⁴ “And you know the way where I am going.” ⁵ Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?”

Simple language to convey a seismic change in thinking, Jesus simply says, “You know the way where I am going.” Yet they could not go there yet (“Where I go you can not follow me now, but you will follow later” 13:36). Jesus needs time to prepare the place (14:2-3) after which He would return to receive them and then allow them to follow Him to that place. We who are reading this might ponder, what is time to God for whom a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day (2 Peter 3:8)? But to the disciples at that moment any separation would seem an eternity.

Their idea of following Jesus was going to change from a physical activity to a spiritual one, a paradigm shift of enormous magnitude. The disciples already “knew” the way, Jesus calmly says. The Greek word here is oida which reflects a knowing that comes from careful, reflective thinking. The subtle chide is this, “Think about what I have been teaching you all along!” What Jesus is telling them is really not something new. Thomas, the disciple much maligned (possibly unjustly) for his honest expressions of doubt, questions what must have been lingering in the minds of his fellow disciples in the Upper Room. How can one possibly know the way to a place when they didn’t even know where the place was?

That is actually quite a natural question, from a human point of view. The problem was that Jesus was taking them to a super-human point of view. He was changing their entire view of faith and spirituality. Up until now, religious life for Jewish people was mostly practiced in the external realm of the physical world: physical sacrifices at physical locations (i.e. at the temple in Jerusalem). The land was prominent in Jewish thinking and existence. To the average Jew of the 1^st century, religious life had to do with the tangible, the earthly.

Jesus was refocusing them on the spiritual, away from the physical. The disciples were thinking in terms of which roads to walk on to follow Christ. But the place He was going was a spiritual place, and it required a new, a spiritual way to attain it. It was already in their grasp, but they were not yet ready to lay hold of it. In one sense they had already done so in following Christ, but the new way required, made it absolutely necessary, for Jesus to leave them and come back later. Then they would be able to follow Him by the way He had already taught them. The picture now is ready for sharper focus.

Lord, I have neighbors, friends and relatives who have not yet come to know the true way to God. Help me be the messenger to show them that Jesus is the Way.