Thought for the week - 3 May 2026

Christ tells us in today’s gospel, “There are many rooms in my Father’s house”. We often hear this reading at funerals – and rightly so, for it is comforting and true, and puts into context the promises made to us and for us at our Baptism, that there is a place for us in the world yet to come and that we belong in the heart of God, indeed that there is a place individually prepared by Christ for each one of us, which may seem to bear little relation to the place where we are now. But there are only two places in St John’s gospel where the expression “my father’s house” appears. One is in today’s gospel, from Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples in the Upper Room. The other occurs much earlier, where Jesus has a rather different sort of “farewell discourse” as he throws the moneychangers and those selling animals and birds out of the temple. “Take these things away,” he says; “you shall not make my father’s house a house of trade.” So the Father’s House is – or was - both the Temple in Jerusalem, and the heavenly abode of those whom Christ calls to the place individually prepared for them. It is also worth meditating on the beautiful fact that He gives this promise in the very room He will come back to three days after His death.

The Temple, the ‘other place’ which the Cenacle, the Upper Room, prefigures and eventually at Pentecost floods the world with, was failing to live up to its role as a sign of heaven, so it is abandoned and forsaken by God. Not as a punishment but because the new Temple to which we are called is what St Peter today calls a “spiritual house” built from “living stones”. That is, we are the Temple in Jerusalem, the ‘New Jerusalem’ as it is put, because we not only know there is a place made ready for us in Heaven, but that we are part of it now, and that we are building it here now, of living stones, meeting in but not contained by this building now.

We don’t merely dwell in a room in the Church, but we become part of her dynamic fabric and structure. In our baptism and confirmation we are consecrated and anointed as individuals, but also to be part of the spiritual temple dedicated to Christ. So too in the Church we need to recognise our interdependence. We must provide for and support those in need, recognising that while we have different functions, we are equal in dignity and equally requiring physical and spiritual nourishment, whether we are Hebrew or Hellenist, Apostle, Deacon or Widow, Cradle-Christian or Convert. So today we hear this Gospel in faith and hope as we come to elect new PCC members and church officers, because all this is part of our equality, our interdependence and the building of the Kingdom. It would be a fanciful image if it were built on our human frailty, but as the living stones are built on Christ, we must strive to make sure that we are built not on His foundations, but that we are built into an image of Him, in whom all find a home and in whom all have a place prepared out of love.

Building anew, as we are called to do, is hard. If you want an example, then travel back two thousand years and explain to the Temple authorities in Jerusalem that their building will be demolished and that our building here in Blackpool will be of equal value and filled equally with the presence of God. They would laugh at you, and probably kill you, as they killed Christ for saying, in another way, just that. So it will involve continual change, because God is alive and so are we. And that’s hard because we tend to think that the past was better than the present, and we can become fearful that the decline will continue in the future, and that what we perceive to be decline actually is decline.

There’s a great danger of idealising the early Church. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that the Christian community was of one mind and heart and held everything in common but in today’s first reading we learn of a failure in the life of the early Church in Jerusalem. A very vulnerable section of its community — poor Greek widows — was being neglected. Converts overlooked the widows in the daily distribution of food. That showed a serious lack of care and concern and undermined the unity of the community. Not surprisingly, there were complaints. But more importantly, when the Church recognised its failure, it immediately took steps to remedy the fault. And it used imagination in finding a solution.

Seven deacons including Stephen were given the task of caring for the widows. By allotting different tasks to different people, the life of the Church developed. What had started as a failure became an opportunity for growth. And we must expect this process to continue in the future. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit the Church should recognise new needs and may find unexpected solutions. That’s a sign of its vitality — not by trying to recapture an idealised past, which never existed. So today and every day, we commit ourselves to following the changing power of God in making Him known on earth, here, as He is in the place He has made ready for us.