be arrested, tried and executed. His disciples know this, and we can easily imagine their hopelessness. But then Jesus says: Don't be troubled. Trust God and trust me. There is room to spare in my Father's house, and I'm going to prepare a place for you. Then I'm going to return and take you to me so that wherever I am, you will be too.

It might seem that the rooms to which Jesus is referring are the individual places that he is going to prepare for each of us, which we go to after our physical death. But “room” and “place” are different words, both in the original Greek, and in our English translation. So, the rooms in the Father's house are not the places that Jesus is preparing for us. The “rooms” that Jesus mentions here were the inns of his day where foot-weary travellers would stop and eat and rest up for the rest of the journey. Where is the Father's house. It is right here, this world into which God sent his only begotten Son, not to condemn this world, but to save it! On the last day of the Resurrection, this world is not going to be blasted away into nothingness. It will be transformed.

In the meantime, the Resurrected Jesus has already returned and taken us to himself that wherever we are, he is there too. He is with us today. In whatever room in which you are staying today, Jesus Christ is with you. In whatever room to which we travel tomorrow, the day after and the day after that, he is with us. How? If I explained it fully this morning, I would end up preaching next Sunday's sermon as well as this Sunday's. Next Sunday, Jesus will tell us of the coming Holy Spirit, who will fulfill Jesus' promise today: I will return and take you to be with me, that wherever I am, you will be there too.

We still hope to reach that place which Jesus has prepared for us. And Jesus will take each of us to that place. But our ultimate hope is not a false hope of escape from this world. Our lasting hope is the Father's house to which Jesus Christ came, and comes, to save. That is the real hope to which I witness, with the witness that has been handed down to me by the first witnesses of the Resurrected Jesus. He has prepared a wonderful place for each of us. In the Holy Spirit, he has already returned. And come what may, we can live with him as Resurrected people, fearing nothing. For where he is today, there we already are!