Jesus doesn’t say, “I give you the way,” but “I am the way.”
How do you know who, or what, you truly are? It’s a question about self-awareness. Some of us are better at this than others, but we all need help, from time to time, understanding ourselves.
This help often comes in one of two forms. One type is when someone explicitly points out your character traits. This could come from a personality test or a clinical diagnosis. Or it could come from someone simply describing you. Readers of a certain age will remember how comedian Jeff Foxworthy turned this into an art form with his “You might be a redneck” jokes. In comedic fashion, Foxworthy could help you know yourself if, for instance, you own a home with wheels and several cars without, or if your coffee table used to be a cable spool.
The other form occurs when someone offers you a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had. You learn something about yourself quickly when a friend offers you a breath mint. Jesus is the master of this method. A classic example is in John 14, where Jesus says to you, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1). Jesus seems to be offering you a solution to a troubled heart, which suggests you might indeed have a troubled heart. Actually, because the Great Physician is an expert diagnostician, we’ll up the ante on that. If Jesus says to you, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” you definitely do have a troubled heart (at least, until Jesus fixes that for you).
What does it mean to have a “troubled heart?” We certainly have no shortage of possibilities.
You might be experiencing a common frustration. A friend, family member, or co-worker may be getting on your nerves to a record degree. And after venting for ten straight minutes to another friend, you have that out-of-body experience where you realize you are really upset about this.
Jesus seems to be offering you a solution to a troubled heart, which suggests you might indeed have a troubled heart.
You might be experiencing a deep disappointment. You got worrying test results from the doctor. You didn’t get the job you wanted. Someone you love doesn’t love you back. You fret. You lose sleep. You can’t concentrate on things that should matter, on the things that are going well. You fixate on what you can’t control and neglect the things you can. You enter a downward spiral where your internal dialogue churns repeatedly over the same disappointment.
Or we could speak about this in more generic terms. Perhaps the “troubled heart” is what we call mental illness. This is a concern that touches all of us, directly or indirectly. One in five adults in the US live with a mental illness. Fully half of adolescents experience some mental disorder. Persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness among young people have doubled since 2009, a statistic matched by the rise of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in that population.
Is this what Jesus is talking about when he diagnoses your troubled heart? We don’t want to deny the seriousness of any of these unfortunate conditions or experiences. But as Christians—those whose lives and worldviews are to be shaped primarily by God’s word—we should enter this issue from another angle. Rather than looking about our sin-infected world for our understanding of what ails us, we must look to Scripture. And here we find a different focus.
Notice, we are speaking about troubled hearts, not troubled heads. Our culture’s focus on psychology and psychiatry works to convince us that human experiences are reducible to mental operations. Get the internal script right, get the hormones balanced, and we will be troubled no more.
But we are on different terrain if we begin instead with the heart. Scripturally speaking, the heart is the organ of faith, trust, and belief. As Paul says in Romans 10:10, “one believes with the heart.” When a heart is troubled, it is because it believes the wrong thing. It puts its trust in the wrong thing. Its faith is off kilter. This is why Jesus immediately follows his words “do not let your hearts be troubled” with this: “believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1). Jesus knows that the heart is troubled precisely when it believes in the wrong thing.
Why do we put our faith in the wrong things? Like the disciples in John 14, we fear that God is absent. After Jesus tells them that he is going to his Father’s house and coming back for them (John 14:3), Thomas asks the obvious but pathetic question: Jesus, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way? (John 14:5). And even after Jesus precisely describes the destination and the way, they are still certain that God is absent. “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied,” suggests Philip (John 14:8).
Both responses show that they sense that God the Father is far off, distant, and hidden. That’s what sinners—like you and me and the disciples—are trained to believe. This breeds fear, which causes us to put our faith elsewhere: career, family, appearance, possessions, accomplishments, or even in morality. Consequently, God recedes further into the background, meaning that when we realize we really do need God (rather than all these other things), God seems even farther away than before. It is a vicious cycle.
Jesus, however, has a sure-fire way to stop the vicious cycle, to interrupt it before you scare yourself into hell. When you ask, “What is the way to God?,” Jesus points to himself, right in front of you. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he says (John 14:6). There is no need to solve the riddle of God’s hiddenness or traverse the ends of the earth to discover the right path. The “way” has presented itself to you—hunted you down, really.
But you still may wonder: what will it be like to walk this way, even if it is right in front of me? You may fear the cost of walking in the way of Jesus. So you will naturally ask if you can get to the destination by going around Jesus. “Just show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”
Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “I give you the way,” but “I am the way.” It’s better to think of Jesus as an airport moving walkway than a rocky path up some steep hill. Jesus will take you where he wants you; don’t worry about it.
But more directly, Jesus tells you precisely how he brings life to you. It is not by inspiring you to commit to a new life of righteousness or self-sacrifice. It is not by introducing you to some new moral code that will set you apart from the rest of the world. As with everything powerful when it comes to God, this comes down to words. So Jesus replies to Philip’s misguided request: “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works [in these very words]” (John 14:10).
This “way,” this journey, is a journey of listening, of hearing what God has to say to you through Jesus. His words are words of pure promise. They are unadulterated gifts. And these words sustain you both in this world and in the world to come. In John 14, the words go like this:
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. 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, so that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:2-3)
Now with something to believe in—and not just something, but a promise from God who cannot lie—your heart will no longer be troubled.
