Christ the way

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 14:1-6) takes us into the heart of the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. This short passage contains some of Jesus’ best-known counsels and teachings: Let not your heart be troubled…In my Father’s house are many rooms…Where I am, you may be also. Thomas questions Him, alleging that they do not know the way to where He is going. Jesus replies: I am the way, the truth, and the life.

On the eve of His passion, these are the last words of Jesus to His closest friends; not yet His deathbed wishes, which will come tomorrow from what some Fathers of the Church call the marriage bed of the cross. But this discourse is His last love letter as it were. He speaks above all in this passage to the anxieties the disciples have and that they will have in the future. How many of them in their final agony – hanging from a cross or awaiting an executioner’s sword – found their minds crossing the years back to that candle-lit room to hear the words of their Master: Let not your heart be troubled…I go to prepare a place for you.

Jesus stands on the edge of eternity, not just in His ascension but in every moment of His life. In the highest part of His soul, He contemplates the Beatific Vision, even while remaining a wayfarer in this life, a man of ancient Palestine, a villager from a disreputable hole called Nazareth. And He speaks to us now, encouraging us also to see the people and events around us from the perspective of eternity, not time. Eternity belongs to God alone, so what does it mean to see things in the light of eternity if not to see them in the light of God?

What then holds any of us back – the wanton sinner, the proudest Pharisee, and the clownish servant of the Lord – if not our all-too-human habit of calculating rather than contemplating? Calculation is a good servant but a terrible master; it is a tool of prudence and a tyrant over wisdom. We are called to love but only God is love right through, and until we are again in His hands after our own last journey, we must battle against those forces in us that urge us to take control.

Now, what does Thomas’s question mean if it is not a request for empowerment? How can we know the way? he inquires. He could easily have said: what must we do? Or rather, Give us the tools. After all, what is a man without a plan? When we contrast this question with his first words, there is almost a note of irony to his complaint: Lord, we do not know where you are going. He might equally have said: Stop being so mysterious, would you, Jesus? Isn’t that what we tell Jesus constantly: Stop being so mysterious, Jesus! Tell us what you are up to.

And thus comes Jesus’ reply:

I am the way, the truth, and the life. The message, the agenda for the Christian, is not self-gratifying empowerment but encounter with Christ. Jesus is the way. Every wrong step, as we calculate our own coordinates, is a departure from that path. It is easy to point to the great sinner who has tangibly stepped off the path; but we are all at it, we fallen human beings, lapsing back into calculation, trying to do something, unmindful of how our actions can become a kind of self-sufficiency, shored up unconsciously by crystal-clear norms in the reflection of which we labour to find our own image. And then when Jesus requires us to be most dependent on Him for His glory, He finds us most dependent on ourselves.

To follow Jesus is to be like Him and to be not like Him. Perhaps we focus too much on the former and not enough on the latter. We must be perfect, He says, as our Heavenly Father is perfect. But when He says I am the way, the truth and the life, woe betide us if we echo Him literally, saying, I am called to be like Jesus, so I too am the way, the truth, and the life.

He must increase and we must decrease.