The Gospel of John Chapter 14 represents a pivotal place – the movement from an old relationship to one that is new. I often use the passage at a funeral service… where the passage heralds in a new way of being, a letting go of the past and placing the loved one in the hands of God in the certain hope of the resurrection. And yet there is always the pain of parting.

The disciples’ sense that something is slipping away. Jesus speaks of departure, of going where they cannot yet follow. Anxiety hangs in the air. And into that fear, he says: ’Do not let your hearts be troubled.’ Not because nothing is wrong – but because God is already making a way through what is wrong.

This passage is less about giving us a map to escape the world and more about forming us to be present within it – with God and with one another.

Jesus does not offer the disciples a strategy. He offers himself. ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’

Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, ‘I will show you the way,’ as if the goal were simply information or direction. He says, ‘I am the way.’ The Christian life, then, is not fundamentally about mastering a set of beliefs or achieving a distant destination. It is about being with Jesus – sharing his life, inhabiting his presence, trusting that wherever he is, there is the Father.

I have in the past been disturbed by the words ‘No one can come to the father except through me’ which may well be a reaction to early Christian anti-Jewish polemic.

I think that as we broaden our vision, we can see God very much at work in the world through people of other faiths and none and this is a reassurance rather than a threat, that Jesus’s earthly mission would be accomplished through his followers and others will recognise through his message, the authentic marks of the God who is revealed.

This is deeply resonant with a ‘being-with’ theology. The good news is not that God swoops in to fix everything from afar, nor that God hands us the tools to fix ourselves. The good news is that God is with us – before the solution, within the struggle, and beyond the outcome.

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled.’

This is not a denial of suffering. It is an invitation into relationship. The opposite of a troubled heart is not a solved problem – it is a companion presence. Jesus reassures the disciples not by explaining the future, but by anchoring them in trust: ‘Believe in God, believe also in me.’

And then there is that mysterious line: ‘In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.’

This is often heard as a promise about heaven, and it is that – but not only that. It is also about belonging. About space. About a God whose hospitality is expansive enough to hold every fear, every doubt, every person. The Father’s house is not a gated community; it is a place of radical welcome.

At St Martin’s, that vision takes flesh whenever strangers become neighbours, whenever the excluded are named as essential, whenever music, prayer, and justice create room for those who thought there was no room for them. The ‘many dwelling places’ are not just future promises – they are present practices.

‘Lord, show us the father, and we will be satisfied,’ says Philip.

It is such a human request. We want clarity, certainty, something we can grasp. And Jesus responds with a sigh: ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?’

In other words: You have already seen enough. Not because the disciples understand everything, but because they have been with him. The revelation of God is not hidden in abstraction; it is visible in a life lived in love, in healing, in forgiveness, in presence.

If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus washing feet. Look at Jesus eating with outsiders. Look at Jesus refusing violence. Look at Jesus staying.

And then comes the startling promise: ‘The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do – and, in fact, will do greater works than these.’

Greater works – not because we become more powerful than Jesus, but because his presence multiplies through us. The Church is not an institution preserving memories of Jesus; it is a body through which his life continues. When we are with him, we begin to be with others as he is with us.

That’s the heart of it.

Not fixing, not controlling, not escaping – but being with.

Being with the grieving, without rushing to explain their grief.
Being with the poor, without turning them into projects.
Being with the anxious, without pretending anxiety can be easily resolved.
Being with God, not as an idea, but as a living presence.

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled.’

This is not a command to suppress fear. It is a promise that fear does not have the final word. Because the way forward is not a path we must discover – it is a person who walks with us.

And that changes everything.

It means that even when we don’t know where we are going, we are not lost.
Even when the future feels uncertain, we are not abandoned.
Even when the world feels fractured, we are not alone.

Because Christ is the way – and he walks with us now and into the future.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.