In Times Like These, Part 1: ‘How Can We Know the Way?’
In John’s Gospel, Jesus offers these words that we hear, more often than not, at funerals. “‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (John 14:1-6).
Do I Know the Way?
My experience of what it means to be a Christian walking with Jesus is that I often say to Jesus, “I’m not sure I know the way. I think I know who you are. You in your graciousness have revealed that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. In you is eternal life. In you I have the promise of forgiveness of sins, a place with you in heaven. But how I get from A to B, the way? I’m not often sure that I know what that is.”
And that can particularly be what we are feeling now, because things that we thought were the way we should go are not that way anymore. We live in an era, which, at least for the generations living, is an unprecedented time of financial, emotional, relational, economic and even political upheaval.
And it’s compounded by the fact that everybody has a grand narrative that they want to tell you. “If you listen to me, I’ll tell you what the truth is. Don’t believe those people over there,” whoever those people are, and it happens across the political and socioeconomic spectrum. No one, quite frankly, is immune; everyone is claiming to have the best insider information.
And we, who are used to, as an educated people, understanding that the way you master a situation is to get the best information, are extraordinarily gullible to those barker-type calls about what we are to think and as a result, how we are to live.
‘Lord, Show Us the Way’
And when Jesus responds to Thomas’ question, “Lord, show us the way,” he offers something I’m sure that for Thomas, and certainly for most readers of the gospel, is an unexpected response. He doesn’t offer, as it were, a game plan in so many words. Instead, he offers a relationship, and out of that relationship, a way of seeing life that doesn’t offer us all of the answers as much as it invites us into a relationship of both trust and knowledge.
In other words, Jesus is teaching us something about how to live, not by a formula that we master, but by a relationship that over time, masters us.
That’s not something that we’re used to. We understand mastery is something to be avoided if it is imposed upon us, as people say, particularly in the light of the rejection by some of wearing face masks.
None of us likes other people to tell us what to do. The last thing we want is to be mastered. We instead want to be the ones who master, who direct, who control, who tell other people what to do, who define reality for other people. And we think that if we can speak those words confidently enough, we’ll get an audience, even if what we’re saying appears close to ridiculous.
And that’s a part of what is being proven by these competing grand narratives, spoken with such utter confidence and shamelessly attacking those who do not agree.
‘I Am the Way’
So we’re invited into something different than is being offered by any of the media outlets, something different than what is being offered by almost all of our politicians. It has to do with knowledge, yes, but knowledge that is, in fact, the fruit of not the mastery of facts so much as it is entering into a relationship that gives us the capacity to see life from a different perspective, one that promises the capacity to begin to know truth. And as most of us know, truth is always larger than facts. It’s actually a way of seeing the world.
And so what Jesus says to Thomas is, “I am the way.” In other words, what Jesus is saying is that he is inviting us into a subservient relationship, where we allow him as Son of God and Lord to direct us and to teach us and to shape us in that relationship.
In other words, to follow Him, to be with him, to get to know Him, to learn to hear his words, be shaped by those words. He invites us to both know him and the God that he embodies in a way that isn’t possible any other way, and out of that way, to be able to see life from the vantage point of the Creator and Redeemer of the World.
A New Testament scholar by the name of Merrill Tenney puts it this way: “because he is the only one who has intimate firsthand knowledge of God and humanity not marred by human sin.”
What that means is when Jesus teaches, when he speaks and the way he lives come from a perspective both on God and on life, that is intimate, personal and most of all, perfect. And in fact, in Jesus’ life, perfection is redefined in a way that it can only invite us to know him.
He is the truth, because he is the only one who can speak truth. As the Son of God, Jesus is the only one who even defines the nature of what truth is: the perfection of his nature, the capacity of his to live in an unmarred relationship with God flows out of him, to use Jesus’ own words, in a river of living water that speaks truth unparalleled by any other teacher.
We’ll learn more about that truth in my next post.
What do Jesus’ words “I am the way” mean to you? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.
(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on May 10, 2020, in the chapel of the Diocese of Central Florida in Orlando.)
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.