Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?- Joh_14:5.
The next time that Thomas speaks is when Jesus and His disciples are still in the Upper Room where the last Passover had just been celebrated and the Lord's Supper instituted. “In my Father's house are many mansions; I go to prepare a place for you. And whither I go, ye know the way.” The other disciples may know whither their Master is going, and they may know the way, but Thomas knows neither. “His Father's house?” said Thomas to himself. “What does He mean? Why does He not speak plainly?” Thomas must understand his Master's meaning. Thomas is one of those unhappy men who cannot be put off with mere words. Thomas must see to the bottom before he can pretend to believe. Thomas was the first of those disciples, and a primate among them, in whose restless minds
doubt,
Like a shoot, springs round the stock of truth.
The question was natural; it argued no want of loyalty; and the Master answered it with one of His greatest and deepest sayings: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” In leading His disciples on to a higher level of discipleship, He would lead them to Himself.
In our own lives there are many places where there is nothing for us but that word of Jesus. We have our doubts and our difficulties. We look to the future. We argue about immortality; we see something to be said for it, and something against it; we express the mind of the twentieth century, the feeling of our times, and when we are baffled and confused and troubled with the problems of the mind what comfort is there for us? There is this-that One stands before us and says, “I am the way,” and if He be not there in whom our hearts can trust then we are of all men the most miserable. The hand of God is laid heavily upon us. We suffer bereavement or affliction or trouble. Dear ones are taken away from our family circle; the chairs are left vacant; those upon whom we depend are moved from us; our whole life is altered; we have to reshape it at some bitter hour of tragedy, when one or another has been removed to another sphere of service; and in a moment like that we are confused and troubled. We know not which way to go, or how to find our way; but there is One who stands before us and says, “I am the way,” and in the confusion of our brain, in the cloudy days of mental trouble and distraction that come to us, has not the Christian in all ages found to his supreme comfort and victory that Christ is the Way, and that He opens to him the gates of life, and makes time and eternity a possible thing for him to contemplate?
Much may remain dark to us; but the purposes of life receive a clear and powerful direction the moment we believe that the one supreme Way of life is Jesus Christ, God's Son, our Lord. No other single way, capable of uniting the whole nature and life of man, has yet been discovered or devised which does not tend to draw us down rather than lift us up. But if in Him is shown at once the Way of God, so far as it can be intelligible to man, and the Way of man according to God's purpose, then many a plausible and applauded way stands condemned at once as of necessity leading nowhither; and many a way which promises little except to conscience is glorified with Him, and has the assurance of His victory. Yet, when the primary choice has once been made, the labour is not ended. The Way is no uniform external rule. It traverses the changes of all things that God has made and is ever making, that we may help to subdue all to His use; and so it has to be sought out again and again with growing fitnesses of wisdom and devotion. Thus the outward form of our own ways is in great part determined for us from without, while their inward coherence is committed to our own keeping; and the infinite life of the Son of man can transmute them all into ways of God.… But we shall never reach the full measure of the word, Christ is the Way, till the journey itself is ended, and with thankful wonder we find ourselves wholly gathered to Him in the place and presence assigned from the beginning by the heavenly Father's will.1 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, The Way, the Truth, the Life, 38]
