“Because I go to the Father?”

It is a question, a question that arises out of the puzzlement of the disciples about what Jesus said. What does he mean? He says “a little while and ye shall not see me; and again, a little while and ye shall see me” and “because I go to the Father”. “We cannot tell what he means,” they say, about both these statements.

Perplexity and confusion, fear and uncertainty, sorrow and grief all belong to the mystery of the Resurrection. Yet the mystery of the Resurrection is really the mystery of God as essential life, always present, at once seen and unseen. The Resurrection accounts make visible what was hidden yet present in the Passion and what is hidden yet present in our lives. In a way, Jesus highlights the human problem about the forms of our knowing which are often reductive and limited, a failure to grasp the meaning of what is heard and seen. The stories of the Resurrection are all about the birth of the understanding in us. And how? Most powerfully through the person of Christ himself teaching us about the essential life of God upon which all our being and knowing depend. It is all about the understanding. “In him was life and the life was the light of our humanity,” as John makes clear. Life and light go together.

“Because I go to the Father” is the recurring theme of Eastertide. It signals the dynamic life of God as Trinity in the mutually indwelling motions of the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into which dynamic life we are gathered; literally, born again, born anew. Born upward. This is the new life which restores us to fellowship with God and with one another in our daily lives. It is the underlying principle of how we act in the world, “submitting ourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” as Peter puts it. Note that this is “for the Lord’s sake,” not for our own immediate self-interest, not for sake of power and authority over others but because of the principle of the authority of God upon which all power and rule ultimately depend as forms of service. As Jesus said to Pilate in the Passion: you would have no power had it not been given you by God. All authority is from God. All wisdom belongs to God. God is life and light and love.

How do we come to know these spiritual truths? By the way in which God engages us through things heard and seen, through a kind of holy epistemology, we might say, the ways of knowing and living that belong to Word and Sacrament. We see this most explicitly in the story of the Road to Emmaus. But the logic of Word and Sacrament, understood as complementary and interdependent, is that we can learn from the visible things of our world the invisible things of God. But not by reducing God to ourselves. It is more about learning how to think upward; in short, to think analogically which is what we see in today’s Gospel.

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“I lay down my life for the sheep”

In one succinct phrase we have the entire essence of the Christian Faith. It is nothing less than the total self-giving life of God in the sacrifice of Christ. To be more precise, it is the radical meaning of the Trinity. We are familiar, perhaps, too familiar with the image of Christ the Good Shepherd and often misunderstand it. It signals, to be sure, the care of God towards us, God for us, we might say. Yet that is entirely grounded in God himself. Our text follows immediately upon the revelatory words of Jesus about the deeper and truer meaning of the image of the Good Shepherd. He is, as he says about himself, “the good shepherd,” but beyond making a certain assertion and identity claim, he explains what it means in relation to us and what it is grounded upon.

“I am known of mine,” he says, but that is followed by the sentence in which our text is embedded. “As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep.” Our knowing him is ultimately grounded in the knowing of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit; our knowing as grounded in God’s eternal knowing of us. For where there are two, there is a third, something which we see in the story on the Road to Emmaus where Jesus comes alongside the disciples in their perplexity and confusion, their unknowing, to bring them into an understanding. How? Through “interpret[ing] to them in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” That is what we have here too. He is interpreting to us the meaning of himself as the Good Shepherd. We are gathered into the spiritual relation of the persons of the Trinity, the divine communion of eternal and total self-giving love.

What that means for us is seen in the Epistle and Gospel for today as concentrated in the Collect. The Father has given his only Son “to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life.” What is revealed to us about the self-giving life of God himself through the sacrifice of Christ is meant to become our life; we are meant “most thankfully” to “receive that his inestimable benefit” and “daily [to] endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life.”

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