"In my Father's house there are many mansions"
Knox, 26 June, 2011 © Scott McAndless
1 Timothy 4:9-16, Psalm 47, John 14:1-8
In 1946 the New Testament of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published. Six years later the Old Testament was let loose on the public. It was a momentous event. Can you imagine it? For the first time in 341 years there was a new, public ally available translation of the Bible. The King James Version finally had some competition. And what’s more, this new Bible took into account some of the finest scholarship of the era and included consideration of stunning newly discovered manuscripts of the ancient texts. But would it ever win the same place in the hearts of the people that the Authorized Bible, as it was then known, had claimed?
Well, it got off to a bit of a rocky start. Some people complained that the new translation just didn’t pack the poetic punch of the old one – in fact, that is still a complaint that is with us today. Some would claim – and with some justification – that no “modern” translation has ever quite measured up as a work of English literature. But it wasn’t just about language. Some people were downright angry when they read certain passages.
This was especially true when people cracked open their brand new Bibles – hot off the presses – and turned to the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. There was Jesus speaking to his disciples – comforting them before his death with the promise that he was merely going on ahead of them and that he would prepare a place for them. Readers’ eyes opened wide with disbelief and then anger when they saw Jesus’ description of the place where he was going. “In my Father’s house,” Jesus says in the Revised Standard Version, “are many rooms.” “What is this?” the cry went up from all over the English speaking world, “The King James promised me that I would get a mansion and now the Revised Standard Version tells me that I’m only going to get a room? I’ve been robbed!”
People also complained that they could no longer sing the classic hymn “Jesus thy blood and righteousness” because “When from the dust of death I rise to claim my room up in the skies,” just didn’t work.
What had happened? I mean there is a whole lot of difference between a mansion and a room! Surely somebody had made a very serious mistake in translation. Either the reverend doctors who had undertaken the first translation at the direction of his majesty King James or (and this was, by far, the most popular theory) the professors who had produced the new translation had messed up most royally and had perhaps done it to spite believers everywhere – to rob them of their mansions in heaven.
Well, the truth is nothing so sinister as that. The truth of the matter was that both translations were correct, but each in its own way. What Jesus actually said (according the Gospel of John which was not written in the language that Jesus spoke but rather in Greek) was this: “In my Father’s house there are many monai.” And that word, “monai,” is a word that appears only there in the Greek New Testament. It is not the common Greek word for a “room.” It is not the word, for example, that the New Testament uses when it talks about the disciples meeting in an upper room. That is why the translators of the King James Version felt that they had to use a unique English word in this place. But why did they choose a word like mansion?
Well, the truth of the matter is that four hundred years ago the English word mansion didn’t quite mean the same thing that it does today. It was a word that meant a dwelling place. The word had been used, for example, by the Romans as the name for a building that was an official stopping place along a major Roman road – a place where a courier might rest his horses overnight. It could be used to talk about the residence of a local lord or leader. But, in 1611, there was absolutely no sense in which the word meant an extravagant multi-room house with manicured front lawns, a ball room and an indoor swimming pool. Translation is not an exact science, of course, there is no one word that means exactly the same as another word in another language. But, at the time, mansion was about the best English word that they could come up with to capture Jesus’ meaning.
What happened, of course, is that the English language changed (as languages will do given a few hundred years). The word mansion took on new and very specific meaning. What’s more, I suspect that this verse in John’s Gospel may have played a role in changing the meaning. As the gentry of England prospered during the stability of the reigns of the Tudor kings and queens, they built bigger and bigger houses with large ballrooms in which they entertained their guests. They looked around for a word to use to talk about their great houses which were far different from the homes of ordinary people. So of course they looked in their Bibles for the perfect name to call such a heavenly home and found it in the fourteenth chapter of John: a mansion – the kind of home where one might live in heaven. And so this verse in the King James Version actually helped to change the word mansion and give it the meaning that it has today. But the more the word changed, the less accurate the translation became.
So the King James was accurate when written, but became less so over time. By the time the Revised Standard Version came out, a mansion had become much more that just a big house – it had become a symbol of wealth and power. Ten years after the publication of the RSV, some producers in Hollywood would come up with an idea for a hit television show. It would tell the story of a man named Jed – a poor mountaineer who barely kept his family fed. But then one day he was shootin’ at some food when... well you probably know the rest of the story. The focus of that television show was on a mansion – a monstrosity of a place with more rooms than poor Granny could clean and a cement pond out back.
That mansion – any mansion – was a symbol of power, of wealth of having finally arrived. It was the best kind of life that people could think of or strive for. It was about beating out everyone else – about being better than anybody else. Even if you came from the Ozark mountains, if you had a mansion in Beverly Hills you had arrived and that was all that mattered. And with all of that baggage packed into a word like that, the scholars behind the Revised Standard Verson knew that they could never use a word like mansion in this verse. It would have conveyed a picture of heaven that Jesus never intended – probably a picture that would have disgusted Jesus given what else he had to say on the topic of ostentatious wealth.
So mansions was out. But was the Revised Standard Version any closer to the mark in 1946 when it translated the same word as “room”? Well, not exactly. As I said, the word that Jesus used there (or at least the word that John used to translate it) was not the common Greek word for a room. I understand why the translators of the RSV decided to use that word. It was a pretty obvious choice. After all, you would normally expect to find several rooms in a house – but it is not necessarily the right one. It seems to me that by using the word monai Jesus was pointing at something a little bit more than just an ordinary room. In fact the word does imply more than just a home for an individual or a nuclear family. It is more in the sense of a central dwelling for a group or a tribe – the place where the head of the tribe might live.
And that, for me anyways, suggests that the image of heaven that Jesus is offering here is a not a row of nice, identical rooms like you might find in a really big Super 8 Motel. He is not talking about a place where everybody has to fit into the same identical kind of room. The heaven that he describes has a place for all people but he is not suggesting that everyone there has to fit into the very same mold. There are “dwelling places” or (if you are able to stick with the seventeenth century meaning of the word) “mansions” for everyone no matter who they are, how they think, how they may approach God.
This is important, I think, because we all have a certain tendency to design heaven to only fit people who are like us – who we are already comfortable with. I mean, isn’t that what denominations are all about? We get together as Presbyterians and dream about a heaven designed for Presbyterians – where everything is done decently and in order – a heaven that just doesn’t seem to be the kind of place where those Anglicans or United folks down the street would feel comfortable. (Maybe we’ll let them in but it won’t be designed for them.)
We build a heaven in our minds that suits our culture and ways of living and it just doesn’t seem like the kind of place where a Massai warrior from Africa or an Indian from Calcutta would enjoy living. (What? No curry? They call this heaven and you can’t even get a decent curry? I don’t think so!) And so I think that it is good to be reminded that, if heaven is going to be heaven at all it had better be a place where all kinds of people from all kinds of places can find a dwelling place of their own and all can truly live in the kind of harmony that we don’t find enough of in this world. Heaven would just be such a sad place if all of those things that make us special and unique simply melted away.
Now, I know that there are some people who will say that in this passage Jesus is talking about the exclusive nature of the life to come. After all, doesn’t he say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” After all, if there is only one way to get to a certain place, wouldn’t it only be one kind of person who would be able to follow that way? Well, I don’t quite see it like that. Yes of course it is true that Jesus is saying that the way to God is the one that he himself has followed, that it is found in the truth that he has preached and embodied in the life that he has lived. But I think it is rather presumptuous of us to think that we know exactly who and what sorts of people are able to follow in that way.
I believe that in this passage Jesus is affirming the openness of the kingdom of his Father. It is not that the way to enter into that kingdom is easy (after all, whatever way Jesus is trying to describe here, it is the way that is about to lead him to his death upon the cross – it is a way that includes giving absolutely everything for the sake of love) but Jesus is affirming that there is a place there, not only for huge numbers of people but also for a huge variety of people.
I know that when we like to imagine heaven, we want to take the things that we strive for in this life – wealth, fame, recognition, mansions – and multiply them many times over. The problem with that is that what we often strive for in this world can be rather hollow and empty of meaning. The reality that Jesus is directing us towards here is so much more than what we can imagine – a place where all of that meaningless stuff is revealed in its true nature. It is a reality that Jesus would say we don’t have to wait for but can actually begin to live in here and now as we adopt the attitudes of such a place. It is a reality we can know when we stop striving for earthly mansions for ourselves and start bringing together all different sorts of people and building dwelling places where all can belong and work together towards God’s vision for this world. That’s what he’s really talking about.