The Way Home

Before someone we love comes to stay, we make a room ready. We change the sheets and clear a drawer, set out a towel, leave a light burning at the top of the stairs. None of it is strictly necessary; the guest could sleep on bare ticking and find the room in the dark. That is the point. A room made ready is a message that arrives before its guest: you are wanted here, and you are expected.

On the last night before the cross, in a borrowed upstairs room, Jesus talks like a man getting a house ready. His friends are coming apart. He has just told them that one of them will hand him over, and that Peter, the bravest talker in the room, will disown him before the rooster crows. Into that unravelling he says, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me” (John 14:1). Then the promise: “In my Father's house are many rooms ... I go to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2).

We hear “many rooms” and picture square footage, an estate with our name on a door. But the sentence lands somewhere else: “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:3). The prize is not the property. It is the pronoun — with me. The word under “rooms” is monai, dwelling-places, from the same root as the “abide” he will use minutes later: places to stay, near him, for good. We have tried other addresses — the house we saved years for, the work that was going to settle whether we amount to anything — and none of them held us. This is the homesickness the whole Bible has been carrying, an ache that finds no home here. It is answered by a God who keeps closing the distance, who dwelt among us in a body (John 1:14). The house is real — he says so, and he is going there to get it ready. But it is a home because he is in it.

We remember Thomas for doubting. Here he is only honest, saying what the others are too proud to admit: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5). We know the feeling. Jesus does not hand him a map. He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He does not point down the road toward home; he is the road. A signpost can tell us where to go and leave us to walk it alone. The one way is not a narrow gate we must be worthy to squeeze through but a Person who came the whole distance himself — which is why a man with nothing at all to bring gets in on the same terms we do.

And here is how the place was made ready. He went down into death and up to the Father — cross, empty tomb, ascension — and that whole road is the preparing. To take us to himself, he bore in our place the abandonment our sin had earned: shut outside in the dark, crying out as one forsaken (Matthew 27:46). Not the Father letting go of the Son, but the Son taking the judgment on himself. He was locked out so that we could be brought in. So the man on the next cross heard, that same afternoon, “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). It is the same with me as in the upper room: begun that afternoon, and finished when he comes again.

So we can let our troubled hearts grow quiet. The distance we could never cross, he has crossed from the far side. Somewhere ahead a room is ready and a light is burning at the top of the stairs, and the One who is himself the way has gone to come back and walk us in. We are not finding our own way home in the dark. We are being fetched.