4 "And you know the way to where I am going.” 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
8 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves."
John 14:4-11
Alexander Maclaren suggests that in 4 Jesus is very gracious and forbearing in so speaking to the disciples, giving them more credit than perhaps they deserved, as we see from what Thomas says in 5. The latter simply literalises what Jesus says in 4, making nonsense of it. We have seen this literalising of Jesus' words repeatedly in John - in the story of Nicodemus, 'How can a man be born when he is old'; in the story of the Samaritan woman, ' that I thirst not', in the crowd when they said, 'Evermore give us this bread'. There was not much to choose, apparently, between the disciples and these others; they were just as uncomprehending. But Jesus gives to their bewilderment a wonderful answer of peace in the ineffable words of 6, 'I am the way, the truth and the life...'. On any reading, these words are tremendous, but it is when we take them in their context that their full import is seen. Jesus is about to go to His death, and it is in this connection that He says 'I am the way'. It is as if He were saying 'My death is the way home to God and into peace'. Taken thus, the whole passage becomes illuminated and is seen as a unity - 'Let not your heart be troubled' (1), 'Peace I leave with you' (27). Here, then, is the basic ground of peace - peace with God through the blood of the cross, and all true experience of the peace of God flows from this. The rest of the chapter unfolds the possibility of a life delivered from unrest and anxiety - a well-ordered spiritual life - and is summed up, as we shall see, in a threefold emphasis: the presence and work of the Spirit, the reality of fellowship with the Father and the Son and the life of prayer.