“You know the way to the place where
I am going” says
Jesus in today’s reading from John’s Gospel. “You know the way to the place where I am going”.
He’s speaking to his disciples on the night before he dies,
but although he has told them many times that he will be arrested and killed,
they still don’t get it. Thomas asks the question that the others are probably
thinking. “Lord, we don’t know where
you are going, so how can we know the way?”
These disciples have been travelling with Jesus for several
years by this point, going from village to village, town to town, healing,
preaching, teaching. But now Jesus is talking about a journey he’ll make on his
own, and they can’t work out where is he planning to go. It sounds as if he’s
expecting them to join him, but if they don’t know where he is going, how can
they? How can we know the way, if we don’t know the destination? It’s a
perfectly sensible question. If we plan to meet a friend – remember those days when
we could just do that! - we need to know where, otherwise we’ll just be
wandering round at random and the chances of coming across them, when they
could be anywhere in the wide world, are pretty remote. Thomas doesn’t understand
what Jesus is saying, and he won’t be able to until much later, after Jesus’
crucifixion and resurrection. For now, all Jesus can tell him is “I am the Way”. Eventually he will
discover that was all he needed to know anyway, all any of us need to know for
the journey that Jesus calls us out onto.
I love maps. I love them not just because they show me how to
get from A to B without getting too loss, but for all the other information
they give about the landscape – an intriguing place name, an ancient burial
mound, a hidden valley, a sacred spring – all there to be discovered. But there
are no maps that can show us the journey our lives will take, no maps that show
us what the terrain ahead of us might look like. We can look back and trace the
hills and valleys we’ve passed through, the places where we seemed to wander in
circles or got lost completely, but the future is a blank. That map can only be
drawn as we walk it. Will the landscape ahead of us be sunlit uplands or somewhere we’ll label afterwards “here be dragons”? We can’t know. We can
only live in the present, however much we hanker for the past or plan for the
future. All we ever really have in our grasp is now, this moment, this place
and time. Maybe we’re especially aware of that now, when the future seems even harder
to predict than it usually is.
We can try to guess how the current crisis might eventually be
resolved, and what the world might look like afterwards, but none of us can
know for sure, not the scientists, not the politicians, not the leaders in
business or any other field, including the church. That’s why their jobs are so
difficult. That’s why they need our prayers. We’re all travellers in unmapped
territory. We may know there is a mountain ahead of us, but we can’t know
what’s on the other side of it.
But the good news of this Gospel story is that, although there
is no map for these strange times, we do have a guide, someone who knows the
lie of the land, who has travelled through the worst of times, and can lead us
through it, and that may turn out to be far better. That’s what Jesus is saying to Thomas. They
don’t need to know the way, because he is the Way. They don’t
need to know where they are
going, so long as they know who they are going with.
“Lord, show us the Father” says Philip, but Jesus reminds them
that they’ve seen the Father in him, God at work, in his love for those around
him day by day. As they looked back, after Jesus resurrection, they began to
understand that he had embodied God for them, showing them what God was like.
In Jesus’ company they’d seen the welcome of God for people
they’d normally have run a mile from. They’d discovered God’s generosity; somehow
there could be enough food for everyone, even if all you started with was five
loaves and two fishes. They’d found that even in the wildest storm, they could feel
ultimately safe, because God, in Christ, had chosen to be in the same boat they
were. They’d seen God’s glory, not in great things, but in small things done
with great love. Eventually they learned, through Jesus’ crucifixion and
resurrection that even death wasn’t the end with God, that what looked like
complete failure in the world’s eyes could be the gateway to new life.
People have often reduced Christianity to a set of doctrines
and intellectual ideas, or rituals to go
through. If you believe certain statements about Jesus, if you get baptised or say
this prayer or that, then that’s faith done and dusted. These first disciples
of Jesus knew differently. That’s why they called themselves followers of the Way. They discovered
that faith only made sense if you lived it. You could only draw close to the
heart of God as you walked day by day in the way of love and sacrifice which
Jesus had shown them; there’s no other way to God but this way, says Jesus here.
But as they walked with Jesus, they found their lives reshaped, reoriented,
recreated. They didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know where this walk
with Jesus would take them. For some it led to execution, as it had for him.
But they carried on walking it because they found this way to be a true way, a
way of integrity and wholeness, a life-giving way, a way that led to life in
all its fullness. It might lead through pain and sorrow, but they discovered that
pain and sorrow didn’t have the last word.
Our future is unknowable. It can’t be anything other
than that. We never really know where we’re going, even if we think we do, and
that’s especially true now. We don’t even know what’s around the next corner.
But we can know the God who goes round that corner with us, and the corner
after that, the God who slogs through the mire, and over the mountains, and
across the deserts, patiently keeping company with us until the journey’s done.
And when we know that God, we can face whatever comes with courage and find his
blessing in it.
A poet called Minnie Louise Haskins said all that in far better words
than I can, in the familiar words which George VI quoted in his Christmas
broadcast of 1939, at another frightening time for the world. I’ll finish with them,
because even if you already know them, they are always worth hearing again.
I said to the man who stood at
the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may
tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and
put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better
than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding
the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And he led me towards the
hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.
Amen
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