Way
John 14"1-14
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John 14:1-14
14 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe[a] in God, believe also in me. 2 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?[b] 3 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. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.”[c] 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know[d] my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
8 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me[e] for anything, I will do it.
There’s an old saying that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. It’s safe to say that in the upper room on that last night, Jesus’ disciples did not know where their teacher was going. It was clear that he was in danger. He had been in danger for some time. The more he spoke out, the more people in charge, people with power to be preserved, recognized that he needed to go. But where? To jail, like John the Baptist had for publicly criticizing Herod’s extra-marital affair with his sister-in-law? Or someplace worse?
They might not have known the details that night they gathered to celebrate the Passover, but they knew that whatever they had been doing with Jesus for the past few years looked like it was coming to an end, and he was going away. Jesus himself has told them that he’s going away. They’d like to know where he’s going. Peter asks, saying that he’d follow Jesus anywhere, only to have Jesus foretell Peter’s denial later that night. Which is fairly troubling. Only Jesus tells them not to be troubled because he’s going to prepare a place for them with his Father and they know the way. While that sounds nice, Thomas is having none of it because they still don’t know just where that is. He knows that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. Which is to say, there is no way to get to somewhere that you do not know.
In John’s gospel Jesus continually has this problem. He speaks metaphorically and literal-minded people are constantly misunderstanding him. He talks to the woman at the well in Samaria about living water and she wants to know where his bucket is. He tells his fellow rabbi Nicodemus, who comes to him under the cover of darkness, that if someone wants to enter into what God is doing, what Jesus repeatedly refers to as the Kingdom of God, that such a person needs to be re-born from above, and Nicodemus asks him questions about the limits of human anatomy. He talks about his own flesh as the bread that he gives for the life of the world and people think that he’s talk about cannibalism.
There is no disciple more literal than Thomas. Thomas doesn’t tend to traffic in abstractions, he wants detail. Definite, tangible, verifiable and manageable detail of what exactly it is that is happening. We heard the story a few weeks ago about how it wasn’t enough for him to hear from his friends who had seen Jesus resurrected. Thomas wanted to put his fingers in the wounds himself. And in the room that night it’s Thomas who reminds Jesus that he hasn’t even told them where he’s going exactly, so they cannot possibly know the way. And that’s where Jesus’ metaphor runs into our own modern-day tendency toward the limits of literalism. Because Jesus says the words that you see on any number of bumper stickers and signs, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” People have heard those words, used those words, as kind of magic formula for getting into heaven when they die. But not only that, they hear them and conclude that anyone who isn’t Christian must not be getting into heaven when they die.
Here’s where we have to step back and push back against the mistaken notion that being a Christian- following Jesus, trusting his lead and relying on him to save us from the worst version of ourselves- that all of it is somehow some kind of program for gaining access to a better class of afterlife.
Friends, I’m afraid that that is simply not the case. Undoubtedly this season of Easter in which we find ourselves, our joyful proclamation that Christ is risen indeed, is testimony to the fact that death is not the end of the line, that death does not get the last word in the story of our lives.
But that does not mean that Jesus came to whisk us away from a hopelessly broken world for harps and angels. Jesus said it himself in that cryptic conversation with Nicodemus, God so loved the whole world that he gave us Jesus so that whoever trusts in what he is doing might be saved. And what he is doing is making all things new.
You don’t save a world by abandoning it. You save a world by restoring it. That’s what Jesus is about. That’s what Jesus means to do in both his dying and his rising. The mistake that we so often make is in believing that God is somewhere else, doing something else- up in the sky somewhere. If only we could see God, because you know, seeing is believing. We can’t. That doesn’t mean we haven’t tried. In fact, so great is our desire to have a God that we can see that God made a commandment specifically forbidding us from creating any kind of visual image of God.
Jacob wrestled… well we don’t know what Jacob wrestled exactly. Scripture only says it is a man. Tradition has referred to it as an angel, one of God’s messengers. Jacob himself contended that he had wrestled with God that night, that he had in fact seen God face to face and lived. But elsewhere we’re told that no one can see God and live. Moses went up the mountain to get the law from God at Sinai, so the story goes. And when he came down the mountain we’re told that his face glowed from being in the presence of the Lord. But he didn’t see him. Not exactly. Moses asks to see God, but all God will agree to is allowing Moses to see God’s backside after passing by.
And that’s generally how it goes. We don’t usually see God in the moment. What we see is where God has been. We see where prayers have been answered, where healing has taken place. We look back see God when people have had their eyes opened to something they had been blind to, or when a person who has had their heart broken learns to love and trust again. But more than that, Jesus reminds Phillip and all of us that the best glimpse we’ll ever get into what God looks like is by looking at Jesus.
The truth of who Jesus is and what Jesus does is the truth about who God is and what God does. And that means that Jesus isn’t some magic password that people have say in order to get in on some golden afterlife. The truth about Jesus, in the way of Jesus is how we come to know and enter into the life of the one Jesus calls, “father.”
Back in 1942, a man named Leonard Wilson was living in Singapore when the Japanese army invaded. Leonard was taken to an interment camp where for many months he endured regular beatings and torture. He constantly prayed to God for patience, for courage, and for love. He got several opportunities to exercise such gifts. While he was being tortured his captors would ask if he still believed in God. When he said that he did, they asked him why it was that his God didn’t save him. He told them that God did save him, just not by freeing him from the pain of their punishment. God saved him by giving him the strength to withstand it. Daily, he would cower at what was being done to him, still he prayed, “Father, I know these men are doing their duty. Help them to see that I am innocent.” Even so their faces were hard and cruel as they took turns flogging him. Some even looked like they might be enjoying themselves. Leonard tried to see them as they might have once been, as children with their brothers and sisters, happy and loved by their parents- not as they were, but as they were capable of being. It kept him from hating them. The hunger he faced was overwhelming at times. Another prisoner was allowed food from the outside. He could have eaten it all himself, but instead each day he shared it with other people in his cell. They in turn were inspired to do the same and shared with each other. It was eight months before Leonard was allowed to go outside into the sunlight. He had never known such joy and said it felt like a foretaste of resurrection. Even though he was still held captive, the peace he felt sustained him. Even in that troubling place he discovered that when you live the Jesus truth in the Jesus way, you get in on the Jesus life.
This is what it means to believe, or to have faith, or to trust in Jesus. It means to follow who he is and what he does in the way that he does it. About twenty years ago it was popular in some circles to ask the question, “what would Jesus do?” as a way of guiding people of faith to make the right choices with their lives. There were even rubber bracelets stamped with the letters of the acronym, WWJD. But if it’s the Jesus way that leads to the Jesus life, then a better question might be How Would Jesus Do. Because it turns out that faith in Jesus is not an afterlife program, it’s a this life program.
Leonard Wilson didn’t survive beatings, torture, hunger and captivity by fantasizing about pie in the sky, he did it by trusting the truth of what his faith had shown him and living that truth in a way that was integral to what he had seen. We cannot separate the truth of what Jesus aims to show us, the truth that saves us from hatred, fear and despair. We cannot separate that truth from the way in which it saves us. Just as we cannot separate that same truth from the way it manifests itself in our lives, in the Jesus way. It’s the way of forgiveness in a world set on revenge; the way of reconciliation in a world driven by retribution. It’s the way of healing in a world jonesing for a quick fix. It’s the way of inclusion in a world divided into warring factions. It’s the way of listening in a world that always has one more thing to say. It’s the way of contentment in a world driven by the need for one more thing and the way of the common good in a world where I’ve got mine, now you get yours. It’s the way of connecting in a world that is so disconnected. And it is the way of resurrection in a world bound by death. That’s where Jesus is going, to the place where death gives way to the kind of life that cannot be killed, not by anything, not really. That’s the truth. And Jesus has shown us the way.