Introduction
Every year in the Easter season, the lectionary brings us back into the Farewell Discourse for the last few weeks.
This year we hear:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled…”
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life…”
And there can be a subtle temptation for preachers and parishioners to try to recreate that Maundy Thursday moment before everything happens. To imagine the confusion of the disciples, the uncertainty in the room, the lack of clarity about what is coming next.
But the truth is, we are not there. And neither were the earliest hearers of this Gospel.
We sometimes like to pretend we do not know the end of the story. To approach the text as if the cross and resurrection are still unknown, still ahead, still unresolved.
But the Christian tradition has never really operated that way. The Gospel message has never really buried the lead. Paul consistently refers to Christ crucified. The four Gospels (especially the Gospel of John— “For God so loved the world…”) are constantly foreshadowing what is to come.
Even before we arrive at Easter, we already know where this is going.
And now, after Easter, the RCL is helping us to see that we cannot fool ourselves any longer.
Narrative Context: Hindsight Is Not Optional
John’s Gospel is remarkably transparent about the disciples’ lack of understanding. Again and again, we are told they did not grasp what Jesus was saying…at the time.
But just as importantly, we are told that this changes.
In John 12:16, after the entry into Jerusalem, we hear: the disciples “did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered…”
This tells us that the Gospel itself is written from the vantage point of hindsight. These are not neutral recordings of confused moments. They are theologically interpreted memories, shaped by the cross and resurrection.
Which means that when we arrive at John 14, we are already standing in that same space of retrospective clarity.
Many scholars are right to caution against collapsing everything into resurrection language too quickly. There is value in honoring the confusion of the disciples. But even the first communities who heard this Gospel proclaimed would not have heard it as a suspenseful thriller with unexpected twists and turns. They already knew about the cross. They already heard the resurrection proclaimed.
They were not listening to discover what happens next.
They were listening to understand what it meant.
“The Way” in Light of the Ending
When Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” it lands differently when the ending is already known.
Because we know where this “way” leads.
It leads to the cross.
It leads through death.
It leads into resurrection.
This is not an abstract claim about spiritual direction. It is a concrete claim about the shape of God’s life in the world. The “way” is not a set of instructions. It is a path already walked, a life already lived, a death already endured, and a new life already begun.
And this is where hindsight refuses to let us soften the text.
Because without the cross, “the way” can sound like clarity, certainty, even triumph. But with the cross in view, it becomes something far more demanding. A way marked by self-giving love, vulnerability, and trust in God even when the outcome is not visible.
The same is true of “the truth” and “the life.” They are not philosophical categories to be defined at a distance.
In the Gospel of John, “truth” is not primarily about correctness, and “life” is not simply about vitality or endurance. They are revealed, made known, and embodied in the person of Jesus. And, crucially, they are revealed most fully in what looks, at first, like failure.
Because if we follow this story to its end, if we allow hindsight to do its work, then “truth” is not most clearly seen in Jesus’ teaching alone, or even in his signs, but in the moment where everything seems to collapse. Truth is revealed in betrayal, in arrest, in the public unraveling of everything the disciples thought they understood. Truth is revealed when power exposes itself for what it is, and when God refuses to meet that power on its own terms. The cross unmasks the world’s definitions of truth (control, dominance, certainty) and replaces them with something far more costly: self-giving love that does not defend itself.
We hear this contrast on Good Friday. Pontius Pilate stands before Jesus and asks, almost dismissively, “What is truth?” Pilate is looking for something definable, something he can evaluate, something that operates within the logic of power and authority. The question lingers, unanswered in words, but not unanswered in the narrative. Because the irony, of course, is that truth is standing right in front of him, bound, vulnerable, and silent. Refusing to assert itself in the ways Pilate expects truth to operate.
And “life” follows the same pattern. In John, life is not merely the opposite of death. It is something deeper, something that cannot be extinguished even by death. But that only becomes clear when death actually enters the picture. Before Easter, “life” might sound like blessing, abundance, fullness. All true, but incomplete. After Easter, we know that life is what persists through death, what is given on the other side of loss, what God brings forth precisely where there should be nothing left.
Which means that both “truth” and “life” are inseparable from the cross. They are not ideals we ascend to; they are realities that are disclosed when everything else falls apart.
And hindsight will not let us forget that.
Which brings us to that jarring promise: “greater works than these.”
If we try to hear that apart from the ending, it sounds like an escalation of power. But through the lens of the cross and resurrection, it becomes something else entirely.
The “greater works” are not greater because they surpass Jesus. They are greater because they extend what Jesus has already done. The revelation of God does not stop with him. It continues through those who now live in light of what has been revealed.
Hindsight does not just clarify Jesus’ words. It transfers their true meaning onto us.
Preaching Possibility
Living As if We Know the Ending
A compelling direction for preaching might be to name the tension of this Easter return to Maundy Thursday directly: we cannot go back, and we should not pretend to.
We know where this story goes.
We know what “the way” looks like.
We know what kind of life Jesus is talking about.
And yet, we often live as if we do not.
We still look for ways that avoid the cross.
We still prefer truths that are easier to manage.
We still define life in terms that look nothing like resurrection.
So perhaps this sermon can become an invitation not to rediscover information, but to reckon with what we already know.
Because the challenge of this text is not that it is unclear. It is that it is clear in a way we would rather sidestep.
And this is where the promise of “greater works” can be reframed.
Not as pressure to achieve something extraordinary, but as a calling to participate in the same revealing work of God that has already been made known in Christ.
To live in such a way that the pattern of Jesus’ life (his love, his mercy, his self-giving, his trust in God) becomes visible again, here and now.
Not because we have figured everything out.
But because we have seen enough.
Easter removes the illusion that we are still waiting for the ending.
The question now is what it looks like to live as people who already know it.
Micah Krey 
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