Way, Truth and Life
Jesus was telling his disciples: I have to go and prepare a place for you, then I’ll come back and take you to myself; and you know the way. Thomas, a down to earth man, complained: Master, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way? Thanks to Thomas’ logic, we have these beautiful words from Our Lord: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Jesus is the one, he is a must, we cannot bypass him, he is compulsory. He should be our center, our summit, our soul, our love, our soulmate, our everything. A good question to ask ourselves: What is the place of Jesus in my life? When you look at a photo of a group of people, you can identify the relationship between each of them, depending where every person is placed in the photo. The one in the middle is normally the most important one. If I take a photo of important people in my life, Where do I place Jesus? At the back? Or maybe our photo is just a selfie.
Saint Augustine says that the way leads us to the truth, and the truth to life. Jesus is the way, the only way. There are as many different paths, as there are people, but only one way. Our life can go only in one direction. If we want to reach heaven, we need to follow Jesus. We come from God and we go back to God. We are here only for few years, wandering around, like a shooting star in the middle of the sky, that comes and goes. We were created without our consent; but it is up to us to reach our final destination. There is a famous saying in the spiritual life: God who created without you, won’t save you without you.
It is so easy to get lost. We see it all around us. So many people losing their way. There are many things in our lives that are trying to pull us away from the path, to distract us, to bog us down, to turn us around. This is one of the reasons why Jesus came to earth: to lead us, to show us the way. He is a short cut, the direct line, the straight path, a free way. He is our true GPS. We trust our gadgets to lead us where we want to go, but sometimes they let us down: our battery is flat, we run out of data, or we go through a spot where there is no coverage. But we don’t trust Jesus, the only real GPS, who never fails, the only one who can get us to our most important destination in life, heaven. If we look for him, he will find us, and once we find him, we will have no other freedom than to love him. We won’t let him go. We’ll keep our eyes on him and we won’t get lost.
If we follow the way, we will find the truth. Jesus always leads us to the truth. Sometimes we don’t follow the way because we cannot handle the truth. We don’t like what the truth is going to reveal to us, what the truth brings about. We live in a relativistic society that doesn’t care much about the truth. People fashion the truth according to what they think or how they live. Either you change the way you live according to what you believe, or you change your beliefs. This is the problem with the truth: it is going to have an influence on our lives. It is hard, but it will make us free. It will free us from the things we are attached to, from the things we are enslaved by, from the things we would like to be free of. The truth will make us free.
That’s why the truth lead us to life. Once we live according to the truth of our nature, we will begin to live an authentic Christian life, and we are happy because that’s what God created us for. If we live the life God has prepared for us, we are in our way to heaven.
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