It’s pretty easy to get almost anywhere these days, isn’t it? I get in my car, put my destination into the map, and do what GPS tells me. Last week I was in Louisville for seminary board meetings. I know the way to and from Louisville, but I always put my destination into GPS because it’s paying attention to things I cannot predict. This time, shortly after leaving, GPS sent me off the highway to avoid a slowdown caused by an accident. It figured out that my fastest route was through some country roads in Indiana, better than sitting still on I-65. I’ve learned not to question GPS. It could tell me just about anything, and I’d obey.
Growing up, the way was harder to find. Every summer, my family would load up our Chevy van to travel from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Green Lake, Wisconsin. In preparation, my parents would set up an appointment at the AAA office. They wanted a TripTik, which was a manually assembled booklet of maps. Someone had to highlight the route and stamp any construction sites along the way. If we got off their route, it was up to us to find a way back to it. Knowing the way was a lot more difficult then.
Knowing the way is at the heart of our passage today. John 14 is familiar to many, particularly because it often shows up in funerals. It’s part of a longer farewell sequence in this gospel, where Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure. He knows that he faces arrest, trial, and execution. He also gets that this is part of something far larger than those events.
Jesus senses his friends’ hearts are troubled by all of this. In fact, he knows what it means to have a troubled heart. Jesus has been troubled three separate times in the previous chapters. His heart was troubled when he approached the tomb of his friend Lazarus, surrounded by all the mourners. His heart was troubled again as he shared with the disciples what he was facing. His heart was also troubled as he told them one of his friends would betray him. Jesus knows what it is to have his heart troubled.
So, he sees the faces of his disciples, and offers them comfort. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he says. “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.”
Maybe the familiarity of this keeps it from sounding strange to us, but as I put myself in the sandals of the disciples, I think I’d be mystified. Jesus is going away, but he hasn’t told me where? Galilee? Rome? Some new land? At least give us a name and a general direction, Jesus! Could you go to the future and grab us a GPS, so we can at least follow the coordinates?
Thomas gets it. He cuts to the quick. “Lord, we do not know where you’re going. How can we know the way?”
How can we know the way?
There are times we thought we knew the way, but we were wrong. Being wrong about the way can lead to some pretty tragic consequences, like the story of Lela and Raymond Howard, an elderly couple from Salado, Texas, a small town halfway between Austin and Waco.
One Saturday in late June 1997, they decided they would go to a fiddling festival in Temple, a 15-mile drive from their home. Now, Lela was starting to show signs of Alzheimer’s, and Raymond recently had brain surgery. They really weren’t in the shape to be driving. One of their sons told them as much, but Lela was determined. “No, we know where to go. We go every year.” The next morning they left, not bothering to tell their other son, who lived next door to them.
The Howards did not return home that afternoon, but a greeter at a Walmart 18 miles north of Salado saw them come in for a cup of coffee that afternoon. By that evening no one had heard from or reported seeing the Howards, so their children posted a missing persons bulletin. Three days later, on July 2nd, an Austin newspaper published an article about their disappearance.
That same day a deputy in rural Arkansas pulled Lela over for driving with her headlights off at night. Lela told the deputy they were trying to get back home to Texas, and the deputy told them they were going the wrong way. He gave them directions and asked where they lived. Lela could not remember.
About an hour later they were pulled over again for driving with their high beams on. They were let off once again, neither deputy knowing that there was a missing persons bulletin issued for them.
The next day there was another article about their disappearance, and allegedly someone spotted them at an Arkansas farmer’s market. By the following day, July 4th, authorities had narrowed their search to three counties in Arkansas. Five more days passed with no sign of them.
CBS Morning News began covering the disappearance, and a local Austin reporter stopped by the Howards’ home, where she encountered many signs of the couples’ mental decay. Folded clothes were on their bed, a sign they were packing for a long trip. The TV was unplugged. Their hearing aids were in the bathroom. Their calendar was turned to February, several months behind the current month. Worst of all, they left their cat named “Happy” behind. Poor, Happy.
Finally, on July 12th, two weeks after they had left for the festival that was 15 miles from their home, hikers found the bodies of Lela and Raymond Howard outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas, over 400 miles away. Lela had driven straight into a ravine. She was so confused that there weren’t even signs of braking. No one knows how long their bodies had been there – a truly tragic ending to a sad story.
Perhaps you remember this story from almost 30 years ago, but you likely remember the song called “The Way” by the band Fastball based upon their disappearance. Three times it repeats, “But where were they going without ever knowing the way?”
I think we can say that about all of us. Where are we going without ever knowing the way?
“How can we know the way?” Thomas asks.
And Jesus responds with those now familiar words. “I am the way, and the truth, and life.”
You see, the way is a path, a person, and a promise.
Did you know that Jesus’ earliest followers were not called “Christians?” That came a couple of decades down the road. Not long after Jesus ascended to the Father, these followers were known as “The Way” (Acts 9:2). The path they followed was the one laid out for them by Jesus. He showed them how to live. They shared that with each other and any who would listen. The way of Jesus is the way to full life, lived right now, not simply in some far-off future.
But it’s more than a framework for living. No, the way is a person. Jesus is the way. Not one way or a way but the way. This story makes some very striking claims about who Jesus is.
He’s the way to the Father. If you know Jesus, then you know the Father. The Father is in Jesus, and Jesus is in the Father. He is not simply a great person or prophet. He is not simply one of the best people to walk the planet. No, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Put another way, “Resident within his person is some aspect of the Father’s life, some feature of divine reality that sets him apart. It is not simply that Jesus is sent on a divine mission on behalf of the Father, but that the Father himself is on a divine mission in the life of the Son.”
There is something unique and special about Jesus. The disciples, even sitting there with him, were grappling with what this meant, just as we continue to do today.
So, the way is a path and a person, but it is also a promise. This story is setting the stage for a new era of history. Jesus will no longer be physically present in the world, but he knows he has to go away so the promised Spirit would come. That’s what the rest of the passage illuminates. He promises some pretty wild things like, “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”
I always stumble a bit at that because, last time I checked, I’m nowhere close to doing greater works than Jesus did. But Jesus didn’t make this an individual assignment. It’s for the billions of Christians down through the ages. And he gave us the Spirit. We have each other and the Spirit.
Those who know Jesus continue his life in the world. This doesn’t give us superpowers. It doesn’t mean we will ever fully embody the wisdom and grace and power of Jesus, but still God choose to reside in us and equips us to be like Jesus wherever we are. How amazing is that? Teresa of Ávila urges you to “believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.”
“Jesus does not merely point the way, he is the Way. Jesus does not just teach us truth, he is the Truth. He does not represent one avenue to life, he is the Life. This is an exclusive claim that cannot be compromised. In a word, the human quest for God ends in Jesus Christ.”
How can we know the way? We open our very selves up to Jesus, trusting him with our lives, now and forever.