Jesus said, “I am giving you a new commandment: love one another, just the way that I loved you. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In our God’s house there are many rooms, and I am going there to get things ready for you. I will prepare a place for you, and then I will come again and take you to myself, so that wherever I am, you will be also. And you will know the way to the place where I am going.
Then Thomas said to Jesus: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. So how could we know the way?”
Jesus said to them, “I am the way.” – John 13-14, adapted
It is quite a philosophically sophisticated speech.
It is easy to forget that Jesus said it all on his knees, with nothing but a towel around his waist.
The story goes that Jesus knew that the end of his life was near, and so one night at dinner with his friends he took on the role of a servant, he tied a towel around his waist and began to wash his disciples feet. It was Peter who interrupted, “You will never wash my feet!” He couldn’t bear to insult his beloved teacher like that.
But Jesus insisted and Peter relented.
Then Jesus started talking. Here is one of his most famous lines. He told his disciples to love one another the way he had loved them.
Then he started to say that there was room to spare in his father’s house, and that he was going there to get things ready for them.
It was Thomas who interrupted and said “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, How can we know the way?” and Jesus said: “I am the way.”
Notice Jesus doesn’t say, I am the destination. He says I am the way.
The disciples just want to know where this is all heading, what exactly have they signed on to, what is the end-game, and Jesus, sitting there with a towel tied around his waist, beside a bowl of dirty water and he says, “love each other the way I have loved you, this is the way to God.”
Is your life full of destinations? Are you always worried about where you need to be next? Jesus knows how trapped we all are by this way of thinking and this way of living. He feels the anxiety of our worrying, just as he heard the anxiety of Thomas’ question. We don’t know where you are going! And gently, he suggests that we learn to settle simply into a way of being together…
The people who were only a generation or two removed from Jesus’ life, the ones who met to share bread and wine and remember him, who gathered to sing hymns, and tell stories about his life. Those earliest Jesus enthusiasts. They called themselves “People of the Way.” Its all over the book of Acts. When we first meet Paul, he is descried a persecutor of followers of the way. Later, after his conversion, he writes “I am a follower of the way.”
They knew that the life that Jesus had called them into was not one with a clear and fixed destination, like the one that Thomas had wondered about, but rather Jesus had taught them a way of being together that would transform their lives. Jesus’ admonition had never been to think certain things or to believe certain dogmas, but rather it was to live a certain way, and more specifically to live a certain way together.
So when Jesus said, “love each other the way I have loved you” right after washing his friends feet. He may have had grand visions of what such a love would look like, but he at least meant, “wash each other’s feet.”
And when Jesus said, “I am the way.” He may of had some sort of grand cosmic meaning in mind, but he was at a minimum telling them that this style of loving each other was the way to met God.
He was telling them that their way mattered just as much as where they were going, and that he had come more so to teach them the way then to tell them where it led.
He was telling them that the way ran beside sinners and prostitutes. It meandered through bad neighborhoods. And leads us to act as servants. For God’s sake.
We do not know exactly where we are going, but that does not stop us from being followers of Christ’s way.
