Year A: Easter 5 | John 14:1-14
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
May 3, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Due to technical difficulties, neither audio nor video of the sermon are available.
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” – John 14:6[1]
Last Saturday I headed over to La Union to help with St. Luke’s afternoon service. In my sermon there[2]—which is posted on our church Facebook page—I looked at Jesus’ statement, “I am the gate.” Many people over the centuries have tried to use that and others of Jesus’ words to promote Christianity as exclusively superior to other religions, but that wasn’t what Jesus was saying—quite the opposite, really. The wording he used focuses on the opening in the wall—the gateway—rather than on the mechanism we use to control what moves through that gap.
Jesus’ mission wasn’t to build an insulated compound of people who know exactly the right things to think about God or who worship God exactly the right way while everyone else is condemned to Hell. He viewed himself as the one who breaks down those kinds of barriers, one who provides access despite our frequent human attempts to cut ourselves off from one another. Part of the Church’s mission in the modern world is to clear the pathways Jesus opened for us 2,000 years ago—pathways we as the Church, under Christendom, spent centuries closing back up. Jesus’ work was to unite humanity in love for God as demonstrated through service to one another. When we break down societal barriers against enemies, outcasts—whomever we’ve taught ourselves to hate—and welcome them into our communities, we actively follow in Jesus’ footsteps; we literally embody the work of Christ.
This week we’ve encountered another of Jesus’ statements that people like to use to prove who’s “in” and who’s “out” in God’s eyes.
I spent the summer after my senior year of college traveling throughout Europe with a mission choir. We performed concerts everywhere from the southern coast of Spain all the way into Moscow. During each concert, one of my school’s Bible majors would offer a brief “testimony.” While in Russia, one of our “preacher boys” gave a fiery sermon emphasizing Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, the Life.” Afterward, our translator confessed to me that he couldn’t translate the speech directly. The Russian language doesn’t use articles, so to make any sense of what our preacher was saying, he had to switch “the” to “only.”
At the time I took it as an interesting factoid. Today I wonder if my interpreter friend wasn’t a little embarrassed about having changed the Biblical text, because “only” is not what we see in John’s Gospel. Like English, Greek does have articles, although they don’t quite function identically to the way we use them. They also had a word for “sole” or “only” that Jesus uses multiple times elsewhere within the context of this same speech.[3] The fact that Jesus didn’t use that word here strongly suggests that our Modern American Christian tendency of emphasizing the “the” doesn’t align with his intention when actually speaking to the disciples. In fact, I would argue that it distracts us from his main point.
Back in Lent—in John chapter 3—we encountered Nicodemus, a leader among the Pharisees of Judea.[4] In the famous dialog where Jesus says, “You must be born again,” we learned that John, as an author, loves to use misunderstandings as conversation plot points. In that case, it was the word “again,” which literally means “from above” and appears to have been a colloquialism for “up north,”—referring to Galilee, where Jesus had grown up. Nicodemus—along with generations of translators—misunderstands Jesus’ word choice as “again” and starts asking how anyone—especially someone as old as him—can crawl back into their mother’s womb.
I strongly suspect something similar is happening in this scene. When Jesus says, “you know the way to the place where I am going,”[5] Thomas responds, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”[6] Jesus then replies, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” It sounds like a straightforward answer, but we need to take a closer look at the word “way.”
It turns out that in Greek, almost identically to English, the word we translate as “way” can have multiple meanings. The primary one is the “way” of a road or path. But there’s a common secondary usage: “way” as a manner of behavior or practice. It’s like when someone says, “That’s just the way we do it,” or “I don’t like the way my hair looks today.” Assuming Jesus is talking about going somewhere, Thomas asks about the route—tell us the way you’re heading. Jesus, following John’s favorite little wordplay trick, responds about the method—the how or the means it takes to get there. But what exactly is that method?
Belief—in the original sense of that word. When the Bible was first translated into English, the word “belief” didn’t mean to consider something to be true or to assent to an unprovable assertion—that meaning evolved hundreds of years later. At the time, to be-lief meant to pledge oneself—to swear fealty or loyalty to someone or something apart from yourself. And how does someone demonstrate that loyalty? By following instructions—by remaining faithful to the words, character, and actions of the one to whom we have become “lief.”
Jesus’s being “the way” is something of an expansion on his claim to be “the gateway.” The disciples already realize that Jesus is there to love and serve, to break down barriers and allow humans free access not simply to the Divine or a mystical afterlife but to those we ourselves continue to make efforts to cut off or exclude. The path we use to continue approaching the Father, with or without Jesus physically present, is to be faithful to the method Jesus had already modeled. We follow the “way” set before us as we incarnate the “way” Jesus lived.
Unfortunately, time this morning limits further exploration of Jesus’ statement. But even without examining those extra details, we are by no means left standing lost or confused. The pathway is the person. The person is their character and behavior. If we want to walk the pathway, we have to walk with the person, absorbing their example. We need to become apprentices who grow in their craft not simply by sitting and studying but by emulating their master. As Christians, Jesus has already laid the road before us. We already comprehend what we need to do to get where we want to go. The question now is, having encountered the Way, are we actually willing to walk it?
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] https://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/year-a-april-25-2026-easter04
[3] John 16:32 (2 appearances of “alone”); 17:3 (1 appearance of “only”)
[4] https://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/year-a-march-01-2026-lent02
[5] John 14:4
[6] John 14:5