Jesus Christ says: 'Ye know the way and ye know the goal.' One of them
ventures flatly to contradict Him, and to traverse both assertions with
a brusque and thorough-going negative. 'We do _not_ know whither Thou
goest,' says Thomas; 'how can we know the way?' He is the same man in
this conversation that we find him in the interview before our Lord's
journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's
resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the
dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as
morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of
things—a practical pessimist—and yet with a certain kind of frank
outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame.
He could not understand all the Lord's deep words just spoken. His mind
was befogged and dimmed, and he blurts out his ignorance, knowing that
the best place to carry it to is to the Illuminator who can make it
light.
'We know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way?' Was
Jesus right? was Thomas right? or were they both right? The fact is
that Thomas and all his fellows knew, after a fashion, but they did not
know that they knew. They had heard much in the past as to where Christ
was going. Plainly enough it had been rung in their ears over and over
again. It had made some kind of lodgment in their heads, and, in that
sense, they did know. It is this unused and unconscious knowledge of
theirs to which Christ appeals, and which He tries to draw out into
consciousness and power when He says, 'You know whither I am going, and
you know the road.' Is not that exactly what a patient teacher will do
with some flustered child when he says to it: 'Take time! You know it
well enough if you will only think'? So the Master says here: 'Do not
be agitated and troubled in heart. Reflect, remember, overhaul your
stores, and think what I have told you over and over again, and you
will find that you _do_ know whither I am going, and that you _do_ know
the way.'
The patient gentleness of the Master with the slowness of the scholars
is beautifully exemplified here, as is also the method, which He
lovingly and patiently adopts, of sending men back to consult their own
consciousness as illuminated by His teaching, and to see whether there
is not lying somewhere, unrecked of and unemployed in some dusty corner
of their mind, a truth that only needs to be dragged out and cleaned in
order to show itself for what it is, the all-sufficient light and
strength for the moment's need.
The dialogue is an instance of what is true about us all, that we have
in our possession truths given to us by Jesus Christ, the whole sweep
and bearing of which, the whole majesty and power and illuminating
capacity of which, we do not dream of yet. How much in our creeds lies
dim and undeveloped! Time and circumstances and some sore agony of
spirit are needed in order to make us realise the riches that we
possess, and the certitudes to which our troubled spirits may cling;
and the practice of far more patient, honest, profound meditation and
reflection than finds favour with the average Christian man is needed,
too, in order that the truths possessed may be possessed, and that we
may know what we know, and understand 'the things that are given to us
of God.'
In all your creeds, there are large tracts that you, in some kind of a
fashion, do believe; and yet they have no vitality in your
consciousness nor power in your lives. And the Master here does with
these disciples exactly what He is trying to do day by day with us,
namely, fling us back on ourselves, or rather upon His revelation in
us, and get us to fathom its depths and to walk round about its
magnitudes, and so to understand the things that we say we believe.
All our knowledge is ignorance. Ignorance that confesses itself to Him
is in the way of becoming knowledge. His light will touch the smoke and
change it into red spires of flame. If you do not know, go to Him and
say, 'Lord! I do not.' An accurate understanding of where the darkness
lies is the first step to the light. We are meant to carry all our
inadequate and superficial realisations of His truth into His presence,
that, from Him, we may gain deeper knowledge, a firmer faith, and a
more joyous certitude in His inexhaustible lessons. In every article
and item of the Christian faith there is a transcendent element which
surpasses our present comprehension. Let us be confident that the light
will break; and let us welcome the new illumination when it comes, sure
that it comes from God. Be not puffed up with the conceit that you know
all. Be sure of this, that, according to the good old metaphor, we are
but as children on the shore of the great ocean, gathering a few of the
shells that it has washed to our feet, itself stretching boundless,
and, thank God, sunlit, before us. 'Ye know the way.' 'Master, we know
not the way.'
II. Observe here, in the second place, our Lord's great self-revelation
which meets this unconscious knowledge.
'Jesus saith unto him: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man
cometh unto the Father but by Me.' Now it is quite plain, I think, from
the whole strain of the context and the purpose of these words that the
main idea in them is the first—'I am the Way.' And that is made more
certain because of the last words of the verse, which, summing up the
force of the three preceding assertions, dwell only upon the metaphor
of the Way; 'No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.' So that of these
three great words, the Way, the Truth, the Life, we are to regard the
second and the third as explanatory of the first. They are not
co-ordinate, but the first is the more general, and the other two show
how the first comes to be true. 'I am the Way' because 'I am the Truth
and the Life.'
There are no words of the Master, perhaps, to which my previous remarks
are more necessary to be applied than these. We know; and yet oh! what
an overplus of glory and of depth is here that we do not know and never
can know. The most fragmentary and inadequate grasp of them with heart
and mind will bring light to the mind and quietness and peace to the
heart; but the whole meaning of them goes beyond men and angels. We can
only skim the surface and seek to shift back the boundaries of our
knowledge a little further, and to embrace within its limits a little
more of the broad land into which the words bring us. So just take a
thought or two which may tend in that direction.
Note, then, as belonging to all three of these clauses that remarkable
'_I am_.' We show a way, Christ _is_ it. We speak truth, Christ _is_
it. Parents impart life, which they have received, Christ _is_ Life. He
separates Himself from all men by that representation that He is not
merely the communicator or the teacher or the guide, but that He
Himself is, in His own personal Being, Way, Truth, Life. He said that,
when Calvary was within arm's-length. What did He think about Himself,
and what should we think of Him?
And then note, further, that He sets forth His unique relation to the
truth as being one ground on which He is the Way to God. He _is_ the
Truth in reference to the divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a
mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but
Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His
personality, are the true representation within human conditions of the
Invisible God; and when He says, 'I am the Way and the Truth,' He is
saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this
Gospel says when it calls Him the Word and the Light of men, and as
Paul says when he names Him 'the Image of the Invisible God.' There is
all the difference between talking about God and showing Him. Men
reveal God by their words; Christ reveals Him by Himself and the facts
of His life. The truest and highest representation of the divine nature
that men can ever have is in the face of Jesus Christ.
I need only remind you in a sentence about other and lower applications
of this great saying, which do not, as I think, enter into the purpose
of the context. He is the Truth, inasmuch as, in the life and
historical manifestation of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Scriptures,
men find foundation truths of a moral and spiritual sort. 'Whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever things are noble, whatsoever things are
lovely and of good report,' He is these, and all true ethics is but the
formulating into principles of all the facts of the life and character
of Jesus Christ.
Further, my text says He is the Way because He is the Life. On the one
side God is brought to all hearts, and in some real sense to our
comprehension, by the life of Jesus Christ, and so He is the Way. But
that is not enough. There must be an action upon us as well as an
action having reference to the divine nature. God is brought to men by
the manifestation in Christ; and we, the dead, are quickened by the
communication of the Life. The one phrase points to all His work as a
Revealer, the other points to all His work upon us as life-giving
Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is
of no use to make a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught
that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can
have by which they can be knit to God is the divine life which was in
Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole
world. He does not tell us here what yet is true, and what He
abundantly tells in other parts of this great conversation, that the
only way by which the life which He brings can be diffused and
communicated is by His death. 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone.' He is the Life, and—paradox of
mystery and yet fact which is the very heart and centre of His
Gospel—His only way of giving His life to us is by giving up His
physical life for us. He must die that He may be the life-spring for
the world. The alabaster box must be broken if the ointment and its
fragrance are to be poured out; and 'death is the gate of life' in a
deeper than the ordinary sense of the saying, inasmuch as the death of
the Life which is Christ is the life of the death which we are.
And so, because, on the one hand, He brings a God to our hearts that we
can love and trust, and because, on the other, He communicates to our
spirits, dead in the only true death which is the separation from God
by sin, the life by which we are knit to God, He is the Way to the
Father.
And what about people that never heard of Him, to whom that Way has
been closed, to whom that Truth has never been manifested, to whom that
Life has never been brought? Ah! Christ has other ways of working than
through His historical manifestation, for there is no truth more
plainly taught in this great fourth Gospel than this, that that Light
'lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The eternal Word works
through all the earth, in ways beyond our ken, and wherever any man
has, however imperfectly, felt after and grasped the thought of a
Father in the heavens, there the Word, which is the Light of men, has
wrought.
But for us to whom this Book has come, for what people call in bitter
irony 'Christendom,' the law of my text rigidly applies, and it is
being worked out all round us to-day. 'No man cometh unto the Father
but by Me.' And here we are, in this England of ours, and in our sister
nations on the continent of Europe and in America, face to face as I
believe with this alternative—either Jesus Christ the Revealer of God
and the Life of men, or an empty Heaven. And for you, individually, it
is either—take Christ for the Way, or wander in the wilderness and
forget your Father. It is either—take Christ for the Truth, or be given
over to the insufficiencies of mere natural, political, and
intellectual truths, and the shows and illusions of time and sense. It
is either—take Christ for your Life, or remain in your deadness,
separate from God.
III. Lastly, we have here the disciples' ignorance and the new vision
which dispels it.
'If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also, and from
henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.' Our Lord accepts for the
moment Thomas's standpoint. He supplements His former allegation of the
disciples' knowledge with the admission of the ignorance which went
with it as its shadow, and was only too sadly and plainly shown by
their failure to discern in Him the manifestation of the Father. He has
just told them that they did know what they thought they knew not; He
now tells them that they did not know what they thought they knew so
well, after so many years of companionship—even Himself. The proof that
they did not is that they did not know the Father as revealed in Him,
nor Him as revealing the Father. If they missed that, they missed
everything; and for all they had known of His graciousness, were
strangers to His truest Self. Their ignorance would turn out knowledge,
if they would think, and their supposed knowledge would turn out
ignorance.
The lesson for us is that the true test of the completeness and worth
of our knowledge of Christ lies in its being knowledge of God the
Father, brought near to us by Him. This saying puts a finger on the
radical deficiency of all merely humanitarian views of Christ's person,
however clearly they may see and admiringly extol the beauty of His
character and the 'sweet reasonableness' of His wisdom. They all break
down here, and are arraigned as so shallow and incomplete that they do
not deserve to be called knowledge of Him at all. If you know anything
about Jesus Christ rightly, this is what you know about Him, that in
Him you see God. If you have not seen God in Him, you have not got to
the heart of the mystery. The knowledge of Christ which stops with the
Man and the Martyr, and the Teacher and the beautiful, gentle Brother,
is knowledge so partial that even He cannot venture to call it other
than ignorance. Oh! brethren, do our conceptions of Him meet this test
which He Himself has laid down, and can we say that, seeing Him, we see
in Him God?
And then our Lord passes on to another thought, the new vision which at
the moment was being granted to this unconscious ignorance that was
passing into conscious knowledge. 'From henceforth ye know Him and have
seen Him.' We must give that 'from henceforth,' as a note of time, a
somewhat liberal interpretation, and apply it to the whole series of
utterances and deeds of which the words of our text are but a portion.
And, if so, we come to this—it was in the wisdom, and the gentleness,
and the deep truths of that upper chamber; it was in the agony and
submission of Gethsemane; it was in the meek patience before the
judges, and the silent acceptance of ignominy and shame; it was in the
willing, loving endurance of the long hours upon the Cross, that Christ
inaugurated the new stage in His revelation of God and in His
life-giving to the world. And it is from thenceforth and thereby that
in the man Jesus, men know and see 'the Father' as they never did
before. The Cross and the Passion of Christ are the unveiling to the
world of the heart of God; and by the side of that new vision the
fairest and the loftiest and the sweetest of Christ's former
manifestations and utterances sink into comparative insignificance. It
is the dying Christ that reveals the living God.
So, dear friends, He is your way to God. See that ye seek the Father by
Him alone. He is your Truth; grapple Him to your hearts, and by patient
meditation and continual faithfulness enrich yourselves with all the
communicated treasures that you have already received in Him. He is
your Life; cleave to Him, that the quick Spirit that was in Him may
pass into you and make you victors over all deaths, temporal and
eternal. Know Him as a Friend, not as a mere historical person, or with
mere head-knowledge, for to know a friend is something far deeper than
to know a truth. 'Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace.' 'This is
life eternal, to know,' with the knowledge which is life and
possession, 'Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast
sent.'