He Is the Only Road to the Father, and He Walks It With You

The supper is finished. Jesus has washed their feet. Judas has gone out into the night. And now Jesus tells them the thing they have been dreading: "Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward." Peter protests. Jesus says he will deny him three times before morning.

The air in the upper room is thick with grief and confusion. These men have left everything to follow Jesus. They have staked their lives on his identity, his promises, his kingdom. And now he is telling them he is leaving. He says the words they need most: "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?"

He is telling them there is a destination. A real place. A prepared place. But Thomas asks the most practical question in the room: "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" A map. A GPS. A list of directions. That's what you need when someone says they are going somewhere and you need to follow.

And Jesus gives them something better than a map: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Not here is the way. Not I know the way. I AM the way. The road to the Father's house is not a path you navigate — it is a person you follow. And this person is going to go ahead of them, through death, and come back to take them with him.

He has spent everything. He is feeding pigs in a foreign country, and he is hungry enough to eat the slop in the pig trough. This is not where he thought he would end up. He took his father's inheritance, left, and destroyed it. Now there is nothing left — not the money, not the dignity, not the sense that he could ever go home.

But then he comes to himself. He remembers his father's house — the food, the warmth, the servants who eat better than he does now. And he forms a plan: I will go to my father. I will confess. I will say I am no longer worthy to be called his son. I will ask to be taken on as a hired servant. It is less than he once was. It is more than he has now. He begins the long walk home.

He is still a long way off when his father sees him. The father runs — in the ancient Near East, a man of dignity never ran; running was beneath a patriarch's honor. But this father hikes up his robe and runs, and he falls on his son's neck and kisses him. The son begins his prepared speech: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son." And the father — hardly listening — is calling for the best robe, for a ring, for sandals, for a feast.

"For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." No one comes to the Father except through Jesus — and the Father Jesus reveals is this Father: the one who runs toward every returning prodigal, who throws the party before the explanation is finished.

Peter and John have been arrested. A man born lame was healed at the temple gate, and the crowd that gathered to hear the explanation has rattled the rulers of Jerusalem. Now the apostles stand before the Sanhedrin — the same council that condemned Jesus, the most powerful religious body in Israel — and are asked to explain themselves.

Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, does not shrink. He tells them about Jesus of Nazareth, the one they crucified, the one God raised from the dead. And then he says the sentence that has echoed through history ever since: "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

The council is astonished. These are uneducated men, ordinary fishermen, and yet they speak with the boldness of people who have been with Jesus. They cannot deny the healed man standing in front of them. And they cannot silence the name of Jesus, even though they try.

Peter is not being narrow-minded. He is being precise about what he has seen and heard. The man who said "except through me" rose from the dead. The man who said "except through me" is the one through whom healing comes to a man who was lame from birth. The claim is not the claim of a religious system. It is the claim of a living person, and Peter has seen the evidence with his own eyes.