Fifth Sunday in Eastertide

In the spring of 2011 I was sent to Camp Lejeune, a vast US Marine Corps Base in North Carolina. I was part of a team sent to facilite training for the eighty or so Navy Chaplains serving there.

The Chaplains were of all denominations and faiths and, one afternoon, I found myself spending time, drinking coffee with two of them - one Muslim, the other Jewish. It sounds like the start of a bad joke: there was a priest, a rabbi and an imam. You can supply the punchline.

Each of us wore a symbol of our faith on our uniform: on mine, a small cross set on a fouled anchor; on the rabbi’s, the Star of David above the tablets of Moses; on the imam’s shirt collar was a crescent moon, a sign of his own divine calling.

It struck me then, and has since, that just as our faith was expressed in symbols, so too it is often captured in short, memorable phrases: sayings that encapsulate belief and identity, pointing to the path of salvation.

In Islam, the Shahada: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

In Judaism, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one", prayed as part of morning and evening prayers.

Buddhism teaches: “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.”

Sikhism: “Truth is high, but higher still is truthful living.”

And Taoism: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.”

In Christianity we have many such phrases, not least these words from John: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

It’s a familiar phrase, often heard at funerals, because it was spoken to bring comfort. Jesus was speaking in the upper room on the night before His death. Though the meal had yet to finish, the shadow of the cross had already fallen. The plot against Him was unfolding; His enemies intending not just to kill Him, but to eradicate His credibility.

Dressing His death in shame, their intention was to silence a blasphemer and unmask a pretender, so extinguishing His movement at source.

And it's into this gathering darkness that Jesus spoke those words.

He doesn't wait for events to interpret Him, as we so often do; instead He interprets them. Before the cross can speak its word of humiliation, He declares a deeper truth: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

These are not the words of a man cornered, but of one at the centre of what is unfolding. Jesus doesn't drift toward death; He walks into it. What His enemies intend as destruction, He receives as a destiny to be embraced in obedience. What they call defeat becomes the path laid out by His Father.

He is the Way not because He avoids suffering, but because He passes through it and makes it the road to the Father.

He is the Truth not because He escapes false judgment, but because even when condemned, He remains the revelation of God Himself.

He is the Life not because He is spared death, but because death simply cannot contain Him.

The great mystic, St Catherine of Siena, whose feast-day we celebrated this week, described Christ as a bridge between heaven and earth, in a sense built from the wood of the Cross. We cross that bridge not by avoiding suffering, but by walking through it, in trust, as He did.

Stripped, mocked and lifted up, He will appear the very opposite of all He claims. Yet it is precisely on the cross and in the resurrection that follows that His words will be proven true. If they were only the words of a good man, they'd be silenced by history.

But He speaks as one who bears the very being of God. When He says “I am,” He is not reaching for metaphors, He simply echoes the divine name spoken to Moses at the burning bush - the God who is the source of all being, truth and life.

So nothing that follows that fateful night can overturn what He declares. No verdict can redefine Him, no suffering distort the truth He embodies, no death can extinguish Him.

He speaks these words to steady the hearts of His disciples. When everything they see seems to contradict their faith, they will hold fast to Him.

And that remains His purpose. Not that we admire a profound saying, but that we entrust ourselves to the one who speaks it. Jesus does not just offer a theory of salvation, but the key to eternal life. He doesn't simply describe truth; He draws us into it. He does not point to life; He shares His own divine life with us.

The resurrection will reveal in glory what was hidden in suffering. His words are given beforehand that those who must walk through darkness, will trust even when the dawn is still unseen. 

They are words designed to stay in our mind and appear when we are in our most testing times. Words sometimes heard on the lips of the dying, spoken in the quiet prayers of anointing, and proclaimed at the graveside.

For in the end, when so much else falls silent, these words of eternal truth continue speak - steady, unchanging, full of promise: not an escape from life’s realities, but the assurance that we are never alone within them.

Every faith has its defining words, but these ones spoken on a night of intense emotion are no mere shibboleth, no simple badge of belonging. They convey the deep truth that nothing can place us beyond the reach of the one who is the Way.

Nothing can deceive us if we remain with the one who is the Truth.

Nothing can rob us of the inheritance given to us by the one who is the Life.

As St Paul said, nothing can separate us from the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus Our Lord.

So we hold fast to Him - He is our anchor in the storms of life. We walk with Him, step by step, trusting the path, even in darkness. As Newman wrote: “Lead, kindly Light… I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.” If that were our only prayer during the course of a day it would be sufficient to carry us forward to the next.

My Muslim and Jewish colleagues that day, fellow children of Abraham, would have recognised the deep truth of Newman's sentiments: that same turning towards God in trust is also a part of their lexicon of prayer - not to see the whole road, but to walk faithfully the part given to us.

Let us pray that the peace we seek so earnestly on the world stage may take root first within our own hearts, and from there reach out to all men and women of good will of all faiths. That we might walk, each in our own calling, the path of goodness. For us, in doing so, may we follow the One who is Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and who leads us, step by step, out of darkness and into a light that will never end.