Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Left to our their own devices our hearts will tend to be troubled. They will fixate on the negative, the hardships of circumstance in our own lives, and the litany of troubles afflicting the world. Our hearts may tell us that it is there right to be troubled, that it is our duty. But there is a higher word to which we should listen.
You have faith in God; have faith also in me.
If Jesus told his disciples not to let there hearts it must have been possible, otherwise it would have been cruel to suggest. What did they need, in this instance, to reassure there hearts in the face of looming darkness? First, they needed faith in Jesus himself. It was not enough to have faith in a distant and disinterested God.
In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.
It was faith in Jesus himself and hope in the promise of the mission toward which he worked that would allow his disciples hearts to be strengthened and encouraged. It can be so for us, when we realize that Jesus really is with us, working to prepare a place for us so that he can take us to himself. This is an eternal perspective, and it can allow our hearts to remain at peace even in difficult times. We see on the one hand "this light momentary affliction" and on the other "an eternal weight of glory beyond comparison" (see Second Corinthians 4:17-18) and, because we see Jesus working to draw us toward the later, we are able to place our hope firmly there.
Thomas said to him,
“Master, we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?”
We are often confused because, although we know Jesus is doing something, it is not always clear to us what it is. We know he is showing us a path to somewhere, but we aren't ever entirely sure of what lies there, as it is entirely beyond our experience. But we are not meant to understand these in the abstract, as if there were a path of virtue that existed apart from conformity to the life, death, and resurrection himself, or a path to heaven other than union with Jesus himself.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Because Jesus is the only way to life, and is himself the fullness of truth, it is by placing our hope in him, as actively and dynamically leading us in our own lives, that our hearts find peace and rest and joy.
But God raised him from the dead,
and for many days he appeared to those
who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem.
Our hope is meant to be anchored especially in the resurrection of Jesus, for this rising opened the path to the heavenly mansions he promised to those who would follow him. It demonstrated definitively that not even death could stand between Jesus and his followers. There could be no condemnation for those who would remain in Christ Jesus (see Romans 8:1).
I will proclaim the decree of the LORD:
The LORD said to me, “You are my Son;
this day I have begotten you.”
What we need is not in the first place a strategy, not a plan to be highly successful, nor even a philosophy of life. What we most need is to place our faith in Jesus, to hope in his promises, and to live lives that are responses of love to the one who first loved us. As we more and more come to be rooted and grounded in him (see Ephesians 3:17) than we are in ourselves we come to realize the promise of a peace and a joy that the world cannot take from us (see John 16:22).
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