Divine Gravity: Rethinking God's House, God's Way, and God's Nature
In our recent exploration of John 14, we encountered three fundamental questions about Christianity that deserve fresh examination: Where is God's house? What is the way to God? And what is God like? Traditional interpretations of these questions have often led us toward escapism, exclusivism, and a conflicted view of God's nature. But I believe there's a more beautiful and expansive way to understand what Jesus was teaching.
Reframing God's House: From Temple to Community
When Jesus speaks of his "Father's house" with "many dwelling places," it's easy to default to interpreting this as a reference to heaven - some distant, spiritual realm where we'll eventually escape to after death. I understand this interpretation deeply. When my grandmother passed away from colon cancer during my teenage years, I even wrote a song expressing this very theology: that she had "left her body that wasn't really her own" to "go back home." This view suggests that our physical existence is somehow less real or less valuable than some future spiritual state.
However, this interpretation owes more to Platonic philosophy than to Hebrew thought or early Christian theology. Plato argued that the physical world was merely an illusion, with true reality existing in some non-physical realm of ideals. This thinking has deeply infiltrated Christian theology, but it would have been foreign to Jesus and his earliest followers.
The Hebrew perspective, reflected in Genesis 1, consistently affirms the goodness of the physical world. God declares the material creation "good" six times, and then calls humans - formed from the dust of the earth - "very good." There is no divorce between physical and spiritual reality in Hebrew thought.
To understand what Jesus meant by "Father's house," we need to look at how this phrase is used elsewhere in John's Gospel. In John 2:16, Jesus refers to the temple as his "Father's house" when he drives out the money changers. For first-century Jewish listeners, the temple represented the intersection of religious, social, political, and economic life - the center of God's activity in the world.
But by the time John's Gospel was written, the temple had been destroyed. The early Christian community needed to understand what Jesus meant in this new context. The key lies in the Greek word "mone" (dwelling place) and its related verb "meno" (to dwell, to abide). Later in John 14, Jesus clarifies: "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our dwelling (monan) with them."
This reveals that Jesus wasn't promising a future escape to heaven, but rather declaring that God would make their dwelling place within and among the community of believers. The physical temple was being replaced not by a spiritual heaven, but by a living community. God's house moved from a building to a people.
God's Way: From Exclusivity to Gravity
When Jesus declares "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," many Christians have interpreted this as cosmic exclusivism - a divine "my way or the highway" ultimatum. This interpretation has caused considerable pastoral anxiety, particularly in diverse cities like DC where many Christians observe their non-Christian neighbors doing more to reveal God's justice in the world than many Christians.
However, this exclusivist interpretation actually contradicts the broader message of John's Gospel. Consider Jesus's words in John 17, where he acknowledges receiving authority over "all people" to give eternal life to "all whom you have given me." Or John 12, where Jesus declares that when he is lifted up, he will "draw all people" to himself (some translations even suggest "drag," emphasizing the forceful nature of this attraction).
Instead of thinking about Jesus as "the way" like a narrow path or moving walkway at an airport, consider our solar system. Every planet, asteroid, and speck of cosmic dust exists within the sun's gravitational embrace. Even when objects appear to be moving in different directions, they remain under the sun's gravitational influence. This better reflects how Christ's love operates - not as a single narrow path that excludes all others, but as an underlying reality that draws all creation toward God, whether we recognize the source or not.
C.S. Lewis explored this idea beautifully through the character of Emeth in "The Last Battle." Even though Emeth believed he was serving the false god Tash, Aslan reveals that all good service is ultimately done unto him. This suggests that Christ's way of self-giving love undergirds all genuine paths to God, even those walked by people who may never hear Jesus's name.
Understanding God's Nature: Starting with Jesus
Traditional approaches to understanding God often start with Genesis and work forward chronologically, trying to reconcile the various portraits of God we encounter - from the creative breath of life to the flood, from liberation to commanded genocide. This approach forces us to somehow square Jesus with all these previous concepts of God.
The early church fathers suggested a different approach: start with Jesus and work backward. Jesus claims "whoever has seen me has seen the Father" and that "the son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing." If we take these claims seriously, then Jesus becomes our primary lens for understanding God's nature.
What do we see Jesus doing? Healing, feeding, making friends, confronting oppression, raising the dead, and bringing close those whom society pushed away. This then becomes our template for understanding God's activity in the world.
Implications for Today
This reframing has three major implications:
Christianity's goal isn't escapism but union with God - starting now, in our physical bodies, on this planet. This drives us toward collective liberation and the renewal of all things in the present, not just in some future reality.
Jesus as "the way" opens doors rather than closing them. Wherever we see movements toward liberation, freedom, love, and healing - regardless of their religious label - we can recognize Christ's active presence.
If something isn't liberating, loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, and kind, then it isn't God. We don't need to twist our consciences to accept harmful or fearful things as divine. God is the most joyful, peaceful, and good being in the universe, and that serves as our measuring stick.
These reframes challenge us to resist the temptation of escapism, to recognize God's presence in unexpected places, and to confidently reject anything that doesn't align with the character of divine love revealed in Jesus. This isn't about lowering our theological standards - it's about raising them to match the expansive, liberating love we see in Christ.
The invitation is to participate in God's dwelling among us now, to recognize divine gravity drawing all things toward love, and to align ourselves with the God revealed in Jesus - the most joyful, peaceful, and liberating being in the universe.
