Fifth Sunday of Easter. Today’s readings: Acts 6, 1-7; 1 Peter 2, 4-9; John 14, 1-12
It was back in my school years that I dared to take part in a cross-country marathon, of which I still have two vivid memories. The first is the moment when I stopped at a road that forked and I had no clue whether to take a left or a right. The second was the embarrassment I felt when, finally running through the gates of De La Salle College, I thought I would find many people cheering, but instead found the organisers clearing the tables because the race had long been over! Knowing the way is of the essence when one is on any journey, isn’t it?
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland we find an interesting dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. Alice asks for directions, but is not even sure where she wants to go. That exchange has been summarised in a sentence that has become famous: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Today, we hear Jesus saying: “You know the way to the place where I am going” (Jn 14,4). Thomas is quick to retort: “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (Jn 14,5). It is then that Jesus made one of his most solemn statements: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (Jn 14,6)
You could be the nicest and most respectful person on earth, but unless Jesus gives you access to God the Father, the chasm between you and him will remain humanly impossible to cross. Roman emperors and popes too have been styled pontifex maximus, pontifex being derived from the Latin for someone who builds a bridge. Jesus is the pontifex between God and humanity.
You could be the nicest and most respectful person on earth, but unless Jesus gives you access to God the Father, the chasm between you and him will remain humanly impossible to cross
The various expressions of the Christian faith present a whole spectrum of what it means that no one can access the Father except through Jesus. Some would adopt St Paul’s approach that unless you profess Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour, there is no chance you could get to heaven.
Others would be more in line with Jesus’s parable of the last judgement, where what counts is love. However, even in this latter approach, we still believe that Jesus alone can make it possible for anyone to reach the beautiful eternal home that awaits us. If, as Jesus claimed, he himself was to go before us to prepare a place for us so that we might be there with him forever, he alone can welcome us and allow us to enter.
Keith Green was a young man living without purpose and restlessly looking for the truth, until he met Jesus and became one of the greatest Christian singers there have ever been. While on stage, before singing his song I Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, he said the following: “I look around at the world and I see all the beauty that God made. I see the forest and the trees and all the things. It says in the bible that he made them in six days, and I don’t know [whether] they’re a literal six days or not. Scientists would say ‘no’, some theologians would say ‘yes’. But I know that Jesus Christ has been preparing a home for me and for some of you for 2,000 years. And if the world took six days and that home 2,000 years, hey man, this is like living in a garbage can compared to what’s going on up there!”
“Believe me” – with these words, the Lord of life pleads with us to accept the truth of his oneness with the heavenly Father, which is the guarantee of Jesus’s ability to give us that life that never ends.