John 14:6

Sermon for Sunday, May 2, 2026 || Easter 5A || John 14:1-14

Today we’re going to spend our entire sermon time talking about a single verse of the Gospel reading. John Chapter 14, Verse Six says: “Jesus said to [Thomas], “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The first half of this verse is so beautiful and enlivening in its poetry. Then, to our modern ears, we hear the second half of the verse as terribly exclusive, as a complete barrier against anyone who is not Christian being able to gain access to God. So let’s wrestle with this verse this morning and see where we end up. We’ll start with the first half, this great “I Am” saying, and my hope is that the “I Am” statement will shine a new light on the second half of the verse.

Recall that Jesus’ “I Am” statements in John’s Gospel reach all the way back to Moses’s conversation with God at the burning bush. Moses asks God what God’s name is, and God responds with the cryptic, “I Am Who I Am.” Another possible translation of this cryptic response is “I Create What I Create.” In other words, the name of God derives from the fundamental concept of Being. God, as Creator, is the Foundation of all Being, “of all that is, seen and unseen.”

This understanding of God will be important later in this sermon, so hold on to this idea of God as “the Foundation of all Being.” We’ll get back to it in a few minutes. But first, Jesus’ beautiful poetry: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

The word translated as “way” in this verse is not a special word. It is one of the most mundane words in the Greek language. The word crops up 100 times in the New Testament, and it just means “road.” Sometimes it is translated as “journey.” It is simply the path you walk down, the “way” you are traveling. By calling himself the way or the road, Jesus invites us to walk with him down the path that he is trailblazing. The Way of Jesus is not a destination; it is a daily walk. The Way of Jesus is not a contract to be signed once and then put in a draw; the Way of Jesus is an adventure to be taken. We choose the Way each and every day, with each and every step.

The Way of Jesus is the Way of Truth, but please don’t misunderstand here. The Truth that I’m talking about has nothing to do with a set of theological claims or doctrinal statements. The Truth with a capital “T” is the reality of existence free from illusion and delusion. Too often in our lives, we succumb to illusions; we succumb to the great big lies that human society tells, the lies that are so BIG that they seem true because humanity has warped our societies around the big lies. You can name those lies just as well as I can: lies that some people are better than others because of any number of factors; lies that unchecked economic growth is possible without destroying the planet; lies that all other life exists to support human consumption. All of these lies are illusions that keep us from living in True Reality, the reality from which and to which God calls us.

The Road we walk following Jesus leads us to Truth free of illusion. When we embrace this Truth, we are able to live Life authentically. We are able to take off our masks. We are able to strip off our armor. We stand before God to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from [whom] no secrets are hid.” We stand before God just as we are, as the old hymn says:

Just as I am, though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

We look in the mirror and we are who we are, the beloved of God, “unique, precious, and unrepeatable.” This is the authentic self from which Life springs. As the cheetah is meant to run and the dolphin is meant to dive, the human is meant to love self and others. We discover this Life as we seek the Truth while walking the Way. And so the Way, the Truth, and the Life combine into a virtuous cycle. They are the revelation that Jesus brought to the world.

And this brings us to the second half of the verse: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” First, we must acknowledge the exclusionary nature of these words. When John’s community was writing their account of the Gospel, they were going through a painful split with the other Jewish people who did not think Jesus was the promised messiah. The Jews who became Christian and the Jews who did not had a messy breakup in the last decades of the first century. So it makes sense that the texts these new Christians were writing would be staking a claim to a certain identity different from what they had before. And in staking this claim, they wrote words that delineated the line between their current group and their prior group.

When we read these words nearly 2,000 years later, we read them from the perspective of Christianity being a humongous global religion with a lot of clout and a history of exclusionary atrocity. But when these words were written, the term “Christian” had barely been coined; the followers of the Way of Jesus were a small group trying to carve out an identity for themselves. They were not trying to exclude others; they were trying to figure out who they were apart from other groups.

So this sentence, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” sounds exclusive and, throughout history, it has often been used to exclude. But based on my reading of the first half of our verse, I don’t think this exclusive understanding is the only way to read it. Stick with me on this line of thinking:

The One Jesus calls Father is God.
God is the Foundation of All Being.
Our unique, precious, and unrepeatable Life comes from this foundational Being.
We embrace this Life by seeking Truth free from illusion.
This seeking happens as we daily walk the Way.
Through the example of his truth-filled life, Jesus sets our feet on the path of this Way.
And so we come into relationship with the One Jesus calls Father.

Again, none of this has to do with doctrinal purity. It has everything to do with the patterns our lives take on. And not just our lives, but the lives of all people, Christian and not. All people are searching for Truth. All people want to live lives of authenticity and abundance. When people discover the pattern that leads to Truth and authentic Life, they have found the Way. We might identify that way as Jesus’; others might not. But it is the Way just the same.

Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Each one of us has the opportunity, each day of our lives, to accept Jesus’ invitation: to step out onto the road he paved, to seek the truth he proclaimed, and to live the life that resonates deeply with the Life of the One who continues speaking Creation into being.

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash.