Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; yet the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me.” (John 14.23-24)
When the Jewish writer and activist Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, himself a survivor of the German concentration camps of World War II, the Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind.” After his release from those horrendous camps, Wiesel spent the remainder of his life advocating for peace, speaking out against violence, repression, and racism wherever he saw it. The award recognized all of his efforts.
In one of his books, Wiesel, always a keen storyteller, especially of Yiddish folklore, told the story of a Jewish rabbi who lived during those dark days of the war and genocide of the Jewish people. This rabbi came faithfully to the synagogue each day to pray. And his prayer was simple. “I have come to inform you, Master of the Universe, that we are here.”
As the wages of war increased and the suffering of the Jewish people intensified, the rabbi continued to go to the synagogue, offering much the same prayer, “You see, Lord, we are still here.” Finally, as the persecution continued, the rabbi was the only Jew left alive in the village. With a heavy heart, he went to the synagogue one more time. This time his prayer was, “You see, I am still here. But you, where are you?”
Giving voice to the cry of the heart that has endured affliction and torment, the rabbi reminded the Most High God in his prayer that his people were still here, but, given the plight of his people, where in the world was he, the protector of the people? Almost a century later, many ask the same question that the rabbi asked as they experience similar trials and tribulations–where are you, Most High God?
It is never an easy question to answer, not for those who know the desolation and destruction that follow from persecution and prejudice, the human heart, desperate and despairing, seeking remedy and redress, but unable to find the presence of the Most High God anywhere in the turmoil and the turbulence.
Well aware of the human condition and the hatred that haunts the lives of the forsaken, the forgotten, and the foreigner, Rabbi Jesus offers an answer as to where the divine presence is to be found in a world ripped apart by enmity and riddled everywhere with persecutions of the powerless. We hear that answer in his last testimony to his followers on the eve of his own death at the hands of the powerful.
Known as the Farewell Discourse, this section of John’s gospel offers a condensation and summation of Rabbi Jesus’ teachings, putting before his disciples the fundamentals of his way of life, challenging them to continue to live in the world as he has lived, siding with the impoverished, the persecuted, and the powerless, promising them that if they live as he lived they will know a peace that the world cannot give, a peace that comes from God, not from human hands.
Within that Farewell Discourse, particularly in verses that we hear today, we find the Rabbi’s answer as to where the Divine Presence can and will be found in a dark world desperately in need of a ray of light. He tells his followers, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”
In other words, the presence of the Most High God is found in the human heart that loves as God loves. That answer reorients and redirects the search for God’s presence among his people, a presence that previously was said to be found in the Promised Land, then in the Tabernacle that was carried on the shoulders of the Hebrew slaves, and then in the Temple built to honor the Most High God.
Now, Rabbi Jesus asks his followers not to look at these exterior structures as the abode of God, but to look at the interior hearts of humans that beat with self-giving and self-sacrifice. For the writer of the Fourth Gospel, this is a logical progression, since he envisions Rabbi Jesus as the new temple of God, the divine presence found in his person, not in the Jerusalem Temple.
We want to recall that already at the start of his gospel, the evangelist tells us that the Most High God made his dwelling among us in the person of Rabbi Jesus, descended from the heavens, commissioned by God to show to the world the right way of living, and described by the evangelist as “God among us.” He was the human presence of the divine God.
Bringing to earth the living, breathing presence of God, his heart expressed and exposed the divine heart of God, a heart beating with love, a heart overflowing with compassion, and a heart embracing those dismissed, degraded, and disregarded by a world off-course and offline with the Most High God. “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” Rabbi Jesus informs Philip at an earlier point in this same Farewell Discourse, in this way identifying himself as the human face of God.
But, as Rabbi Jesus also makes clear, his human presence is not long for the world, his death around the corner, this meal the last that he will share with them in his human form. Yet, he will not have his followers become frightened or believe themselves forgotten, reassuring them that although he will not be physically among them, he will remain with them in a spiritual manner.
“I am going away and I will come back to you,” he promises them, insisting that while their eyes may not find his physical presence with them after his departure, the divine presence will still remain, embedded now in their beating hearts, as it was found in his heart while he walked the face of the earth. Speaking for his Father and for himself, he says, “We will make our home with you,” a far better translation than the word dwelling.
Shortly before these words, Rabbi Jesus had told the gathered disciples that he was going to prepare a place for them in his “Father’s house where there are many rooms,” also translated as dwellings. As the evangelist understands it and as Rabbi Jesus presents it here, this image of eternal life is not far off and faraway. Instead, it is here and now, or it begins here, not there.
Since eternal life signifies a right relationship with God, then it does not await some indefinite time in the future, but instead begins in the present, as soon as the human heart opens itself to housing the divine presence, in effect becoming an Airbnb for the Spirit, the place in this world where God can lodge.
Of course, this intimate bond results from and requires that the human heart beats in unison with the divine heart in the same way that Rabbi Jesus’ heart showed to the world the heart of God. And, as his life demonstrated, the heart of God is always a heart overflowing with love, breaking down every barrier that would divide one from another, washing away every difference that would define one as other, and flooding the world with fresh springs of water that all can drink from, Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and freedman, black and white alike.
If and when the human heart closes its doors to the divine heart, then the presence of the Most High God in the world is less visible, less felt, more opaque. And when that happens, the cries of the lost and the lonely and the least pierce the heavens, asking where God has gone, why he can’t be found, when, if ever, he will show his face again. “Where are you?” becomes the dirge of the desolate and the disconsolate.
When that question is asked–and it is asked far too often in these times and in too many places–then we know we have failed as followers of Rabbi Jesus, our human heart failing to reveal the divine heart of God to the world, our incapacity to love as God loves snuffing out any signs that the divine presence is still alive and well in our midst.
Rabbi Jesus understood the probability of his followers failing to fulfill his mandate to love as he loved, but he also believed in the possibility that some–maybe more than a few–would succeed, opening their hearts to others as he had opened his heart, allowing themselves to become conduits of divine love, bringing light into the darkness, hope to the hopeless, and food to the hungry.
When and where that possibility becomes a reality, the world is suddenly full of burning bushes that bring the divine presence into the world, calling the unbeliever to belief, freeing the imprisoned from their chains, and knocking the proud from their high horses. Suddenly, the world is ablaze with the light of a thousand torches.
Perhaps a story told by the old rabbis makes more sense now. According to the story, Rabbi Joshua ben Levi talked to the prophet Elijah one day. “Where,” Rabbi Joshua asked the prophet, “where shall I find the Messiah?” Elijah answered him, “At the gate of the city.” The rabbi asked, “How, then, shall I recognize him?” Elijah said, “He sits among the lepers.” Rabbi Joshua, surprised, responded, “Among the lepers! What is he doing there?” Elijah answered simply, “He changes their bandages. He changes them one by one.”
Elijah, like all the prophets, could read the heart of God. Today, Rabbi Jesus would have us also know the heart of God, opening our own hearts to his love, in this way changing our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. As we heard, he asks us to make a home in our heart for the Divine Presence. If and when we do, we will find ourselves in a very different world, a world with God in it again.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 