I will come again

A word for the week

What happens when the person who was holding everything together is about to leave? That is the ache in this passage, and it is worth feeling, because Jesus speaks these words on the last night of his life, to friends who are about to watch him die and do not yet understand why. Their hearts are troubled, and he knows it, and so the first thing he says is not a command but a comfort: do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. And then he makes a promise so plain and so large that the whole of our watching rests on it.

In my Father's house are many rooms, he says; if it were not so, would I have told you? I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also. Hold those words: I will come again. It is not a maybe, not a poetic flourish. It is a promise, given by Jesus to his frightened friends the night before he died, that his leaving is not the end of the story, that he is going ahead to prepare a place, and that he will come back for them. He is going ahead of them, to make ready.

This is the ground the whole Christian watch stands on, and it is why we keep the watch at all. We are waiting on a specific promise from a specific person: I will come again. Everything else in the practice, the eye kept on the road, the old prayer maranatha, the readiness, grows out of this one sentence. He said he would return, and so we watch, because you keep watch for someone who has told you plainly that they are coming back.

Then Thomas, bless him, asks the honest question the others were probably too embarrassed to ask: Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way? And Jesus gives one of the best-known answers he ever gave: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Notice he does not hand Thomas a map or a set of directions. He says, in effect, the way is not a what, it is a who; it is me. You come to God by coming to Jesus, by walking with him, following his way, trusting his person. He is himself the road home.

So this passage does two things at once, and they belong together. It anchors our hope in a plain promise, I will come again, which is why we watch and keep watching. And it tells us how to make the journey in the meantime: not by figuring out the route ourselves, but by staying close to the one who is the way. Do not let your heart be troubled, he says to people about to lose him, and he says it to us, in every season when the road ahead looks dark and uncertain. He has gone to prepare a place. He is coming back. And the way there, the whole way, is him.