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Green Blades Preaching Roundtable

5th Sunday of Easter

Year A
May 7, 2023
David R. Warner Jr.

John 14:1-14

The Gospel for this Sunday is John 14: 1-14. In that text, Jesus is on his way to the cross. He is accompanied by his motley band of disciples. As usual, they have difficulty understanding what Jesus is talking about, reflecting the human condition. Jesus reaffirms for the disciples that he is, “I AM”. Given how we usually read this gospel, it does not appear to say anything about our concern for EcoFaith. To hear the ecological echoes and implications of this passage, we need to look with a wider scriptural lens, first, to the creation context of the Gospel of John, and then to the creation account that begins the Bible as a whole.

In the gospel’s prologue, John writes “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” John then goes on for 9 verses and in verse 14, we find the incarnation. John writes “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

In the time span covered by those nine verses at the beginning of John, we have the entirety of cosmic, human and religious development, from the beginning of time to the incarnation. In the first chapter of Genesis, verses 26 and 27, God creates humankind. In verse 28, He gives humankind care of “the fish of the sea and …the birds of the air and... every living thing that moves upon the earth”. All of this activity occurs within the scope of John 1:5- 14.

In our text, verse 2, Jesus tells his disciples “In my Father's house there are many dwelling places”. And Jesus also tells his disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them within those dwelling places and tells his disciples in verse 4, “you know the way to the place where I am going”. The disciples, of course, tell Jesus that they cannot and do not know the way. Jesus then explains to his disciples that he is the I AM. Jesus also extols the benefits of believing in him as the I AM.

I wonder about the dwelling places of which Jesus speaks in this passage. Despite the disciples’ inability to understand, it is clear that Jesus is speaking of his spiritual nature and of a spiritual place. It seems to me that those dwelling places might very well be right outside our windows. We see this flora and fauna every day and think little, if we think at all, of God's injunction in Genesis regarding the care that we are to exercise with respect to what we are seeing and experiencing. Just perhaps, when we step aside from our temporal world and allow ourselves to experience the spiritual, the trees and animals, whether ambulatory or crawling, flying or swimming or in the form of insects, are in fact the dwelling places that Jesus speaks of which have been moved from the spiritual world to the temporal world where we can experience them.

As such we are bound to adhere to God's injunction in Genesis. Jesus tells us in this passage, in verse 12, that those who believe in him “will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the father”. Perhaps we experience those dwelling places and do works greater than Jesus by abiding in the dwelling places of God all around us, and by abiding by God's injunction in Genesis in caring for creation.

David R. Warner Jr.
David R. Warner Jr.
McGregor, Minnesota

Retired Law Professor.
Member of the Leadership Team for the EcoFaith Network of the NE Minnesota Synod
Affiliated with the Tri United Parish of the NE Minnesota Synod

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