LET OUR HEARTS NOT BE TROUBLED
(Friday, May 26)
“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know.” (Jn 14:1-4)
Why is the Lord telling us, “You believe in God, believe also in Me”? Because we might tend to have faith in God in general, but lose sight of faith in the Son of God *also*, with all that He opens up for us, having become One of us; having dwelt among all sorts of us, and having called the whole lot of us into His communion and kingdom. He lifted all of us up, in His ascension in the resurrected human body, when He “went to prepare a place for us,” all of us who “know” Him and His way. But many of us, endowed as we are with the mixed blessings of self-awareness and self-doubt, might immediately say as Thomas said, right after the Lord had reassured us with the above-quoted words: “Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?” But Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” We know enough, if we are even having this conversation with Him. We may not understand all the how’s and why’s of God’s plan for us, but we know Who it is that is leading us, our Lord Jesus Christ, and we know where He is leading us, – and that is, *up*. We also know the Way there, which is through the Cross.
We are all different, as Thomas was different from the rest of the disciples in his own way, in that he tended to have more questions. St. Paul, who came to believe even later than Thomas, was different in that he tended to have all the answers, which blocked him from believing in Christ even after he knew about Him. So, our journeys to faith in Him are complicated through our own circumstances and characters. But our Lord says to all of us today, “Let not your heart be troubled… In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Let my heart not be troubled this Friday, but open to being lifted up in Him, however He sees fit to do that today.
