Place For You (part 2 of 2)

Moses, who was the first to be recognized as a deliverer of Israel (something of a pre-messianic sensibility messiah), had spoken to the people of the covenant about the land of their Father’s promise---the land in which the Creator God said that He would dwell with His people---telling them that it possessed many dwelling places for them.   Specifically, the people were informed that this promised land contained large, fine cities which they did not build.   

In that mold, Jesus, the presumed messiah and deliverer of Israel and renewed Israel, speaks to the people of the covenant and the new covenant that was to be centered upon Him, about the land of the Father’s promise---the place in which His people would one day dwell with Him---also telling them, as had Moses in a previous time and place, that it was a place of many dwelling places.  These words that were said to have fallen from the lips of Jesus mark the beginning of what is generally known as His “farewell discourse” in the Gospel of John, as they follow the “last supper” and Judas’ having gone out to complete what would come to be understood as his betrayal of Jesus.  As Jesus is now on His path to the cross, He says “I am going away to make ready a place for you” (14:2c).  This is deliverer-speak. 

Based upon the route He traveled in His vocation, Jesus understood where it was that He was going.  If He was indeed Israel’s Messiah, He operated with a certain level of trust and expectation in regards to  what it was that His death would accomplish.  Believing Himself to be the representative of Israel (its King), He knew that He was going down into the curse of death on behalf of His Israel, but did so in what appeared to be complete trust in the promise-keeping God of Israel---Whom He is shown to have trusted with His whole mind, being, and strength---to fulfill the expectations of His promise, to raise up His Messiah from the dead, to conquer death through that Resurrection, and to inaugurate the kingdom of heaven on earth in a radically transformed creation in which Jesus reigned and Resurrection power was available through the mysterious agency of the Spirit for all those who were moved to a trusting allegiance to Him as Lord and King---for the purpose of bringing the Creator God’s glory to bear in this world. 

Because Jesus consistently spoke of the kingdom of God on earth, when He says that He is going to make ready a place for His disciples, we can safely understand that He is speaking of the kingdom of God that was going to be established with His Resurrection.  He is not necessarily talking about an eternal home full of mansions in a far-away place called heaven.  This expectation of the kingdom of heaven being established on earth (the life of the age to come breaking in upon the present creation, renewing and restoring, and the Creator God making His dwelling among men as the realm of His existence overlaps with the realm of man’s existence---heaven on earth) would be completely in line with the Jewish worldview, which looked to a resurrection of the righteous dead and a restoration of the creation to a pre-fall condition, with Israel’s God as ruler through His Messiah.  For Israel, and Jesus as the representative of Israel, this would be a world in which renewal had been commenced, in which heaven was going to be everywhere breaking in and shining forth in the world through God’s covenant people. 

When Jesus says “if I go and make ready a place for you, I will come again and take you to be with Me, so that where I am you may be too” (14:3), He seems to be speaking of His Resurrection.  With this, one must consider the Apostle Paul’s repeated insistence that all those that trust in Jesus as King will be raised up from the dead in the exact same way in which He was raised up from the dead---into a world now subject to and experiencing the kingdom of God that has Jesus as its ruler.  Finally, because He had spoken so many times of His death and His Resurrection, Jesus rather pointedly says to His disciples, though they would neve grasped the message or want to believe it until after the climactic events of all of history, that “you know the way where I am going” (14:4).