There are seven I AM statements built into the structure of John’s gospel, each one a parable which helps us to understand a little more about the person of Jesus. This one is prompted by a question from plain-spoken, literal-minded Thomas. A few moments earlier in the conversation, Jesus has told the disciples that where he is going, they cannot come; now he asserts that they know the way. Faced with such riddles, we have some sympathy with the confusion in Thomas’ mind: Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?
I am the way. No one comes to the Father except through me. As Jesus approaches the crisis that will bring his life to a close, he is conscious that the outcome will take him home to His Father. That is where he is going, and that is the destination to which he now points his disciples. They cannot follow him now, though Peter rashly thinks he is ready to do so, because the journey is one that can only be undertaken in company with him, and by the power of his in-dwelling Spirit. He has to go ahead of them, on his own, since only then, when he has fulfilled his own mission in obedience to his love for his Father, will death and resurrection set his Spirit free to accompany not just the little group whom Jesus could get to know well in the course of his short earthly life, but all who have learned to put their trust in him. Their destination is our destination; their way is our way. No one comes to the Father except through me.
But if Jesus is the Way, following him can seem like an impossibly daunting prospect. We see what it meant for Stephen the first martyr to follow in the Way of Jesus, and we admire him from afar, but if that’s what it means then most of us will never make it. Fortunately our Lord knows us better than to ask what is beyond our strength. In My Father’s House are many resting-places. This phrase, which so comforts the bereaved, is not just an assurance that there is plenty of room in Heaven. Those of us who are old enough to have travelled in the further flung corners of the Empire, before the advent of jumbo jets and mass tourism, remember the simple comforts of the rest house. I am indebted to William Temple for the notion that our spiritual journey, the Way to which we are called, is like a journey from one rest house to the next, with Jesus continually going on ahead of us to draw us forward step by step into an ever deeper fellowship with him and with his Father, preparing a welcome for us at the next resting-place, and coming back to help us as we undertake each stage of the journey. He is the Way, because he is not just waiting to welcome us over there at our final destination; His presence accompanies us as we travel through the changing scenes of life from one resting-place to another.
I am the Way, and the truth. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as Christian and Faithful pass through Vanity Fair, they are assailed by one trader after another demanding to know what they will buy. They are unimpressed, keeping their eyes down. What provokes the riot leading to their arrest and imprisonment is when they are moved to fling back the challenge: we buy the truth. In Vaughan Williams operatic version of the story (of which, by the way, you can see a rare semi-staged performance at Sadlers Wells in June), the derision of the traders is focused in a sneering response – What is Truth? The cry of the lynching mob, which soon follows – He is guilty of death – carries deliberate echoes of the trial of Jesus. Their rage is provoked because Christian and Faithful have exposed the emptiness and deception of the frenetic ‘Buy, buy, buy’ culture, which is surely even more prevalent to-day than it was in Bunyan’s time. The traders close ranks to snuff out the truth, and Faithful is swept on to a martyrdom as glorious as Stephen’s.
Is the truth really so dangerously divisive to-day? I doubt whether you would risk a lynching if you were to make a similar declaration this afternoon among the market stalls at Camden Lock, though you would probably be escorted off the premises. On the other hand the truth is still very divisive in Kenya or Zimbabwe or Tibet. Even in this country an insistence on the truth when it’s not convenient, when it gets in the way of a profitable deal or a sensitive contract, may be bad for your career. Philosophically, the nature of truth is hard to pin down, as we all found when I raised some of these issues in a sermon a couple of years ago, but that does not allow us to dismiss the truth, as Pilate does with a world-weary sigh, nor yet to lose sight of the challenge in a mass of subtle definitions, however valid they may be in abstract terms. On the contrary, since Jesus claims to be the truth, we have to take the search very seriously indeed.
In the market-place, the true price and value of an object is relative, a matter of supply and demand, where both may be subject to manipulation. In Pilate’s world of Realpolitik, where justice and policy may be influenced by expediency and public interest, truth may indeed exist, somewhere, the truth may indeed be fought over, but it is the relative power and influence of the contestants that determines what version of the truth will carry the day. Whether in commerce or in politics, the truth is profoundly unsettling for those whose power or livelihood depends on something else.
What is truth? In Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy, Lyra uses an alethiometer of whirling dials and needles to answer her questions, but her exceptional gift for the use and interpretation of the instrument depends on her capacity to empty her mind of the pre-conceived notions which might otherwise get in the way of her ability to discern the truth. For us, Jesus is the truth. The heart of the Christian gospel is not a series of propositions which we have to learn, but a Person whom we come to know in the only way we ever really get to know anyone, that is to say by the interplay of love, his love for us awakening the love by which we respond to him. When we look to Jesus as the truth, finding him in the pages of scripture as well as in our personal experience of his love, we do not have to interpret a set of complex dials and needles, but like Lyra we do have to open our minds and our hearts unconditionally to the truth, the truth which found unique expression in Jesus, the truth which still transforms our perceptions and changes our lives by the power of his Spirit dwelling in our hearts.
I am the way and the truth and the life. God chose to express the truth about himself through the Incarnation. In that sense, if you find it helpful to think in terms of the categories we explored a couple of years ago, the truth about God is a narrative truth. Moreover Jesus himself taught us to reinforce the narrative truth about his death and resurrection by an act of performative truth when we gather at the Lord’s table to celebrate the Holy communion in the bread and wine of his body and his blood. But when Jesus says I am the way, and I am the truth, he invites us to engage with him in a dynamic personal relationship, that reaches out to each one of us where we are, drawing us into an engagement with Him that affirms and builds on our experience of his love as we are led through life from one spiritual resting-place to another. The implicit truth with which we engage in that relationship takes us ever deeper into the absolute truth about God that lies at the heart of all things visible and invisible. So it is that as we follow Jesus the Way, as we engage with Jesus the truth, we find the way home to our Father’s house in and through Jesus who is the Way and the Truth and the Life.