When Jesus was a boy, He stayed behind in His Father's house, the temple in Jerusalem, even after His family had left to go home to Nazareth. Why did He do it?
My guess: He was homesick.
Jesus would speak of His Father's house again about twenty-one years later to His disciples:
In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. ... And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.
One's house is a place of security. It provides shelter. A house is where one eats, and where one rests, the way God Himself rested on the Seventh Day. A house is one's home, where one belongs.
Was Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, at home on earth? In one sense, there is nowhere in the universe that God cannot be found. All the universe belongs to Him. At the same time, where Christ was always really "at home" was in the presence of His Father who sent Him. Before his entrance into the created world, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity lived in a perfect communion of love with and knowledge of the Father and the Holy Spirit. He not only lived the beatific vision that we mortals hope to achieve when we pass from this life, He was that beatific vision.
Now think, He had to go from that to ... this. A beautiful and awe-inspiring creation, of course. But what is it compared to the complete bliss of God's own life? Obviously you and I can't make the comparison. But He could. He knew what more there was to life than this world that passes away.
Not that He begrudged it. He was happy and willing to humble Himself to take on human form. But He always felt drawn back to the place He had always been -- in the shelter of His Father. That was Jesus' home.
Now, the revolutionary idea of Jesus is that He now intends to make that home, our home. Your home. My home.
What do families do when they have a baby on the way? They prepare a room for her. A place where she can be kept safe and receive everything that she needs to be happy. So with the family of God, the Trinity, and us. Jesus' promise that He will prepare a place for us in His Father's own house means that He is telling us -- not just how we ought to live, although that is important, and not just Whom we are to worship, although that is crucial, but where we belong. It is what we search for in life so frantically. A sense of belonging. It's why people yearn for romantic relationships. They desire terribly only that they might belong with someone. Just to belong somewhere, with someone, is enough to make life mean something, to make it worth living. Not a bad thing either. God gave us those desires. He made us a people that yearns to belong with someone else besides ourselves. We yearn to belong with each other.
But those wants only point to the ultimate yearning of our hearts -- to belong with something greater than we are. And the message of Jesus is that He intends to satisfy that ultimate longing in our hearts, by making a home for us with His Father. So that where He is, at home with His Father, we may be also. His belonging becomes our belonging. We belong because we are one with and in Christ. Because He belongs, we belong.
We are not going to some strange place when we follow Jesus to His Father's house. We are not leading some strange life when we live the way He does. We are being who we were meant to be. We are going where we were meant to go.
Home.
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