Troubled hearts seem to be just about everywhere. We carry them into hospital rooms and funeral homes. Into late-night doom scrolling and breaking news alerts. Sometimes we carry troubled hearts right into church and try our best to hide them behind polite smiles and our Sunday best.
Today, we hear Jesus say those words: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” It is most certainly easier said than done — but if we step back and notice why and when Jesus says them, things start to make a bit more sense, become a bit more applicable for our actual lives.
Jesus says these words to his troubled and frightened disciples the night before the cross.
This is not Jesus speaking from a safe distance. This is not motivational advice from someone untouched by suffering. Judas has already gone out into the night. Peter is about to deny him. The disciples are confused and afraid. To some, it may seem that everything is beginning to fall apart. And it is right there — in the middle of fear and uncertainty, in the middle of what seems like everything unraveling — that Jesus speaks peace.
Last Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired a remarkable interview with Ben Sasse — former senator, now living with a terminal cancer diagnosis. I’ve been watching every interview he gives. Each one is a must-watch.
What strikes me is his deep faith, his peace. Sasse speaks with clarity about death, eternity, and where he believes he is headed. You could see it in his face. He was emotional. Honest. Human. But not consumed by fear.
In a world that spends enormous energy trying to avoid death, delay death, distract ourselves from death, or pretend death does not exist — that kind of confidence feels almost foreign.
The disciples in our text are staring death in the face too, though they don’t fully understand it yet. Jesus keeps talking about going away. Their entire world has been built around following him. They dropped their nets. What happens if he leaves? What happens if everything they trusted collapses?
Maybe that question sounds familiar.
What happens when the future we imagined changes? What happens when the church changes? When our health declines? When the ground beneath us suddenly feels unstable?
Jesus doesn’t gloss over any of this. He understands the human tendency to worry, to be fearful, to be anxious. And then he says:
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”
Not might be. Not hopefully. Are.
Christian hope is not wishful thinking. It is rooted in the person of Jesus Christ himself. Christians are not merely people with optimistic attitudes about the afterlife. Christians are people joined to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Thomas — old Thomas, patron saint of all honest skeptics and doubters — speaks up. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
I love Thomas for this. He refuses to nod along when he doesn’t understand. He will not perform a faith he does not yet possess.
And Jesus doesn’t rebuke him. Jesus answers him. Directly. Personally.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
Now — an important caveat. This is one of the most-quoted and most-misused verses in all of Scripture. Entire centuries of violence have been perpetrated because of misreadings of texts like this. It has been wielded as a weapon, a gatekeeping device, a theological blunt instrument.
Look at the context. Jesus is not giving a lecture on the exclusivity of salvation. Jesus is speaking to frightened friends on the worst night of their lives. He is saying: bad things are about to happen — but take comfort. I am the path. Stay close to me. In the chaos that is coming, you will not be lost.
The Way is not a doctrine. It’s not a how-to. It’s certainly not something meant to be wielded judgmentally. The Way is a person. It’s Jesus — the one these disciples dropped everything for. They know him. We know him.
Ben Sasse, shaped by a Reformed tradition that takes the sovereignty of God seriously, said recently: “There are no maverick molecules in the universe” — a bone-deep trust that nothing falls outside God’s providence. And yet he is not a man who has found this faith easy. He is a man who has found it true — which is a different thing entirely, and a harder thing.
He said: “I don’t feel ready. But to whom would I go?”
To whom would I go.
Later in the text, Philip asks for something more. “Lord, show us the Father, and then we will be satisfied.”
And Jesus sounds almost weary: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
Philip wants a theophany. A clear vision. An undeniable, conclusive proof. Show us God, and we won’t be troubled anymore.
And Jesus says: You’ve already seen him. You’ve been eating with him. You’ve watched him touch lepers and argue with Pharisees and weep at Lazarus’s tomb. That is what God looks like.
This is the scandal of the Incarnation. God does not appear on a mountain in fire and thunder. God appears in a human face, at a dinner table, on a cross, in bread and wine. The way to the Father runs straight through the most human thing imaginable: a life lived, a death endured, a love that would not let us go.
Philip’s request is being answered right now. In this place.
We are not waiting to see the Father. We are not straining toward some future mountaintop experience that will finally put our doubts to rest. We are already joined to this Jesus reality — week after week, in the most ordinary and most extraordinary of ways.
Water poured. Words spoken over a child or an adult who cannot yet fully understand what is happening to them — which is, honestly, all of us. You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever. That is not a metaphor. That is a promise attached to your actual name, held by a God who does not forget.
Bread broken. Chalice poured. This is my body. This is my blood. Given and shed for you.Not for the spiritually advanced. Not for those who have resolved their doubts. For you — troubled, half-believing, sometimes barely-hanging-on you. Jesus meets us at this table the way he met those disciples in the upper room: in the middle of their fear, on the worst night of the week, with food and his presence.
We don’t have to manufacture an encounter with God. The encounter comes to us. In water and word. In bread and wine. In a gathered assembly of people who have no business being here except that we were called and we came.
Sasse said it well: “We get to approach the Almighty, the divine, and call him Daddy — Abba, Father. That’s pretty glorious. And I know that’s what I need.”
That’s what we need. Not a vision. Not a proof. A Father. And the claim we stake our whole worship life on is this: the Father comes to find us. Here. Now. Again. In the same promises, received anew, week after week.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”
Philip wanted a grand plan. But Philip had already been given something better — the very presence of the living God, right in front of him.
So have we.
Thanks be to God.
