John 10:1-14
Easter 5 / Year A
The Apostle Thomas said to
Jesus, “How can we know the way?”
Since I was a boy I have
been fascinated with maps. I remember
spending hours on endless summer vacation drives studying maps of the places we
were visiting. I guess I was drawn both
to their symbolic representation of the world and to the feeling of being
oriented… of knowing where I was in relation to everything else.
Did you know the oldest map
we have is on Babylonian clay tablet and dates back to 2,300 BC (almost 500
years before Moses and the Exodus)? A
Roman map from 300 AD depicts the known world from a bird’s eye point of view,
which is pretty amazing given no one was able to get off the ground and look
down from above. Claudius Ptolemy, who
lived in Alexandria in the second century, created what is arguably the most
influential map in human history. It accurately
depicts over 8,000 locations.
Ptolemy made several
assumptions that influenced his map. He
rightly believed the earth was a sphere, but wrongly held all land existed
above the equator. Historians account
for this error because explorers were reluctant to sail where they could not
see the North Star. He also believed the
western edge of Europe basically met the eastern edge of Russia, so his map
shows the Euro-Asia landmass stretching across the entire document.
Giovanni Verrazano produced
one of the earliest maps of our east coast.
More of a nobleman than a sailor, he was uncomfortable navigating too
close to land. His 1503 map fails to
locate the Chesapeake Bay or any of the great harbors on the Atlantic Seaboard because
he never got close enough to shore to find them. Passing the Outer Banks he could see the
Pamlico Sound on the other side, but not mainland North Carolina, so he assumed
the New World was no more than a narrow strip of sand. Future explorers took his map as gospel until
someone brave enough (and skilled enough) to sail up rivers like the James used
their new information to produce more accurate maps.
How can we know the way?
Maps and cartography illustrate
a broader psychological phenomenon of how people can get stuck on an idea or an
orientation. Certain behaviors
characterize this stuckness:
· One is Polarized Thinking… getting locked into
black/white, right/wrong, all-or-nothing mindset where you are dominated by an
emotional process you do not notice or understand. For example, when Columbus sailed people questioned
the westward distance from Europe to the Far East. Some calculated 3,000 miles, others 10,000. As people divided into polarized camps and
carried on emotional debates, no one ever conceived of a third possibility…
that a new continent existed in the middle of the ocean waiting to be
discovered and explored.
· Another characterization of stuckness is the Treadmill
Effect where you assume you can solve a problem by working harder doing the
same thing. I remember how after a
prolonged power outage caused by downed limbs snapped off by a winter ice storm,
Dominion Power defended itself by stating it had adhered to the same tree-trimming
policy it followed for the previous 20 years.
The Treadmill Effect.
· A final characteristic is a Focus on Answers rather
than Questions… like trying to find the ‘answer’ of the Northwest Passage
rather than asking the ‘question’ what value does this New World hold?
Perhaps you recognize that
stuckness is not unique to early explorers.
It happens across ages and cultures.
It affects individuals, groups, organizations, and entire
civilizations. And while we chuckle at
the obvious deficiencies of early maps, it is much more difficult to evaluate
the emotional and spiritual maps we create for ourselves and from which we
navigate our lives. And make no mistake;
we all make internal maps that are symbolic representations, not of geography,
but life. We use these psychological
maps to orient ourselves so that we can have a sense who we are and where we
are in relation to everything else.
To the degree that you can
recognize in your own life the treadmill effect, a focus on answers rather than
questions, and polarized thinking then you can be confident the maps you make
contain some errors. They may be errors
carried forward from the maps your parents used. They may be errors you have picked up from
cultural influences. Or they may be
errors of your own creation. No matter
what the origin, they negatively affect how you make your way through life.
Imagine if my parents used
1910 maps to navigate our 1960s vacations!
Now imagine going through life carrying emotional and spiritual maps you
never had the courage or wisdom to update based on the ongoing journey of your
life. Even worse, what if you used only
the maps you inherited from your family of origin or early Sunday School
learning. Yes, having a foundation on
which you can rely is critical. But you
have experienced so much and learned much from it. The map that you use to guide you needs constant
updating to include this.
How can we know the way?
The way out of stuckness,
if you are an early explorer or a 21st century pilgrim, is to
reorient your life by embracing a spirit of adventure. This reorientation has several components:
· The first is a willingness to take a chance, to
embrace risk, and to welcome uncertainty.
Nothing is more characteristic of stuckness than predictability. But chance, risk, and uncertainty seem to go
hand-in-hand with serendipity, discovery, and new life. There is a reason why no one discovered the
New World while docked in a European harbor.
As they say, no risk, no reward.
· A second component is a willingness to make
mistakes. The longer you are stuck in
the same place, the more accurate your map of that place will be. It will be tried and true… the way it’s
always been done. If you embrace a
spirit of adventure, mistakes are not understood to be failures, rather they
are signs of movement and new life. Do
you know how the cleaning product Formula 409 got its name? The inventor’s previous 408 mixtures didn’t
get the job done. If you aim to get
unstuck, false starts and dead ends are opportunities for reflection and new
learning, not reasons to give up or give in to the ridicule of those who say
the old maps are good enough.
· And finally, to get unstuck you must be willing to
cross emotional barriers… those notions or ideas that have great power over us;
be it crossing the Equator or breaking out of a comfortable but stultifying
routine.
The Apostle Thomas says to
Jesus, “How can we know the way?” He was
asking not for a geographical map, but a spiritual/emotional map; a symbolic
representation he could use to orient himself to life. Jesus replies, “I am the way, and the truth,
and the life” (or as I like to translate it, “I am the True and Living Way”). It is a brilliant answer in that Jesus
orients all of life around himself, rather than some fixed object like a holy
shrine or a moral teaching. The image of
the way calls us out of stuckness and beckons us to embrace adventure. It calls us to reorient our lives, to make
new maps, and then, just when we think our maps accurately portray life as it
is, to explore some more, make new discoveries, and create new maps.
And we can do this with
some confidence and courage because the object Jesus invites us to seek is himself…
he, the one who promises never to leave us or to lose us, invites us to explore
a life in him that perhaps we never dreamed existed. How can we know the way? Jesus tells us that we can know the way by
using him as the map. He invites us to
reorient our life to his.
