February 21, 2019 – John 14:2

In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.
—John 14:2

Our Lord has taught us to connect heaven with the thought of himself—“my” Father’s house.22 Heaven is the house of Christ’s Father. It is as when an arch is built and last the keystone is put in that binds it all into one, or as when a palace has been raised with all its rooms and their furniture complete, but it is dark or dimly seen by lights carried from place to place. The sun arises, and by the central dome the light is poured into all the corridors and chambers. The Lord Jesus Christ is the sun of this house. If we think of its rooms and wonder where the final resting place will be, it is where Christ takes up his dwelling. His person is the place of heaven. If we think of its extent and variety, our imaginations might be bewildered and our souls chilled by boundless fields of knowledge, which stir the intellect and famish the heart. But where he is, knowledge becomes the wisdom of love—the daylight softened—and a heart beats in the universe, which throbs to its remotest and minutest fiber, for “in him was life, and that life was the light of men.”
If we think of heaven in its unity of communion, it is in him that it is maintained and felt—at his throne, through his love—according to his prayer. And if we think of a Father in heaven, it is Christ who has revealed him. “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). Even in heaven, God cannot be seen by created eye; the pure in heart see him, but with the heart. For the human eye, it is Jesus Christ, the glorified God-man, who says in heaven as on earth, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” He who gave us a corporeal nature and surrounded us with a material world has put into us the craving wish to approach him with our entire beings, soul, body, and spirit, and he has met the wish in the Son of God. In his person are enshrined the infinite attributes of God, so that finite creatures can look on them and comprehend them and see the Father in the Son. Thus God becomes open to human vision and accessible to human affection.
—John Ker