y speaks as if
there were One on whom He Himself leant, and to whom He prayed, and with
whom, as with another person, He had fellowship. "I am the Way," He
says; and a way implies a goal beyond itself, some further object to
which it leads and brings us. He is not the Being revealed, but the
Revealer; not the terminal object of our worship, but the image of the
invisible God, the Priest, the Sacrifice.

Christ announces Himself to Thomas as the Way, in order to remove from
the mind of the disciple the uncertainty he felt about the future. He
knew there were heights of glory and blessedness to which the Messiah
would certainly attain, but which seemed dim and remote and even quite
unattainable to sinful men. Jesus defines at once the goal and the way.
All our vague yearnings after what will satisfy us He reduces to this
simple expression: "the Father." This, He implies, is the goal and
destiny of man; to come to the Father, who embraces in His loving care
all our wants, our incapacities, our sorrows; to reach and abide in a
love that is strong, wise, educative, imperishable; to reach this love
and be so transformed by it as to feel more at home with this perfectly
holy God than with any besides. And to bring us to this goal is the
function of Christ, the Way. It is His to bring together what is highest
and what is lowest. It is His to unite those who are separated by the
most real obstacles: to bring us, weak and unstable and full of evil
imaginings, into abiding union with the Supreme, glad to be conformed to
Him and to accomplish His purposes. In proclaiming Himself "the Way,"
Christ pronounces Himself able to effect the most real union between
parties and conditions as separate as heaven and earth, sin and
holiness, the poor creature I know myself to be and the infinite and
eternal God who is so high I cannot know Him.

Further, the way to which we commit ourselves when we seek to come to
the Father through Christ is a _Person_. "I am the Way." It is not a
cold, dead road we have to make the most of for ourselves, pursuing it
often in darkness, in weakness, in fear. It is a living way--a way that
renews our strength as we walk in it, that enlivens instead of
exhausting us, that gives direction and light as we go forward. Often we
seem to find our way barred; we do not know how to get farther forward;
we wonder if there is no book in which we can find direction; we long
for some wise guide who could show us how to pro