How can we know the way?
Where are we all going? Do we have a sign or even a road map? What’s in your diary in the coming months?
In the current crisis, is it hard not knowing what’s going to happen – or is it just me that feels that way? Where is this all leading? When will it be end? What will the future be like?
Jesus had shared some amazing times with his disciples – in just three short years, they had heard wonderful stories, seen miraculous healings, had their faith challenged and restored, and come to believe that God would do something dramatic in their day. What they didn’t know is that it would take Jesus’s death to accomplish God’s plans, but that they would also be witnesses to his resurrection.
Sometimes we make plans and things work out pretty much as we expect; we book a holiday and are not disappointed when we reach our destination, we visit friends and have good conversations over a shared meal, a day of appointments in the office all run smoothly. But, quite often, it’s not like this at all. The hotel is a building site, our friends have bad news to share with us, the schedule at work changes beyond recognition. This is just not what we planned. And, more than at any time I can remember, that’s how life is at the moment. Anything we were looking forward to has been cancelled and any plans we now dare to make for the Autumn months have ‘provisional’ written all over them. For those of us with a tendency to live in the future, these are very difficult times. What does the future hold?
I guess the disciples must have picked up on Jesus’ mood the closer they got to Jerusalem and to that fateful Passover celebration. Certainly the things he said highlighted that he was expecting the death that awaited him, even if they didn’t understand that. And so it was that, on the occasion of his last meal with his friends, Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me…’
Now it’s really important that we hear that as one command or, as I prefer to think of it, one invitation. If we only hear ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled’ then we are going to hear that as a tough call, which many of us – at different times of our lives – will find it hard to answer. Jesus, we say, my heart is troubled – and what can I do about it? Work harder at controlling my emotions? I must not let my heart be troubled… If we think that, then we will fail.
Within an hour or two of Jesus saying these words, he was deeply troubled in the garden of Gethsemane. In one of the most emotional passages in scripture, he cries out to his heavenly Father – honestly revealing the struggles he is enduring. But this is keeping with what he has said to his friends, in the remainder of verse one, ‘Believe in God, believe also in me.’ For the reason I prefer to see this as an invitation rather than a command is that Jesus is doing what he has always done, since he first called his disciples to follow him, he is inviting them – and us – into a relationship.
Imagine a stranger coming up to you in the street and saying, “I believe in you, you can do this!” Now imagine yourself as a child and hear your parent say, “I believe in you, my child, you can do this!” Which has more power?
Belief is about relationship. It builds on what we know about someone and it injects into that relationship some trust and some hope. Jesus invites his friends, who already know him to be trustworthy, to believe in him some more – and to believe in God, his father and theirs. This isn’t blind faith – we already know something about God, we already know something about Jesus. As Jesus will go on to say in this passage, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” This is why Jesus is central to our faith as Christians – because he shows us what God is like.
If you’re not sure, then, what you believe, get to know Jesus better. These are not empty words, but my invitation echoes that of Jesus to his friends. Look at Jesus, and you will see God. How? Principally through the words of the Bible – and I would always suggest returning to Mark’s gospel, for its immediacy and brevity, and for its great energy. Why not commit to re-reading Mark – or reading his account of Jesus for the first time, if you never have, this week. It only takes a few hours. But don’t forget to listen also to the testimony of Matthew or, my personal favourite, Luke – or continue with us to hear John’s perspective in this wonderful gospel. These four little books are our primary source for getting to know Jesus better.
But then there are also those in whom Jesus is still writing his story – Christian believers who are motivated day by day to live lives shaped by Jesus. Just as we see the Father as we look at Jesus, so the witness of Christians can show us Jesus and, in so doing, show us God at work. Even here, even today, God is at work.
Which makes it easier to trust God for the future. As he faces his own death, Jesus knows that he will be leaving his disciples. At this point in the church’s year, we try to understand the strange reality of the resurrected Jesus, present with his disciples but able to appear and disappear in a mysterious way that suggests he is not staying. And we ready ourselves to remember again – in eleven days’ time – the mystery of the Ascension, when Jesus leaves the earth and returns to his father in heaven.
It is towards heaven that Jesus now turns his eyes as he speaks of those “dwelling-places” that he goes to prepare, in words that are very familiar to us from the funeral service. Jesus is clear about his plan; he will go to the Father, which is what we believe happened at the Ascension, and then he will return. It is on his return that he will gather together those who believe in him and take them, with him, to our Father’s house.
Do you believe that Jesus will return? This is the faith of the early church, reflected in the whole of the New Testament – that Jesus, ascended to be with the Father, will return to take us home. As a teenager, I remember being deeply moved by the words of a song, in a version performed by Cliff Richard on his album ‘Small Corners’; the song ends, “Help me wait on You, Lord, until the day You come; all my ways need a grave so that I can rise with You, when You come to take me home.”
Our thoughts and our feelings about the future may change when we know that our destiny is to be ‘at home’ with Jesus, in his father’s house. But in the meantime we have decisions to make about our everyday lives. Twenty years ago I began to sense a call to move away from the church I was serving in Birmingham and this became clearer when I read an advertisement for the post of Chaplain with Deaf People in the Diocese of St Asaph. The post was combined with being a Vicar in a place I had never heard of and could barely pronounce. “Where is ‘pont-bly-dyn’?” I asked, reaching for the AA map book. I didn’t even have to open the book. Every year the AA prints a portion of a map on the front cover of their map book. That year, Pontblyddyn was in the middle of that map, on the front cover. It seemed like guidance and I followed God’s call and came to Wales in early 2001.
“How can we know the way?” That was Philip’s question and it was fair enough. It isn’t always easy to know how God is guiding us – but if we start with relationship, then we are much more likely to know. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life…” says Jesus. Knowing Jesus means having a sense of direction, it means knowing someone who is worth believing in, and it means having the energy and the joy that are inherent in that promise that we heard last week, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” As we wait for Jesus to return, we don’t put our lives on hold, even during lockdown. We live life to the full.
Jesus’s invitation to life includes bringing our concerns to him in prayer, which we will do in a moment or two. Prayer itself is an expression of our relationship with Jesus, talking to our friend and sharing our concerns just as much as trying to get a problem sorted. So, as we think about the future, in all its present uncertainty, as we think about the needs of the world in which we live, let us look deeply into the eyes of Jesus. He doesn’t point us to a different way – he doesn’t indicate the direction we should go – but he invites us to know him and to walk with him. May you know his presence on your journey in these coming days.