Homily for 5th Sunday of Easter, Year A
There are many ways of travelling from Palmers Green in North London, to Isfahan, in
the Islamic Republic of Iran, and three years ago I decided to explore one of those ways.
Travelling by train and boat and train and boat and bus and train and plane and train
and coach and train and coach, I made my way from North London, through Holland and
Germany and Austria and Italy and Greece, and Turkey, all the way to Iran. It wasn’t a
very quick journey, but along the way I saw a lot of things. The first couple of days were
quite fun – it was good being away from London, and not having to do any work, but as I
got further away, my mood began to change. As the direct train from Istanbul to Tehran
was fully booked, I decided to take a slower train to a town in the middle of Turkey and
to continue eastwards by bus – but having arrived in the remote town of Sivas I found
that the next coach was not for a number of hours, and sitting down on a bench I began
to question myself. Stuck in a half-derelict bus station, as far away from Isfahan as I was
from London, there came a point when I wondered whether I should go on, or whether I
should walk back to the railway station and turn around and go home. Iran still seemed
a long way away, and so homesick and tired, and gasping for cup of tea, I realised that
tempting though it would be to turn around, there was in reality no way back. I had
already booked my flight back to Heathrow, and unless I got to my destination on time,
there was no way that I could catch it. There are many ways to where I was going, and
although it didn’t matter what way I took, I had to get there somehow, otherwise my
parishioners in Palmers Green would never see me again.
The reason that I’m saying this is because my journey to Iran is a bit like the journey that
takes place in all of our lives, for there are many ways of travelling.
Sometimes the journey we take through life can be very direct, but at other times much
less so. Sometimes through our own choice, sometimes by mistake, and sometimes
through factors over which we have no control, we can find ourselves, like I discovered
in the middle of Turkey, at a bit of dead end, in a cul-de-sac, at a point where we can
feel very far away from what life is about and from what we’re supposed to be doing
with that life. And at those times we can find ourselves in a very difficult place. And it
with all this in mind that we hear the words of today’s Gospel – ‘I am the way, the truth,
and the life.’
For those of us whose life can seem a long way from the ideal of the Gospel those words
can sound very remote, but the one who said ‘I am the way the truth and the life’, to his
disciples and the crowds who surrounded him, continues to say the same thing to all of
us today, whatever the circumstances of our lives.
Yes, we can identify cul-de-sacs and roads that seem to go nowhere, we may even feel
sometimes that we’re in one, but for Christ and for those who follow him, there is no
such thing as a dead end. There is always a way, and that way is accessible from every
point we can ever reach.
To fly to Turkey you first have to go to Heathrow, to get the Eurostar to Paris you first
have to go to St. Pancras, but to follow the Way the Truth and Life - that journey begins
from wherever we are at the moment, however remote and unlikely and even hopeless
that place may appear to be. And so wherever we are in life, whatever place or
circumstances our own ill-advised choices have allowed us to travel to, wherever we’ve
got stuck, Christ our way our truth and our life, shows us that there is a path we can
follow. Yes life can appear to be full of places from which there is no way forward and
no escape, but for the one who follows Christ, these are precisely the places where our
journey can begin. There is always a way.