There are sentences in Scripture that arrive like a hand placed gently on the table. Not dramatic or loaded with sentiment. Not loud enough to silence the room. Simply there. Steady. Present. Waiting to be noticed.
Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Jesus speaks these words in John’s Gospel on the edge of loss. They are not spoken into calm circumstances or offered as a decorative blessing for lives already settled and secure. They are spoken at the Last Supper, in the shadow of betrayal, denial, departure, and death. The room is thick with what the disciples cannot yet understand. Something is ending. Someone they love is leaving. He has just identified that one of them will betray. The future, which only moments before may have seemed held together by his presence, begins to loosen at the seams.
This matters because these words are not a command to feel nothing. It is not a rebuke for anxiety, grief, confusion, or fear, nor is it the spiritual equivalent of ‘calm down,’ which is rarely helpful and almost never calming. Jesus is not asking his friends to pretend that the world is stable when it is not. He is inviting them to find, beneath the shaking surface of things, a deeper truth on which to stand. A holy ground.
In contemporary Australia, many hearts are troubled. They are troubled by the cost of living, by mortgages and rent and supermarket shelves that seem to ask more of families each week. By young people who appear connected but are often profoundly unseen, by classrooms carrying more complexity than policy documents can name. They are troubled by the exhaustion of caring professions, by the sharpness and at times ‘fakeness’ of public discourse, by the quiet griefs people carry into staffrooms, trains, parish pews, hospitals, kitchens, and school car parks.
Some hearts are troubled by the state of the planet: dry riverbeds, fire seasons, floods, heat, and the strange moral fatigue that comes when the problems are too large to hold in one pair of hands. Some hearts are troubled by institutional failures, by broken trust, by the ache of trying to remain truthful in systems that prefer smooth surfaces and archaic approaches. Some hearts are troubled simply because life has not unfolded according to the clean equation they once imagined and life can be exhausting.
We like equations to balance. There is comfort in the idea that if we do the right thing, the right result will follow. If we work hard, we will be recognised. If we follow the rules, the sum will come out neatly. Life, however, is not always arithmetic.
Sometimes the variables multiply beyond our control, especially when navigating life in collaboration with varying agendas and motives. Sometimes the true unknowns remain unknown, even if they are propagated as known. Sometimes the graph of a life does not rise in a smooth and elegant line but bends, drops, plateaus, and begins again from a point we would never have chosen. Faith does not remove the complexity. It does not make the equation simple. It gives us a constant.
Believe in God, believe also in me.
This is the centre of the passage. Jesus does not offer the disciples a map with every road marked in advance. He offers them relationship. He does not say, “You will understand everything soon.” He says, in effect, “Trust me.” Not because the way will be easy, but because he is the way.
I do love my literature and there is something almost Austen-like in the restraint of the scene. So much is felt, yet not all is said. The disciples, like characters standing at the edge of some great social and emotional upheaval, are trying to interpret signs they only half understand. Thomas asks the honest question: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
It is a question worthy of any age. How can we know the way when the old certainties no longer hold? How can we know the way when institutions falter, when relationships fracture, when the future feels less like a promise and more like a fog? How can we know the way when the maps we inherited do not quite match the terrain beneath our feet?
Jesus answers not with a direction, but with himself. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Not a theory of the way. Not a slogan about truth. Not a decorative idea of life. Christ himself. He is our compass.
This is where the Gospel becomes both comforting and demanding. To follow Christ as the way is not merely to admire him from a distance. It is to walk as he walks: with mercy, courage, clarity, tenderness, and truth. To receive Christ as the truth is not simply to be correct. It is to become whole. To live in Christ as life is not merely to survive, it is to be drawn into the kind of life that allows you to say to the Grim Reaper – “You have no power over me.”
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”
This is not real estate language. It is belonging language. There is room for all of us in God. Room for the bewildered and the ashamed. Room for the exhausted. Room for those who have made mistakes and those who have had mistakes made upon them. Room for the ones who know exactly what they believe and room for the ones who can barely pray. Room for the confident and the barely holding on. Room for the hearts that are troubled, not because they lack faith, but because they are human. Just because I turn to God does not mean that the ones who cause me pain have not also turned to God. It is a complicated communion but it is also very diversity embracing.
Perhaps this is what Australia needs to hear again, beneath the noise of productivity and performance. We are not machines. We are not data points. We are not merely economic units, ATAR scores, job titles, mortgage holders, consumers or names on a spreadsheet. We are souls. We are people made for communion. We are creatures who need shelter, meaning, forgiveness, beauty, and hope. We do not have to agree to be in communion and we should choose our actions and words to be life-affirming not retaliatory.
The mathematical nuance is this: in the geometry of faith, the shortest distance between fear and peace is rarely a straight line. It curves through trust. It passes through grief. It may double back through doubt. It may require the courage to keep walking when the proof is not yet complete.
Jesus does not say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled because nothing painful will happen.” He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled” because pain will not have the final word. Departure will not have the final word. Betrayal will not have the final word. Death will not have the final word. The final word is Christ, who prepares a place not only beyond this life, but within this life: a place where our hearts can rest even while the world remains unfinished. So perhaps the invitation is not to become untroubled in some shallow, polished sense. Perhaps the invitation is to let our troubled hearts be held by something stronger than trouble.
To breathe.
To pray.
To tell the truth.
To walk the next small stretch of the road, one foot in front of the other.
To remember that when we do not know the way, we are not abandoned to the map.
We are held by the One who is the Way.
The Female Theologian 