Sermon based on John 14:1-14
The scripture we just read also gets read at a lot of funerals. And that’s for a good reason. It’s one of the most comforting things Jesus ever said. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Those words have covered a lot of grief. They have held a lot of people in the hardest hours of their lives.
But here is the thing. Jesus did not say these words at a funeral. He said them at a dinner table, to a room full of people who were very much alive and very much afraid. He was not addressing the recently bereaved. He was addressing men who had just watched one of their own slip out into the dark to betray him. Men who had just been told that their most confident member, Peter… loud, blustering, rock-solid Peter, was about to fall completely apart. Men who had been told that Jesus himself was leaving and that where he was going, they could not follow.
The ground was shifting under their feet. Everything they had counted on for three years was coming undone in a single evening. That is the room Jesus is talking to. That is the moment these words were born into.
Which means this passage has a great deal more to say to us than where we go when we die. It has something to say to us about right now, about what it means to follow Jesus in a world that does not always hold still.
One Heart
Jesus opens with something that is easy to miss in most English translations. He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” The word “hearts” sounds plural, like he is addressing each individual’s personal emotional state… your heart, and yours, and yours. But in the Greek, the word is singular, καρδία (Kardia).[1] “Do not let your heart be troubled.”
He is speaking to a group of people, using a plural “you,” but referring to a single heart. Your collective heart. As in: you people share one heart, and right now that heart is in danger.
That is a striking thing to say. It is also a necessary thing to say, because what is about to happen, Judas gone, Jesus arrested, Peter denying him three times, the disciples scattering… all of that is the story of a community coming apart at the seams. And when a community comes apart, hearts get troubled. The singular fractures into many, and people go their separate ways into fear and isolation and regret.
Here, Jesus is not just offering comfort. He is calling them back to their shared identity before it disintegrates. He is saying: stay together. You are one body, one community, one heart. Do not let the chaos of the next few days convince you that you are on your own.
That word lands differently for us than it might for people who only hear this text at memorials. If we are honest, we know what it is like to sit in a church, or in a family, or in a community, where fear has started to pull people in different directions. Where something has shifted and people are uncertain and the ground does not feel as solid as it used to. Jesus has something to say to that moment. Stay together. You have one heart. Do not let it be troubled.
Thomas Needs a Map
Jesus goes on to tell the disciples that he is going to prepare a place for them, and that they already know the way. Thomas, to his credit, says exactly what everyone else in the room is probably thinking: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
Thomas is not being dense. He is being honest. Jesus is speaking metaphorically, and Thomas is asking a literal question. He wants an address, a road map, a GPS coordinate. Give us something concrete to work with.
And Jesus responds with what is arguably the most quoted — and most misused — sentence in the Gospel of John. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
That sentence has been turned into a hammer. It has been wielded as a threat; accept Jesus on our specific terms or be excluded from God forever. It has been used to build walls, to sort people into saved and unsaved categories, to baptize all manner of religious exclusivity.
But read that sentence where it actually lives. It is the middle of a farewell dinner. Jesus is not issuing a decree about world religions. He is answering Thomas’s anxious question. He is saying: you do not need a map, because I am the way. The destination and the directions are the same thing. I am both. You already have what you need.
This is a word of comfort and assurance, not a word of judgment. The scholars of the early church called the followers of Jesus “people of the Way.” Not people who had the correct doctrine about the Way. People who were walking in it. People who had taken up the life and manner of Jesus, the path of discipleship, the way of living, and were trying to embody it in the world.
When Jesus says “I am the way,” he is not drawing a line around a parking lot and telling you who gets to park there. He is saying: look at me. Watch how I live. Watch how I treat people. Watch where I show up and who I eat with and what I defend and what I refuse. That is the direction. Walk that way.
Philip Still Wants More
Thomas gets his answer and sits down. Then Philip raises his hand. “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”
There is something almost endearing about Philip here. He has been with Jesus for three years. He has watched Jesus feed thousands of people with a handful of loaves. He has seen blind men see and dead men walk. And still he is saying: just show us God and we will be content. Give us one undeniable, unambiguous vision of the divine, and we will ask for nothing else.
It is worth noting that the Greek word Philip uses, “satisfied”, is the same word he used earlier at the feeding of the five thousand, when he told Jesus that six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for the crowd. Philip is a man haunted by scarcity. He keeps calculating what is sufficient, what is enough, whether there will be enough to go around.
And Jesus, with what reads like barely contained exasperation, says: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
This is the whole of Jesus’ mission, named plainly. He has not come to establish a religion or found an institution or give us a manual for moral living. He has come to show us what God is like. Every time Jesus healed someone who wasn’t supposed to be healed, every time he ate with someone who wasn’t supposed to be eaten with, every time he refused to condemn and instead extended mercy… he was showing us the Father. The character of God. What God cares about. What God loves.
If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. That is the claim. It is an enormous claim. It is also a clarifying one, because it means we do not get to invent a God who endorses our exclusions and validates our violence. The God we see in Jesus is the one who kneels on the floor and washes dirty feet. The God we see in Jesus is the one who says “neither do I condemn you” before the woman has had a chance to clean herself up. That is the Father we are looking at when we look at Jesus.
Greater Works Than These
Jesus closes this section with something that is hard to hear without flinching a little. “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”
Greater works than these. Greater than healing the blind. Greater than raising the dead. Greater than feeding thousands. It is a remarkable promise. And if we are honest with ourselves, it is a promise that is awfully hard to square with most of our experience of church.
Part of the problem is that we have imagined “greater works” means spectacular works — miracles performed on demand, dramatic visible interventions, the kind of thing that makes the news or trends on social media. We keep waiting for that version of greater, and it does not show up, and so we quietly conclude that either Jesus was exaggerating or we are somehow failing.
But the mission Jesus is entrusting to his disciples is not primarily about spectacle. It is about presence. It is about making the Father known the same way Jesus made the Father known — by showing up where people are suffering, by refusing to write people off, by embodying the character of God in plain, ordinary, sometimes invisible ways.
There is a boy in Omaha, Nebraska named True. He is a third grader who loves baseball and riding his bike around the neighborhood. He is also a kid who was born with only one functioning chamber in his heart… a rare and serious condition that, a generation ago, would likely have been a death sentence. He has had five open-heart surgeries and ten cardiac catheterizations. He is, by any measure, a remarkable kid.
But here is the part of his story that I want to get to. In January of 2022, True was four years old. He was in a pre-op room at Children’s Hospital in Nebraska, alone, about to go into a heart procedure without a single family member by his side, because he was in the foster care system. His anesthesiologist, a doctor named Amy Beethe, walked in to meet him and found him sitting there… small, scared, by himself.
She made a phone call. She learned the hospital had been struggling to find a foster family for True because his medical needs were so complex. Almost as an afterthought, the social worker asked if Dr. Beethe might know of anyone. She didn’t know that Dr. Beethe was a licensed foster parent.
Dr. Beethe called her husband. They said yes. Within weeks, True was home with them. Not long after, he was adopted. The Beethe family then went further; they adopted True’s biological sister, helped find homes for four other siblings, placing two of them with another Children’s anesthesiologist, one with Dr. Beethe’s sister, and one with her husband’s brother. Six kids, scattered by hard circumstances, pulled back into a network of people who simply refused to let them disappear.[2]
Now. Was that a miracle? There was no dramatic healing, no visible sign, no moment where the crowd gasped. It was a doctor doing her job who noticed a scared kid alone in a room, and then chose to do something about it. It was a family saying yes when saying yes was going to cost them something. It was a community of people; doctors, social workers, extended family, weaving themselves together around children who needed them.
That is what greater works looks like. Not a spectacle. A choice. A presence. A willingness to see someone who is easy to overlook and refuse to walk past them. The Father, made known. Not in a flash of light but in a pre-op room in Omaha on a Tuesday morning in January.
And collectively, that shared singular heart again, the community of Jesus doing those works in a thousand places at once, across two thousand years? That is greater than any one miracle. That is the mission.
What We Already Know
Here is what I want you to take home from this passage. Not the comfort of heaven, though that comfort is real and good and we should hold it. But something more immediate.
Jesus says to his disciples, in a room full of fear and confusion and the beginning of grief: you know more than you think you do. You know the way. You have seen the Father. You have one heart. Do not let it be troubled.
That is not a command to get your emotions under control and project confidence. It is an invitation to trust what you have already received. To trust that the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and presence and refusing to let people disappear, is the actual way. Not a way. The way.
And it is a call to stay together. Because the singular heart Jesus is addressing only functions as one heart if the community holds together. Peter’s catastrophic failure, three denials before dawn… happens when he is isolated, when he has drifted away from the people who share his heart. He is restored in John 21, and he is restored in community, surrounded by the people who know him and love him and refuse to let his worst night be the last word about him.
That is what this community is. That is what we are called to be for each other and for the world around us. People of the Way. People with a singular heart. People who have seen the Father in Jesus and are trying, imperfectly, persistently, together, to make him known.
Do not let your heart be troubled. You know the way. You have known it all along.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life… Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” — John 14:6, 9
[1] https://biblehub.com/interlinear/john/14-1.htm
[2] https://www.childrensnebraska.org/health-hub/trues-story-heart-care-and-adoption
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