Dear Sisters, dear Brethren in Christ, we have just listened to virtually the same Gospel as that which we heard yesterday, in which St Philip the Apostle makes one of his rare appearances in the Gospel. By coincidence, if today were not the 5th Sunday of Eastertide, we would be celebrating on this date, the 3rd of May, the feast of St Philip and St James, Apostles.
We have, in this Gospel, a reason to be greatly thankful to St Philip, just as on the Second Sunday of Easter, three weeks ago, we had similar reason to thank St Thomas, who also has an important appearance today as well. It was St Thomas’s challenge that he would not believe in the risen Christ unless he first not only saw, but plunged his finger and hand into the Lord’s side, and when he did so at the Lord’s command, his wonderful reply was, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Thomas comes over on that occasion and again today as a rather hardheaded and sceptical type, not easily persuaded of something as incredible as the resurrection of a cruelly killed man from the dead. So today he has a similarly hardheaded reply to our Lord’s statement: ‘I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.’ We can almost see him challenging our Lord with these almost cynical words: ‘We don’t even know where you are going, so how can we know the way there?’ Our Lord’s reply is one of His most familiar and profound statements: ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’ Yet again, it is because we have heard this so many times that we may not necessarily stop to ponder, what does our Lord mean by adding this utterance about coming to the Father? Why should that follow after ‘I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.’?
We should begin by recalling that we do not know God as ‘our Father’, much less actually dare to call Him by that name, without our Lord teaching this to us. Our Lord is the way that God has chosen to show us the Truth about Himself and His Son, and about the Life that God alone has of Himself. We, for instance, do not have life of ourselves. We were brought into life without a word from us. Our identity, our parentage, was something we had no power whatever to choose. Our Lord, however, is Life itself. The difference between Our Lord’s life and ours is that we do not own ours. It has been lent to us for a time on earth and will come to an end with death. Our Lord’s life is not like that. Although He did become a man like us, and lived and died as we too live and one day will die, in His case this was all by His choice and at His Father’s will, all for us men and for our salvation, as we say in the Creed. His life is not restricted to what happened to Him on the earth; it far exceeds earthly life. And that life He now lives in heaven where He has gone ahead of us to prepare a place for us to live with Him when this world comes to an end. But I don’t want to jump ahead too quickly.
Let me say this too: there is something quite mysterious and wonderful about His being, too, about what kind of existence He has. It is one with God the Father’s being. In the Creed in a short time we will proclaim our faith in the only-begotten Son of God, consubstantial with the Father – that is, the same being as the Father, the same God, though not, of course, the same person. It is hard for us to grasp how significant this is. For us, to be a different person from another is to be a different being. We are not only different persons from our fathers and mothers, we are separate beings. We share the same nature but in different entities. That is why we can continue to exist even when our parents no longer do. But with God it is unimaginably different. The Father cannot exist without the Son and the Son cannot exist without the Father. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that this means that somehow God is limited by this. On the contrary, the co-existence of Father and Son is totally liberating. It is what makes God truly God.
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