The Way, The Truth, The Life
I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through my phone
and stopped at three news clips back-to-back.
Three different people,
all speaking with total confidence,
all claiming to tell the truth,
and all saying things that flatly contradicted
what the next person had just said.
I caught myself doing something strange.
I was nodding along to the one I liked,
and rolling my eyes at the one I did not.
Then I stopped and asked myself,
“Brendan, how do you actually know
which of these is true?”
The honest answer was uncomfortable.
I was not weighing evidence.
I was picking the voice
that already matched what I wanted to believe.
I think this is our story here in Silicon Valley.
We live in the most information-rich place
in the history of the world.
We have more facts at our fingertips
than any generation that ever lived.
And yet we are starving for truth.
Every day a new voice tells us who we are.
An algorithm tells us what to want.
An influencer tells us what success looks like.
A podcast tells us who the enemy is.
A headline tells us what to be afraid of.
And now an AI can tell us almost anything
in a voice that sounds completely sure.
So many voices,
all claiming to tell the truth,
and so many of them
are completely unhinged from the truth.
The result is exhaustion.
We do not know who to trust.
We do not know what is real.
We do not know which way to walk.
Our hearts are troubled.
Into exactly this kind of moment,
Jesus speaks the words of today’s Gospel.
His friends are scared and confused.
He has just told them he is going away.
Thomas asks the question we are all asking,
“Master, we do not know where you are going.
How can we know the way?”
But Jesus does not hand him a map.
He does not give him a five-point plan.
He does not give him a doctrine to memorize.
He gives Thomas himself.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
Notice he does not say,
“I will show you a way.”
He says, “I am the way.”
He does not say, “I will teach you the truth.”
He says, “I am the truth.”
He does not say, “I will give you a better life.”
He says, “I am the life.”
The earliest Christians understood this.
Long before they were called Christians,
they were simply called
people of “the Way.”
Saul was looking for followers of the Way
when he was knocked off his horse.
Paul preached the Way in Ephesus.
It was their first name for themselves,
and it tells you everything.
Following Jesus was not a label.
It was not a tribe or a side.
It was a road you actually walked.
The journey itself was Christ.
The truth was what Christ asked of them.
And in the end, Christ was their fullest life.
So, God’s challenge to us today is sharp
and it is simple.
Stop looking for the truth in the noise.
Stop hoping the next post,
the next podcast, the next headline,
the next confident voice
will finally settle your heart.
It will not.
The truth is a person.
And he is asking,
“Do you actually know me?”
Here in Silicon Valley, that hits hard.
We are trained to optimize.
We are trained to consume more inputs,
read more, listen to more, scroll more,
as if more information
will eventually deliver more meaning.
It will not.
Our challenge this week is to do the opposite.
Quiet the inputs.
Take the Way seriously as a way of walking.
Take the Truth seriously as a Person to know.
Take the Life seriously
as the life you already have in him.
That looks ordinary.
It looks like ten quiet minutes
with the Gospel before you open your phone.
It looks like one honest conversation
instead of ten reactive comments.
It looks like serving someone in your home
the way Stephen and the seven
served the widows in today’s first reading.
Living stones, Peter calls us.
Built into something real.
And my challenge, my own challenge,
is to stop preaching about the Way
and start walking it more honestly.
To choose, each morning,
one Voice over the thousand others
competing for my attention.
Because at the end of all of this,
when the noise finally stops,
only one Voice will still be speaking.
And he has already told us who he is.
I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.