“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:1-6

            In many ways this generation of Americans is a generation of seekers.  We are always searching for the next thrill and the next pleasure.  Every Amusement park every year seems to come out with the next wildest, longest roller coaster with the steepest longest drop to get the people to come.  Every baseball team or sports team in the last decade has built a new stadium or coliseum to get the fans in.  I remember when the switch to color TV was happening in America and everyone had to get the latest television.  Now, every year the word is “High Definition” as the screens get bigger and bigger and the picture clearer and clearer.  We’re always moving on to the next thing that we think will fulfill our wildest dreams.  It’s even in the Declaration of Independence as one of our premiere rights: you and I have the right to pursue happiness.  Did you know that the original wording of the great American document had the phrase that we were entitled to “Life, Liberty , and Property?” But one of the original signers remarked that not everyone in America had property.  But, he went on, everyone seeks something that will make him or her happy.  And so we had the change.  But even with the change we are still searching; every generation has searched and I suppose it is in the nature of us all that every generation will search.  My fear is that we will, however, end up singing that line from of Bono’s from the band U2 which goes, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

            Today Jesus seems to understand what is in all of our hearts.  What I continually find amazing is that all of His words to us were said the night before He died.  It was only a few hours away when the betrayal, arrest, trial, condemnation, and crucifixion were to be upon Him.  You would think that all of His thoughts would have been about Himself and what He was about to endure for us all.  But He always thought of us; even to the very end.  And in His heart He knew and knows that we are always searching for something.

            In fact, Jesus had his own trio of words that He used.  He did not say that every person would necessarily have liberty and freedom this side of heaven.  He did not say that we were all entitled to happiness in life or at least the right to seek after it and pursue it.  He said that what all people search for are the “Way, the Truth and the Life”.  But He knows that all people still haven’t found what they are looking for.

            One of my favorite movies of all time is Forrest Gump.  It is the story of a simple man from Alabama who wanders through most of the events that shaped my own generation: The Vietnam War, The Sexual Revolution, the slogans and catchphrases of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the assassinations of our presidents and other leaders, the Civil Rights Movement.  Through it all Forrest Gump seems to take everything in stride as he meanders through the years and he always seems to come out a success.  But the other main character in the movie is the flip side.  It is Jenny, the love of Forrest Gump’s life.  Jenny’s life takes an entirely different direction because she is the embodiment of the lost soul that also was part of my generation growing up.  She is the one whose entire life is summed up by the three words: “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll”.  And her life for the most part is an empty one;  in fact, she considers ending her life on more than one occasion in the movie.  More people of my generation are like Jenny rather than Forrest Gump.  They are looking and searching and the answers they have come up with, if they are answers at all, have left us with a nation that is morally bankrupt, into quick fixes to life that ultimately do nothing for us, and leave us with huge debts which we wracked up in the search to find answers to life.

            And Jesus says, “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life”.  I think Thomas has one of his greatest moments here.  Unfortunately all we know of Thomas for the most part is his famous doubting comments made later on in John’s Gospel.  Doubting Thomas is the name he has worn for two thousand years because of one stupid comment he made on Easter Sunday night when he refused to believe Jesus had really risen from the dead without physical evidence his eyes could see and his hands could touch.  But this is his other famous line.  He tells Jesus that he is a searcher and he is seeking. But he doesn’t know the way.  I think it is one thing to believe in your heart that there are no answers to life’s big questions.  But it must be infinitely sadder to know in your heart that there are indeed answers but you don’t know how to find them.    They say that the reason Moses led the Israelites in the wilderness for forty years was because he refused to ask his wife for directions.  Thomas seems to want to ask for directions.  But he doesn’t know where to turn.  And Jesus says, “ I am the Way.”

            Did you know that when the first Christians gathered in the book of Acts they said that they were followers of “the Way”?  They took Jesus’ words so seriously that they saw their faith as a way for them.  And “Way” can mean two things for you and me.  The “Way” can refer to a way “out” and the “Way” can refer to a new direction to take. 

Jimi Hendrix, the great Guitarist of the sixties, before he died from a drug overdose, had a famous song that had the line in it: “There must be some way out of here… said the Joker to the Thief”.  I think one of the basic plights of humanity is that they are desperately searching for a way out – out of their despair and hopelessness and guilt.  There’s got to be a way out of the mess life has become for me.  Is it in drugs and alcohol?  No.  Is it in relationship after relationship? No.  That was what the Jenny of Forrest Gump discovered.  But there is a way out.  It is in the cross of Jesus Christ.  When the Lord said to us all that He was going to prepare a place for us, of course He meant heaven.  But I loved the way Jesus put it. He spoke of heaven as His Father’s House.  It was a house where there was a room for you.  Do you know what one word comes to mind when I read it that way as the Lord spoke of it?  I think of the word “Home”.  I do not know about you but to me that is one of the most wonderful words in the English Language.  To go home has inside of it all the images of peace and a place that is a haven to you.  To me I think of Mom and Dad and a warm feeling when you could just come in the door, drop your stuff, plunk down on the couch, turn on the TV, and leave the world with its problems outside.  Jesus spoke of our eternal home that way where God was not just God to you but Father.  In fact, I like the Hebrew Word “Abba” which Jesus sometimes used for our heavenly Father.  The actual Hebrew for “Father” is “Ab”.  “Abba” is more a familiar term.  It really is best translated as “Dad” or if you were very little it meant “Daddy”.  In Galatians 4:6 St. Paul told us that because we have the spirit of Jesus in our hearts when we cry out to God we say “Abba”.  He said the said thing to us in Romans 8:15 where he reminded us that you and I were adopted as God’s sons and daughters and so we cry out “Abba”.  God really is our father;  Jesus said that you and I could have the same relationship to Him that He did.  And heaven is home.

            But the way He prepared that place for us called “home” is in the cross.  He went to a place where none of us could go.  He went through the horror of your hell on the cross out of love for you.  He experienced what real death is and real separation from God is so that you would never know that reality.  You will never be forsaken ever by your “Abba” because on the cross Jesus lost the ability to call Him “Abba” and cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsake me?”  That’s what sin does – it takes away a loving father and replaces Him with a stern Almighty and eternal judge – that’s what Jesus knew on the cross as He prepared our hearts to see God as our Father and heaven as our home.  The cross is the “Way out of here” if you are struggling with guilt and same and despair today. And it is the way towards heaven and eternal life.

            Jesus also said He was the Truth.    St. John loves this word.  Do you know how many times the word Truth appears in Matthew’s Gospel?  Zero times.  In St. Mark it appears once.  In St. Luke’s writings Truth appears only once.  In St. John’s writings in the New Testament “Truth” appears 38 times. He is fascinated by the word; as are human beings just like you and me.   But most human beings are like Pontius Pilate.  I think it is more than telling that St. John is the only one who has the discussion of Jesus with Pontius Pilate right before the crucifixion.   Pontius Pilate is a man who desperately wants to know the truth.  He knows Jesus is innocent.  He wants to free Jesus.  But he is too afraid.  He cannot face yet another rebellious crowd fomenting revolution.  He would fit in very well in the twenty first century.  He is struggling to face life knowing that he is a hypocrite and that his life has no meaning in the end.  And Jesus tried to give Pontius Pilate and our generation an answer.  He said, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”  And sarcasm took over in Pontius Pilate’s voice, very similar to the saracastic cynical generation that lives today and he spoke those immortal words, “What is truth?”  Is there really anything true anymore? Or is it all relative?  Is my truth your truth?  Is yours mine?  Jesus said to us all, “Yes, there is Truth.  But to find it you have to stop listening to the voice in your own heart and start listening to Mine.” 

            Otherwise you will never really know what life is.  “Life” is another favorite word of St. John .  Did you know that Matthew, Mark, and Luke combined in the New Testament mention “Life” fifty times?  St. John mentions “life” sixty-seven times all on his own.  He is fascinated with “life”.  In fact, in what some say is the most famous verse in the entire Bible, John 3:16 , you and I hear those words we knew as a child, “God so loved the word that He gave His one and only Son that whosever believes in Him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life.”

            “Everlasting life” doesn’t just mean living forever in the way we are living now. That is what most people see as immortality.  But ask yourself, is that eternal life, simply to go on living this way we live on planet earth forever and ever?  Would you want an eternity of heartache and hurt to go on and on  and on?  Would you want to live with your guilt and shame day after day after day without end?  Life for God doesn’t mean just existence.  An amoeba has existence and it is alive.  But does it have “Life” in the sense of which Jesus speaks?    Is life something more?  Is it more of what our Lord meant when He said in John 10:10, “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly?”  How many people do you know are living live abundantly?  Oh yes, they may have an abundance of material things – that is true in America .  But are we “living abundantly”? 

            To go back once more to the movie Forrest Gump the one thing that he had that the others seemed to lack was faith in God.  His friend Lieutenant Dan who is totally disgusted with the way his life has turned out once asked Forrest Gump if he believed in God – and his answer was “Yes”.  And I know Hollywood could never go so far as to fill in the blanks with the name of Jesus but you can tell that it is Jesus that forms Forrest Gump’s faith.  He sings in his Church choir, he funds the new Church building with its steeple.  And whether in the end he believes that God has chosen a destiny for all people or that life is in fact, a box of chocolates given by the Lord to us all to discover where life will go for us, it didn’t bother Forrest Gump in the end.  “It was probably both” – a God Who does direct us and walks with us in life and a God Who gives us the freedom to make choices in Him and to discover where the Abundant Life lay.  It was something that all his friends, both Jenny and Lieutenant Dan, struggled to find in their own lives – a faith that life was more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll – or unfulfilled destiny.

            But those things will only be found in Jesus Christ.  That’s what Thomas needed to hear to that question of the heart he voiced for all the ages.  “I want what you are offering Jesus.  But I don’t know the way to find it.” “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life”.  In fact, so real is the message of Jesus Christ that our Lord went on to say that there is no other way.  Our world with its vague notions of what “Truth” is cannot stand to hear that there is only one Way to God and to  Fulfillment to the exclusion of everything else.  But if the answer is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ then that’s the answer and I cannot help it that there is no other answer.  Nor do I want to.

            Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?  I have Someone for you to consider.  His name is Jesus Christ.   His answer is the cross and the empty tomb.  He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is Your Way, Your Truth, and Your Life. Amen.