When God Doesn’t Give Directions
Learning to trust presence instead of certainty
Welcome back to Sacred & Secular.
On Tuesdays, we take a slower look at the lectionary reading for the coming Sunday, taking a slower look at the passage and noticing what we might otherwise miss.
Today, we’re in John 14.
I am a terrible map reader.
Not just slightly unreliable, but properly hopeless. Left to my own devices, I could get lost in a car park. So I rely almost entirely on the sat nav. Put the postcode in, follow the voice and don’t question.
Which works, until it doesn’t.
A while ago, we entered one wrong digit. Just one. The sat nav did what it always does. Confident. Certain. Calm voice. Turn here. Carry on. You have arrived.
And we had arrived. At a place with the exact same name as the one we were aiming for. Just in a completely different part of the county.
What followed was a series of slightly awkward conversations. We insisted we had a booking. They insisted we did not. Until slowly, painfully, we realised what had happened.
By that point, we were very late.
— • —
In the Gospel of John, chapter 14 opens with a group of people who would have appreciated a good sat nav. They are unsettled. Jesus is talking about leaving, and nothing feels clear anymore. The sense of direction they had come to rely on is slipping, and you can almost hear the fear in their voices.
So Thomas does what any of us would do. He asks for clarity.
“Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
It is such an honest question. There is no attempt to dress it up. No carefully constructed theology. Just confusion and a desire for something solid to hold onto.
Tell us how to get there.
— • —
What Jesus says next is one of the most familiar lines in the Gospels, and yet it does not quite function as the answer we might expect.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
It sounds like a response, but it does not operate like directions. Thomas asks for a path, and Jesus offers a person.
To understand how striking that is, it helps to notice what “the way” meant in the world of the Bible. The word used here, hodos, had long since moved beyond the idea of a literal road. It was used to describe a whole pattern of life, a direction of travel, an orientation of the self.
In the Old Testament, people are described as walking in particular “ways,” not because they are heading somewhere geographically, but because their lives are aligned in a certain direction. There is the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked, each representing a trajectory shaped by choices, habits, and a relationship with God.
By the time of Jesus, this idea had deepened further. The “way of the Lord” was something to be prepared for, a path shaped by communal practice, obedience, and identity. People expected that the way to God could be followed, learned, and lived out together.
In other words, they expected something that could be clearly mapped out.
What Jesus says next changes the question entirely.
