In today’s Gospel Jesus is preparing to depart and trying to prepare his disciples for his departure. It’s a scene of some frustration, with two levels of discourse. Jesus is trying to “explain some of the encouraging aspects of his death and departure.” And clearly, the disciples desperately want things to remain as they were. Who can blame them? Who wants to talk about death and departure anyway?
I am reminded of a scene certainly less profound but nonetheless touching. A particular family dinner with aunts, uncles, and cousins all gathered at table. My cousin Angela admires my mother’s earrings, and she tells me, “Honey, when I die, give Angela these earrings, and the necklace that goes to Kathy, and you know where my bank books are…” I interrupt her, “Please Ma, could we just have dinner. No one’s going anywhere.” “Well it’s important; I want you to know these things. I am getting older...” “Mother, please just pass me the eggplant.” Call it denial of death, whatever. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t like change. And like Thomas and Philip, I often don’t understand.
That’s why I love Thomas’ question this morning, I find it so consoling. It’s such a relief. He puts it right out there. “Master, we don’t know where you going. How can we know the way?” I suspect the others were all thinking the same thing, but didn’t dare to ask. Said another way: “Why does following you have to be so puzzling?” Or “Why can’t things be clearer?” “I don’t understand the way you do things.” “Why can’t things simply remain the same?” And further removed as we are, having never encountered Jesus in the flesh, perhaps our faith needs to be even deeper than theirs. That’s why I love Thomas’ candor. Very soon as we approach Pentecost, we will hear the Lord say: “It is better for you that I go.” I wish Thomas were there that day too to say something like, “Please remind me why this is better because I’m just not getting it. I don’t understand. I just want you to stay.”
Jesus desires that those he loves will stay with him, and abide in him. In the very “dark hour” of his passion and death, the disciples don’t know where Jesus has gone or how to follow him. And after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene will voice the question of all the disciples caught as they are in the “pre-dawn darkness of the scandal of the cross, ‘Where is the Lord?’” Scholars remind us that this “where” of Jesus in John’s Gospel is not a geographical location but a relationship of indwelling, abiding and communion - between Jesus and his Father and between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus is the Way. Jesus is in the bosom of the Father and he has come into the world to make us children of the Father with him, through him. And as he prepares for his departure “to resume his primordial glory in God’s presence,” he promises those whom he loves that he will come back for them, come back for us. But until then, even now, we dwell in a dark faith with no small amount of obscurity.
I trust but I don’t understand. The Lord’s reply, “It’s ok, you don’t have to understand you only have to believe in me, trust me, abide in me." Jesus promises us, “I am the way that leads through darkness and confusion, obscurity and doubt; through seeming absence to a richer, darker, mysterious presence.” He draws us higher to the place he’s preparing for us, the place of our belovedness. Jesus clearly understands himself as the Beloved of his Father. (How else could he have made it through the horror of his passion?) And he envisions the same identity for us - he calls us his dear disciples, even his friends, and says that where he is, there we will be beloved ones - hidden in the bosom of his Father. “I will come back again and take you to myself,” he says, “so that where I am you also may be.” For all my lack of understanding these words of Jesus are so tremendously consoling. “I will take you to myself.” Where else would any of us want to be?
So we continue to hold fast to his promise, for only love and surrender to him can quiet our questioning. For Jesus is even now taking us to himself, drawing us. And even as we hold fast to him in faith, in our faithfulness to him- all is still a mystery. And as monks, this is where we live - in this land of desire, somehow suspended between heaven and earth, getting glimpses of heavenly communion, visits of the Word, noticing his kind and loving presence but more often left hanging, because our desire always outstrips our present capacity, and we are left suspended, longing for more, but often losing our way. We live in this in-between place poised in faith between a promised heavenly homeland and an earthly home; puzzled and sometimes impatient because earthly existence even for all its ambiguities is at least tangible and real. And as we wait in joyful hope, we must keep on doing what we’re doing - passing the eggplant - with love in our hearts, noticing the ordinary charged with mystery, for this is exactly where Jesus will find us.
Such is this mystery of our faith that as we await the fullness of our communion in the bosom of the Father - the departure of Christ grants us an absence that is full of his mysterious presence - in the communion of community, the communion of mystical prayer, in the communion of this Holy Eucharist.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Homily by one of the monks.