We Know the Way

Today’s Gospel brings us back to that last supper — Jesus gathered with his closest friends, knowing that before the night was over, their world would be shattered. He had warned them, more than once. But warnings rarely prepare the heart. And so, like a parent who sees the storm coming while the children still sleep, Jesus offers them the only thing he can: words of comfort. “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me.”

We know those disciples. We are those disciples. Thomas speaks up and admits what the others are too afraid to say: “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” That question lives in us too. How many times have we stood at a crossroads — after a job lost, a diagnosis received, a relationship broken — and felt that same cold panic: I don’t know where I’m going. And I certainly don’t know how to get there.

That feeling is not weakness. It is honesty. Because the truth is, we are not in control of everything that comes our way. We cannot map out our futures. And when we forget that — when we cling doggedly to our plans and our timelines — our hearts grow anxious and afraid. Jesus recognizes this. He doesn’t scold Thomas for not knowing. He answers him.

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, “I will show you the way,” or “I taught you the way.” He says: I am the Way. This is not a road map. It is not a GPS. It is a person — a relationship — a way of being in the world that he himself lived before us.

In Spanish we speak of el camino — the road, yes, but also the path of one’s life, the manner of one’s walking. When we say someone has buen camino — a good path — we don’t just mean they know the directions. We mean they walk with dignity, with care, with love. That is the “way” that Jesus speaks of. Not a route to follow, but a life to live.

Not a route to follow, but a life to live.

Our Responsorial Psalm already pointed us here: “Happy are those who do not take the way that sinners tread.” The way is a how — how we treat one another, how we carry our suffering, how we welcome the stranger, how we love the person who is hard to love. Jesus showed us this way not in a classroom but in a life — eating with outcasts, healing the forgotten, washing dirty feet, dying with arms stretched wide.

To follow Jesus as the Way means letting go of the things that wall us off from one another. It means releasing our grip on detailed plans we’ve made that leave no room for mercy, no room for others, no room for God. It means asking, in every moment — not just where am I going? — but how am I walking?

And here is the comfort Jesus offers for all our uncertainty about tomorrow: “I go to prepare a place for you... that where I am, you may be also.” He is not abandoning us to an unknown future — he is already there, waiting for us, making room. We reach that place not by solving the mystery of what lies ahead, but by living faithfully in the present — with open hands, open hearts, and eyes that see the face of Christ in the people right in front of us, especially the poor, the suffering, the ignored.

My brothers and sisters, we will never have a perfect map of our lives. The road ahead will surprise us, disappoint us, and sometimes frighten us. But we are not lost — because we know the Way. We know his name. We have met him at this table. And we carry him with us every time we walk out those doors and choose, in some small and beautiful act, to live as he lived.

We may not know exactly where we are going.

But we know the Way.