Gospel of 10 May 2020
Fifth Sunday of Easter
John 14:1-12
I am the Way, the Truth and the Life
Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house; if there were not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too..
You know the way to the place where I am going.’
Thomas said, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus said: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment you know him and have seen him.’
Philip said, ‘Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied.’ ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip,’ said Jesus to him ‘and you still do not know me?
‘To have seen me is to have seen the Father, so how can you say, “Let us see the Father”?Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work.
You must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; believe it on the evidence of this work, if for no other reason. I tell you most solemnly, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’
Reflexion
Men often say that women get lost because they can’t read road maps. But women will have their revenge. They will retaliate by saying that men also get lost because they are too proud to ask for directions. They would rather trust themselves and be too proud to admit that they had made a mistake.
Trust is in short supply these days. Can you blame anyone for their lack of trust? As the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns continue (even with some easing in the economic sector) with no definite end in sight, most of us are struggling with fear and anxiety about what the future holds.
Perhaps, the only thing we trust these days are our GPS navigating applications. All we have to do is to trust it’s direction, obey the instructions and turn right when we are told to, or turn left when we are told to. And eventually we are told, ‘You have reached your destination.’
But there are times where we would even doubt the wisdom and accuracy of this technology especially when we are led to unfamiliar roads and asked to take strange and winding detours. Many would be tempted to just switch off the device and tune into their own instincts. We would rather choose to chart our own direction, follow our familiar tried and tested route, than trust a machine.
Today, our Lord tells us, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me.” Not easy during these trying times. But again He is saying that we need to trust in Him because only He can lead us to the Father’s house. That’s our final destination. He tells His disciples that they know the way to get there. Their immediate reaction is puzzlement. We would be puzzled too. Jesus seems to be talking about a “way,” which they’ve never seen, never used nor ever heard of before.
Yet Christ reassures them that they do know the way. You see the “way” is not just any route or method, it is a person. For he tells them, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’ All they need to do is to trust Him and the directions which He is giving them. This is because our Lord is more trustworthy than the most reliable GPS.
Christ has revealed to us our destination and He is like a roadmap that shows us how to reach it. He shows us the way, not only through His life-giving teachings but also through His life - His incarnation, His passion, His death and His resurrection. If we want to get to our destination we need to only to step into His shoes and walk along the path which He has left for us, stay clear of all distracting detours which lead elsewhere, and resist the temptation of charting our own course. Those who believe that they have found a better way, a more reasonable route, a much easier and quicker path, will inevitably find themselves lost.
But there is more. Christ, as the Way, the Truth and the Life is more than just a roadmap to the Father. Even the best roadmap is merely a means to get us to a destination. Christ is also the destination. For He makes the Father visible. “To have seen me is to have seen the Father.”
Many of us had plans, some big and ambitious one, while others a bit more humbled. We would have charted our own roadmap, set out a timeline to achieve our goals. But this pandemic has disrupted everything and turned our entire lives topsy turvy. And all of sudden, we find ourselves terribly lost, without a clear direction of what to do next and how are we to move forward.
Who can we turn to for direction in these difficult times? Well, many of us may have lost faith in the experts since many of their predictions have been proven wrong. In fact, we’ve lost our trust in science, since science with all its promise of being accurate and precise, has proven to be inaccurate. Still others have lost faith in the authorities because we’ve been lied to on countless occasions. And finally, many of us have lost faith in our ourselves, in our ability to handle this crisis. All our bluster and self-confidence seems be misguided.
But let us never for a moment lose faith in God. This pandemic has brought us around full circle to realise that the only One whom we can trust during this crisis is God, for only He who created this universe and is in total control of everything that happens there in will know what’s ahead of us. And if we want to navigate through this mess left in the trail of this pandemic, we need to listen to what His Son tells us, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me.’ If there is nothing else left for you to trust, never fail to trust the Lord, for as the Psalmist acclaims, “for the word of the Lord is faithful and all His works are to be trusted.”