Sermon for Easter 5: "Jesus is the Way"

+ Easter 5 – May 10^th, 2020 +

Series A: Acts 6:1-9, 51-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

Beautiful Savior Lutheran

Milton, WA

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

From the very beginning of creation, God made us to be a people of place and location. We are born with a sense of place. We are born into a family, into a community, into a nation. We have a geography, something that locates us on a particular set of GPS coordinates. We are not made to wander aimlessly without a place. When God made Adam and Eve, He didn’t just have them roam over the face of the earth. He put them in a place, an ordered place, a garden. The garden of Eden was Adam and Eve’s place, the place where humanity was most like God, reflecting His image to the creation, enjoying the fruits of creation, walking with God in the cool of the day.

But sin changed all that. Sin displaced us. Drove us from the Garden. Filled humanity with a sense of loss and longing that we carry with us still. Sin took us from the place where we were most at home and set us in a hostile wilderness of weeds and sweat and pain and death. Sin took away our place and drove us into lostness. We are not at home. We’re lost, longing for a home, a place that we can’t seem to find. We’re restless. We move from one place to another, hoping, longing, searching for that place called “home,” that garden place where we can once again be ourselves, but we can’t seem to find it.

As Jesus taught his disciples on that Thursday night before his crucifixion I imagine they experienced many similar feelings. Confusion and chaos of the unknown future. Uncertainty on the horizon. Fear and despair of what was to come. A sense of loss and longing for a place. This is why John 14 begins the way it does, with Jesus comforting his disciples: “Let not your heart be troubled.”

For the disciples, and more so for Jesus, there was much trouble to come. Jesus’ betrayal by one of his own disciples, Judas. Peter’s denial of his Lord. Sham trials. False accusations. Shouts of crucifixion. Beatings followed by more beatings. A painful, agonizing, humiliating death. Jesus’ own disciples scattered in fear, hiding behind locked doors. Yet, Jesus speaks into their troubled lives.

“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.”

Notice that Jesus doesn’t promise to calm this particular storm, the one he is heading into as he goes to the cross. But he does promise to be with his disciples, and take his place on the cross to ensure that his disciples, and you, will have an eternal place of rest with him.

And even though the way ahead for us is very different from the disciples gathered with Jesus in that upper room, I think we can relate to their sense of fear, confusion, despair, and uncertainty of what’s to come on the road ahead. In recent weeks, we’ve probably all experienced a profound sense of loss in one way or another: loss of jobs, loss of health, loss of peace and safety, loss of family gatherings and events, graduations and school, loss of gathering together as God’s people, loss of health and life. 

Into our lives of despair, uncertainty, doubt, pain, loss, disease, and death - into our wilderness, Jesus gives us words of hope and comfort, his promise and his presence.

I AM the Way, the truth, and the life.

Jesus is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” for his disciples, and for you. He stands uniquely between the Creator and the creature, between the Father and fallen humanity. As Jesus said to Philip, “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” He is also Man of His mother, true humanity, bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh. And so He stands in the breach as the only Mediator between God and humanity. Jesus alone is your way, and he comes to lead us out of our lostness and the displacement of our sin by his death on the cross.

Jesus doesn’t simply speak the truth, He IS the Truth. The absolute Truth. The Truth beyond which there is no further truth, and the Truth to which all truths point. He is Truth enfleshed in our humanity. There is nothing false in Him. He is the antidote to the Lie that poisoned our humanity and drove us into the wilderness of Sin and Death. He is the Truth of God’s love for the world, His passion to save, His mercy toward sinners.

Jesus is the Life. He is the creator of life and He is Life. Jesus’ words are Spirit and they are Life. Jesus is the Life that enlivens every living thing. Jesus is the Life that Death itself cannot overcome. The Father sends His Son, the Son sends the Spirit, and you are on the blessed receiving end of the speaking. You hear the words of the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and in hearing you are set on the Way, the Truth is revealed to you, and you have Life.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Is your heart troubled? By your past, by your present, by your future? By your sins, your failings, your death? Whatever the cause of the trouble, whatever the anxiety or terror or fear, trust the Father, trust Jesus His Son. Jesus has gone the way of death and resurrection to glory and has brought you along with Him in His humanity. You are baptized. You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s treasured possession. You are a part of the body of Christ, you are a member of the household of God, you are a priest in the royal priesthood of Jesus. He’s gone to prepare a place for you. He will raise you from the dead on the Last Day so that where He is you also will be. In Him you are already there.

In Jesus, you have a place. You have a home. In Jesus, you are never lost, but always found. In Jesus, you are never dead, but always alive. He is the Way, the Truth, the Life. 

In the Name of + Jesus. Amen.

The peace of God which surpasses all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.