Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” From today’s Gospel, John 14:1-14.
‘The Way before we know your name… the Truth they cannot yet discern… the Life within the life they love.’ Malcolm Guite, from his sonnet for St Thomas the Apostle, in Parable and Paradox, published by Canterbury Press.
Once again, the Gospel reading today involves Thomas, who doubted the other disciples when they said they had seen Jesus on the day of resurrection but came to believe when Jesus reappeared to them all a week later. Still known as Doubting Thomas by many, this disciple nevertheless found the courage openly to wrestle with what he was being told, resulting in responses of great significance from Jesus.
That’s so in today’s reading, which takes place at the Last Supper, as Thomas asks Jesus what he’s talking about when he tells them that they know where he is going. This is a confusing time for the disciples: Jesus is preparing them for what is going to happen and they are all still in the upper room before Jesus is arrested in Gethsemane. In response to Thomas’ honest and direct question, Jesus replies with the sixth of the I Am sayings, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” This passage is often used at funerals today, including my mum’s.
The I Am sayings refer to the divine name given to Moses at the burning bush: I am who I am. In using this, Jesus is telling his followers who he is – but, understandably, they don’t realise although each term is rooted in the scriptures. Moses tells the Israelites to “Follow the path that the Lord your God has commanded you,” and St John reminds his readers that, ‘The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ In John 19:37, Jesus himself tells Pilate, “For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” “What is truth?” Pilate then asks – a question that echoes down the ages. Jesus also tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life” in John 11, and in chapter 5, says that, “As the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”
There are many more scriptures in which Christians see Jesus as the fulfilment of the scriptures and he becomes not the way, the truth and the life but ‘… our Life, our Truth, our Way.’ (Guite, above.) For those first disciples don’t seem to realise, until Jesus responds to Thomas’ question, that this is not just for the future. Jesus doesn’t say that he will be but that he IS the way – the way of faith is already being followed, bewildering as this may seem to them. Jesus IS the truth, hard as it may be for the disciples to understand this, and Jesus IS the life now as well as at the resurrection, overwhelming though this is. For these are not just principles or values on which to base life, but embodied in Jesus himself who declared to his followers that he IS these things – and this is still being declared today.
With my prayers; pob bendith,
Christine, Priest Guardian.