John 14:2: Why He Told Them at All

My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

John 14:2 (NIV)

Why He Told Them at All

“My Father’s house has many rooms.” Jesus said it to men whose hearts were troubled, and then he asked a question about his own word: if it weren’t so, would he have told them he was going to prepare a place?

The field behind the rented house is sunflowers this year, and they stand a good deal taller than he does. He’s nine. The truck comes Thursday, the new place is four hours away, and he has seen one photograph of it, a front door and part of a porch. He went out into the rows after supper because nobody can see him in there. He takes the head off a stalk with his hand, and he’s sorry about it, and he does it again to the next one. The light is going and every row he looks down is the same row.

Jesus was going there. If he goes and prepares the place, he said, he comes back for them and takes them to be with him, so that they are where he is. The house is his Father’s, he told them, and he said he would come back for them, and he asked them to weigh the fact that he’d said it at all. Of the place they got two words, many rooms.

He said it to the men who were with him, and it holds for the ones who came after them, all the way down to this morning. They walked out unable to picture the place, and he hadn’t asked them to picture it. He’d asked them to take his word, and that was all they had to walk out with. You can put your whole weight on it in the dark without being able to draw one wall of the place.

Off to his left a screen door bangs. The row he’s in comes out at the ditch by the mailbox, and the new address is already taped inside the lid, in his mother’s handwriting.