Lesson 5

As I was writing these lessons, I would sit around at night, searching for the right words to say, talking to myself, writing page after page only to delete most of what I had written and then five minutes later ask myself why I had done that. Let me tell you that, that is one big negative of the computer when it comes to the art of writing.

Once upon a time an author would wad up a page covered in handwritten script or play hoops with typed pages from an old manual typewriter, always able to retrieve the thoughts that at one moment seemed ridiculous when sanity returned. But when you select all and hit delete, well there is no retrieval, just the desire to pound your head against the keyboard. And it was at the head pounding stage that I began to realize I was in some deep trouble.

I stopped solemnly praying and just started talking to God. Father, what do you want me to say, I don’t know how to say that, what do you mean here, I have no idea how to convey this…you are going to have to talk through me because I’ve got nothing. Father we are in some serious trouble…we’ve got a week to go, and all this stuff I have written is really bad, what are we going to do….

One night as I was talking to Him, this guy popped into my head from Braveheart. He’s the one who ends up protecting William Wallice, but everyone thinks he’s nuts, because no one else prays like he does, like God was actually their Father, nobody but him. I realized as I was thinking of that movie, that that is how I should have been praying as I was writing.

But Mel Gibbson wasn’t the one who taught mankind about the Father. No, the one who did that was the only one who really knew Him up to that point, and He is the one who introduced the Father to the world. “I Am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus taught us to pray to the Father. He is the one who led us into a love relationship with the Father and He is more than enough to meet our every need, even when we doubt that He is.

Father, as we seek to know Jesus as our everything, teach us through Your Word and this lesson what it means that Jesus is the Way, what it means that Jesus is the Truth, what it means that Jesus is the Life. In His name we pray, amen.

John 14:8-12; John 11:38-43

In John 14, we find Jesus in the upper room sharing the heart of His message as well as His own heart with the men He lived with for three years. He shared things with them He could never have shared with the crowds, and He teaches them how to love one another in the process.
In John 13, they were all together in the upper room. I picture it as a large enough room to handle thirteen men comfortably. They are all sitting around a large table.

No not like the image we have in our heads of DaVinci’s last supper, more the Roman style, called the triclinium.

In the tradition of the day, three men were usually on one large couch, with the highest ranking reclining at the top. Then the next ranking person angled in front of him with his head about at the chest of the first person. It was said that that person lay in the bosom of the first. So John and Peter were on the couch with Jesus, then the other disciples filled up the rest of the couches around the table making a rectangle.

I say all of this so you can get a mental picture of the level of intimacy, these men shared, and why they did some of the things they did. From this picture, it is really clear why they needed to have their feet washed. They were all sitting around with their feet in each other’s face trying to eat, so it was necessary to make sure those feet were clean.

In addition, on this night, Jesus did not just want everyone to have clean feet; He wanted to teach them that they needed to serve one another. He wanted them to know that none of them were any better than anyone else, and in so doing He was teaching them how to love each other.

Just as they finish up breaking bread together, Jesus told them some things that rocked their world. You see, they, just like the crowd who wanted to eat, thought that Jesus was a political leader. The disciples had been with Him a long time, but they still did not understand the reason He had come to earth. So, Jesus started to tell them some stuff that is extremely hard for them to grasp. He pointed things out to them about themselves that they just did not want to believe.

Read John 13:2, “I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray Me.” Now check out the disciples response. They all start looking at each other. The fishermen were probably looking at Matthew the tax collector thinking, “I knew it, you can’t trust those people. He never worked hard a day in his life, and he wasn’t one of us from the beginning.”

Whatever they were thinking, I am sure they all started to doubt each other.

The disciples starting to feel threatened from within when Jesus hits them with this:
My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for Me, and just as I said to the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

So, not only is Jesus going to be betrayed by one of them, now He is telling them that He is leaving them and they can’t even go with Him.

You need to know that they all thought that they would die for Him. Thomas said at one point when He knew the leaders in Judea were planning on killing Jesus that he would go back to Judea with Jesus and be killed with Him. Now Peter says the same thing, “Why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for You?” None of them think that they will run in fear, none of them doubt that they will fight for Him, none of them ever dreamed they would abandon Him, but their unbelief on this night sets the stage for exactly that to happen.

Philip said, “Just show us the Father and that will be enough.”

Really, Philip, will that finally be enough for you? I mean I can understand, you want to meet the Father face to face, I get that, but you don’t seem to get that when I say I AM, that is exactly what I mean. You have been sitting with the Father for three years now, you get to talk to God face to face…you are talking to the great I AM right now, but I understand…you thought the Father would be a little more impressive. Well Philip, I don’t think that if the Father came down right here next to you that you would believe any more than you already do.

Just a few weeks before Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Lazarus, a very close friend of Jesus, died. He was in the tomb four days before Jesus arrived in Bethany, and He had told His disciples even before they left to see Lazarus that the sickness that had over taken him wasn’t one that would end in death, but that it was for God’s glory.

When they reached Bethany everyone was wailing, and crying. Martha and Mary were mad at Jesus for not getting there sooner, and when Jesus told Martha to have the stone rolled away from the tomb that held Lazarus’ body, she freaked out. She was not to0 overwhelmed with grief to remind Jesus that a dead body smelled pretty bad by the fourth day.

Jesus cried for the hurt Mary and Martha felt, but He did not cry for Lazarus. He told those mourning that day that if they believed they would see the glory of God. Then Jesus prayed, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I know that You always hear Me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe You sent Me.” Jesus didn’t pray publically because HE needed to, He prayed in front of all of those gathered there that day so that they would understand that He and the Father were one. At that point, Jesus called Lazarus back from the dead.

If that event wasn’t enough to prove to Philip and all the other disciples that Jesus was one with the Father, then nothing Jesus did on earth ever would. Belief is a choice; it isn’t based on signs, logic or anything other than a decision to trust.

How many of you are cynics and proud of it?

The cynics among us are not the most easy to teach. We tend to be the ones with our arms crossed, face serious as we listen intently to every word to make sure that no false teaching is taking place. We uncross our arms only to look through scripture to find the portion of the word that is being read. We take notes so we can read them later on, and test the truth of what the pastor or teacher or speaker said.

Now, I am thankful for the ones who hold those of us who teach accountable for the words we speak, especially since we say we are teaching the word of God. The only problem is that we skeptics tend to not know when to stop analyzing and start trusting.

From what Philip said to Jesus, I am pretty sure that Philip is one of us. He is a good guy, but not easily persuaded, and sometimes the cynic’s heart can keep them from a deep and fulfilling relationship because they are always looking for the worst in people…they are always looking for something better, and they end up missing the good that is standing right in front of them, because it didn’t meet their standard. Philip was looking for his idea of God and missed three years of knowing God instead of just thinking about Him.

It is because Jesus knows that they don’t yet understand who He is or what He has come for that He shares all He does with them from chapter 13-17. He does not want to leave them unprepared or afraid so He tells them, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, trust in God, trust also in Me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going to prepare it for you, and if I go and prepare it, then I will come back and take you with me so that you are where I am. You know the way.”

Thomas, also a cynic, chimes in with Philip and says, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Have you ever tried to explain to someone something you know, but they have never experienced so there is a disconnect between the two of you? This happens a lot when I am trying to explain something to my kids. I know what I am talking about, and assume that they can grasp what I am saying simply because they know me, but they instead look at me with a blank stare.

This is usually the moment I start get upset with them, because usually the blank stare comes along with a request for them to do something. But they end up not being able to do what I want because they don’t have the life experience to know what I mean. That is where the disciples are at. They hear what Jesus is saying, but they don’t have the depth of knowledge or faith to understand.

This fact plays out most clearly over the next twenty four to forty-eight hours of Jesus’ life. It is not until after Jesus ascends into heaven, after His resurrection, that they start to grasp what He came to do, and not until the Holy Spirit filled them did they have the life experience (the Spirit of God within them) to fully understand that Jesus had come to die all along. That is why He told them in John 16, that the Holy Spirit would come when He left and that the Spirit would comfort them and lead them into all truth.

Jesus was trying to prepare them for the devastation of the cross, but more than that, because He knew they would fail Him, He was preparing them to come back to Him after the cross.
Don’t be afraid, even though you are going to know terror like you have never known it before. I have to leave you for a little while, but I will be back. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
He was telling them: you do know the way…I am the way…trust me, because I am not just a way of life, but I am the truth of all life, I am life.

And in our day, the idea of one way, one truth that leads to eternal life is something that we no longer accept. We like the crowd that followed Jesus and like the disciples have a hard time grasping that Jesus could be the answer to all of our questions, to the source of all of our beliefs and the ending place of all of our lives.

Many in the Christian community are moving away from teaching that Jesus is the answer, the source and the ending of life. They believe that that teaching is too hard for those in our culture seeking God. Instead there is a movement that says that John 14:6 should not be read to say that Jesus is the only way to God, but instead if you live the way of Jesus then you will find God. Now that might sound like the same thing, but it is not.

What they mean is that if you live as a peasant with nothing, helping the poor, then you will find God, even if it is through another “faith tradition”.

By this interpretation of John 14;6, Gandhi and Buddha, by the things they did are with the Father, even though they did not go through Jesus. But if it is enough to live with no earthly possessions, meet the needs of the sick and needy, then Jesus never needed to go to the cross, he could have simply continued to live as He was, showing His disciples to live that same way.

We should be doing all that Jesus did, but it should not be to get to the Father, it should instead be a by-product of knowing the Way to the Father.

Funny, it was Martha who understood this; she seemed to get it even before the disciples. She was crying, wailing, mourning her brother’s death, as Jesus sauntered in four days late. She walked up to Him and said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give You whatever you ask.”

Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”

“I know he will rise again one day,” Martha responded.

But Jesus didn’t leave it at that. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live even though he dies; whoever lives and believes in Me will never die. Martha, do you believe this?”

And Martha, the one we in the church dog all the time for not being as spiritual as her sister Mary, the same Martha who was too busy to sit at the feet of Jesus and be still, this Martha has more understanding, more faith than the twelve who walked with Him daily for three years. Martha said, “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God who was to come into the world.”

Martha, a cynic if I ever saw one, at the moment of her deepest need believed that Jesus would raise Lazarus from the dead, even before He did it…it was enough for her to simply hear Him say that He would do it, even if it wasn’t enough yet for Philip to see Lazarus raised from the dead.

Martha chose to believe that Jesus was who He said He was, she knew that He was the only way to the Father, that He was and is the Way, the Truth and the Life.