'… I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for
you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am,
there ye may be also.'—JOHN xiv. 2, 3.
What divine simplicity and depth are in these words! They carry us up
into the unseen world, and beyond time; and yet a little child can lay
hold on them, and mourning hearts and dying men find peace and
sweetness in them. A very familiar image underlies them. It was
customary for travellers in those old days to send some of their party
on in advance, to find lodging and make arrangements for them in some
great city. Many a time one or other of the disciples had been 'sent
before His face into every place where He Himself should come.' On that
very morning two of them had gone in, at His bidding, from Bethany to
make ready the table at which they were sitting. Christ here takes that
office upon Himself. The emblem is homely, the thing meant is
transcendent.
Not less wonderful is the blending of majesty and lowliness. The office
which He takes upon Himself is that of an inferior and a servant. And
yet the discharge of it, in the present case, implies His authority
over every corner of the universe, His immortal life, and the
sufficiency of His presence to make a heaven. Nor can we fail to notice
the blending of another pair of opposites: His certainty of His
impending death, and His certainty, notwithstanding and thereby, of His
continual work and His final return, are inseparably interlaced here.
How comes it that, in all His premonitions of His death, Jesus Christ
never spoke about it as failure or as the interruption or end of His
activity, but always as the transition to, and the condition of, His
wider work? 'I go, and if I go I return, and take you to Myself.'
So, then, there are three things here, the departure with its purpose,
the return, and the perfected union.