Feeling lost, finding that the truth is elusive, and the frustrations of letting go of our expectations of life returning to normal are familiar feelings in this age of pandemic and economic depression.
But the words of Jesus to the disciples, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” remind us that this confusing time is the beginning of new life being incorporated into our old lives, new life which we cannot yet fully see or comprehend.
Jesus is the Way.
Jesus is the bridge between the old and the new, a rock solid bridge on which we can cross from one side to the other with great confidence.
We already know that Jesus is the Way to our true home in the heart of God. Every day offers us multiple opportunities to travel the Way home. Every time we respond to another with God’s love, every time we reach out with God’s love, every time we rest in God’s love, we are travelling on the Way crossing over the rock solid bridge that is Jesus to our home in God’s loving heart.
Right now, reaching out in love may mean something as simple as picking up the telephone and calling someone and offering some time of companionship and conversation to break the monotony of that person’s isolation.
Responding in love may mean swallowing frustration with another person, taking a deep breath and responding in a loving way to a situation that has the potential to drive you crazy.
Walking the Way of Love brings us closer to our homes in the heart of God.
Jesus is the Truth.
Like Pilate, we are always asking, “What is truth?” In this age of constantly conflicting information, truth seems impossible to figure out.
But the truth of Jesus is the truth of God’s love.
To respond to any complex situation as honestly as we can in and through God’s love, in the best way we can perceive and live out that love as human beings—that response will be a truthful response.
Jesus teaches us the truth that God loves the person or people that we may find repulsive just as much as God loves us. So to work toward love in our exterior responses, and also to work toward interior love and openness in our hearts, is to seek the truth that Jesus is, and to find Jesus present with us.
Jesus is the Life.
Even in the face of certain death, Jesus is life. And crossing from this physical life into the next on that rock solid bridge of the Way of Jesus gives us safe passage to our ultimate home, “the nearer presence” of God, the home of our eternal life, the Father’s house full of many dwelling places, prepared by Jesus for all who have been traveling the Way of Jesus home to God.
Jesus tells the disciples that he is the way and the truth and the life because they will soon find themselves separated from him by his physical death, and then once more, after those glorious days of being with the resurrected Lord, they will be physically separated from him when he returns to the Father and gives the disciples his work to continue on this earth.
So Jesus wants to reassure the disciples that the end of his time with them here and now is not the end of the story. In fact, the death and resurrection of Jesus mark the beginning of a new story for these disciples.
The disciples and their responses always give me hope, because they are so much like my own responses. “Wait, Jesus, what are you talking about? I can’t SEE where you are going. How on earth am I supposed to know the way?”
We are the current disciples, we know that Jesus is the way to God, but claiming what we know in the face of death and separation is hard for us to do, because when the going gets tough, we tend to develop our strategies based only on physical realities that we feel we can control.
The anxiety that many Christians are feeling right now about getting back to church is based on the desire for a physical reality that we can physically inhabit. Anxious to open our churches, anxious to be together to worship in the buildings that we think of as God’s house, anxious to be surrounded by the familiar, anxious to sing our hymns, anxious to return to our rituals—we are anxious to return to what we know, and the things that we can control, because we have become dependent on these physical things to draw closer to God.
The anxiety we feel about dying and death is similar. Our bodies are what we know. We don’t want to die because we cling to what we know, the bodies that we inhabit.
But Jesus says to us, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Don’t be anxious.” Believe in God, believe also in me.”
That last phrase, “believe also in me,” is proof that God knows about and even honors our need for physical reality. Our need for physical reality is the reason why Jesus came to live and die as one of us. Jesus shows us that God does know and does understand our need for physical reality. God shares our experience of physical reality by being with us as one of us.
Jesus says to the disciples, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” We know who God is and what God is like because Jesus came and showed us, in person, up close and personal.
And we know, because Jesus shows us, that God is love. Jesus shows us that the way, the truth and the life is God’s love for us. Jesus shows us that God’s love never ends. When we truly see Jesus and what Jesus shows us, we can begin to let go of our troubled hearts.
Just as Jesus did, we will go through rough times in our lives. We too will die. But knowing that God is love and that Jesus is the way of love can soothe our troubled hearts through even the hardest times.
At the end of the gospel reading, Jesus says, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” If we ask Jesus to soothe our troubled hearts, Jesus will do that.
Knowing that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life sets us free from our troubled hearts to do God’s work, the works that Jesus himself showed us how to do, the works of love that we ask to do through the power of his love.
Every morning, no matter how old we are, or how hard the circumstances we face, our lives start all over again. We’ve been given another day to walk in love, as Christ loved us, as the writer of Ephesians says.
There’s a hymn in our hymn book called “New every morning is the love.” The words were written in the early 1800’s by John Keble, and those words sum up this daily new beginning. The words express beautifully the fact that God is the one who gives us each new day to walk in love with God and with one another.
The first verse goes like this.
“New every morning is the love our wakening and uprising prove; through sleep and darkness safely brought, restored to life and power and thought.”
The fourth verse is particularly fitting for this time in which we’ve been deprived of being together in person as we would normally be.
“Old friends, old scenes will lovelier be, as more of heaven in each we see; some softening gleam of love and prayer, shall dawn on every cross and care.”
And then this very encouraging last verse. “Only, dear Lord, in thy dear love, fit us for perfect rest above; and help us, this and every day, to live more nearly as we pray.”
Parents, do you remember when your children were babies? When you waited for their first sounds early in the morning? And your heart leapt up in gladness when you heard them moving and talking to themselves, or singing or laughing?
And then you went and got them up, so glad to see them? And welcomed them into the new day?
That is God. God rejoices in each of our new days. God gets us up with joy and then God goes with us into the day, loving us and setting us on the way of God’s love. In each day, the truth of God’s love is present with us.
Each new day, we who know the truth of God’s love with us, we who are the followers of Jesus, are the ones that God trusts with the greatest honor possible.
We are the ones who have the honor to do the great work of being God’s love in the world. God trusts us to do God’s work of love in the world; to walk in the way of love, to show the way of love and to invite those around us to walk that way of love with us.
We can do both the small and great works of love that God calls us to do because we know the Way.
And that Way is Jesus our Lord, the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Let us pray.
“Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”