Date: May 3, 2026

Readings: Acts 7:55-60; John 14:1-14

Preacher: Fr. Travis O'Brian

I AM THE WAY

            “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Many find these words of Jesus difficult, even offensive.  They object to what they hear as a strong note of exclusionism, the note of judgment, the note that seems to say, only the Christian is saved, only the Christian is destined for heaven.  Indeed, many Christians do understand Jesus’ words in just this way; and there are many who weaponize them against others – or at least apply them as proof of their righteousness over-against non-Christians.

        “No one comes to the Father except through me.”  When Jesus says this, in what spirit is he pointing to himself?  Who do we understand Jesus to be, that we are either offended at his words or use them as assurance that we are in the privileged party of the saved?  It’s an urgent question.  It just may be that this difference lies at or near the root of our so-called culture wars.  On the one hand are those who respond to Jesus with varying degrees of offense – including many in more liberal expressions of the church.  On the other hand are those who hold to various degrees of exclusionism.  

       Who is Jesus?  When Thomas, on this night of the Last Supper, asked Jesus to tell him the way Jesus was going, when Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, both were seeking something solid to hold on to – something definitive, some unfailing rule to guide them: this way and no other.  But this is precisely what Jesus refuses to provide.  Jesus seems to accuse Philip of a kind of stubborn ignorance.  And there’s no doubt a note of judgment in Jesus words.  But to what end?  Jesus has just washed Philip’s feet.  His word of judgment is a word of love, not condemnation.  “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you do not know me?”  Jesus wants to jolt Philip into self-reflection.  It’s as though he’s asking: You demand to see the Father, but what do you expect the Father to look like?  What is preventing you from seeing Him right now, before you?  What are you expecting, hoping for?  Where do these hopes and expectations come from?

       Jesus is demanding that Philip (and if Philip then also us) divest his expectation of who God is and what God must be like, from other theological, ideological, and political commitments that act as a lens colouring his perception.  Did Philip expect the Father to appear in majesty, blessing, defending his own?  Was he expecting Jesus, the anointed one, to manifest the power, a mighty defender of the state of Israel?  A God concerned to establish strong borders?  What pre-understanding of God, what theology, prevented Philip from seeing the Father in Jesus?

       Jesus presents Philip with a tremendous challenge.  Jesus tells Philip that he’s looking for God in mistaken places; he’s looking to Jesus the wrong way round.  In essence, Jesus accuses Philip of seeking in Jesus confirmation of who he already understands God to be – and it is because that confirmation remains elusive, because Jesus again and again confounds his expectations, that Philip asks, “Show us the Father.”  But instead of looking to me to confirm what you already believe you know of God, Jesus says, you must look at me if you want to know Father.  Look what I am doing.  Go where I am going.  Love as I am loving.  And then, by doing and going and loving likewise, you shall see.

       So who do we understand Jesus to be?  A social justice warrior?  The guarantor of American values?  The mild one sent to assure us that God loves us just as we are?  The judge who with uncompromising hand separates eternally the goats from the sheep?  We, like Thomas, like Philip, can’t help but come to him full of expectation, positive or negative, about who God is and must be, and we tend to read in Jesus’s life and words confirmation of our expectations.  So when Jesus says, “no one comes to the Father except through me,” he is, at least in part, telling us that the life of faith entails, paradoxically, not to hold on to our insistent understanding of who Jesus is more and more tightly, but to let go of him.  To free him from our expectant demands of who God is and must be.  To be his disciple is to allow him to surprise us, to lead us even where we do not want to go.  To hold onto Jesus is to let go of him, to follow him beyond the limits of understanding, our fears and certainties and hopes – to trust that he knows us better than we know ourselves, and what is for our good.

       Thomas asks Jesus, “we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  But Jesus is the way: the way is the destination and the destination is the way.  To come to the Father is to live as Jesus lives, do as he does, go where he goes, love as he loves.

       Jesus is the truth.  To let go of certainty does not mean plunging into relativity.  Rather, truth is the life disciplined to the shape and demands of God, the demands of Love.  To love in truth is to let go of our need to live for ourselves, trusting our life to God alone.  To live in truth is thus to be free of the world, trusting our hope, the good of our life, the future of the world, not in the world or in the future we are constructing, but in God’s promise and God’s future.

      Jesus is the life.  Life is not biological animation.  Life, to live, is to be in relationship with God, according to the nature God has bestowed on us.  Jesus is the life because Jesus is God of God, because God lives in him absolutely, because Jesus was Love made flesh.  So as we do as Jesus did, as we follow him, as we give our life in love for God and neighbour, then do we live: live abundantly, in the fulness of truth.

            “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”   Jesus is not setting boundaries about who, one day, be granted entry into heaven.  Rather, in these words spoken to his disciples on the night of his arrest, he is speaking both of the generosity that Love demands and the discipline that Love demands.  He is speaking of what lies ahead of them, his friends, those who have pledged their lives in faith to follow him: the life of self-offering, the life shaped by trusting God’s promise of resurrection.  He is speaking of how we must let go of ourselves, including all of our demands of who God must be, in order that we may come to him.

                                                            AMEN