The Way Is a Presence

The Way is not an instruction manual. It is A Presence.
— Julián Carrón
ENGLISH - The Way is a Presence
Julián Carrón
ITALIANO - La Via è una Presenza
Julián Carrón

Julián Carrón - Locked doors, real fear, Kafka’s lament: only the risen Presence opens a way home.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.” Jesus said this to His disciples at the Last Supper. Why does the Church hand it back to us now, in Eastertide? The scene of the disciples helps us see why: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, while the doors of the place where the disciples were gathered were locked for fear of the Jews....” They were afraid. Jesus’ invitation not to be troubled had not been enough. We know the same thing. Day after day, troubles, worries, and anxieties pile up — and a single sentence does not set us free. So we can understand why even the memory of His words could not lift their fear. Even being together did not break the grip of what was holding them. How can we not think of Pascoli’s Two Orphans? Their company for each other cannot dissolve the loneliness inside or the threat outside. Their experience and ours teach the same lesson: something more is needed than simply being together.

We discover what is needed when the thing that frees us actually happens. “The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (Jn 20:20). They rejoiced the moment He appeared, while they were still locked in. This is An Event that answers our inability to free ourselves. Only the irruption of Jesus, alive and present in our midst, can turn fear into joy. That is why the Church places these words back before us at Easter. Only now, because of His living and risen Presence, can we taste real liberation from what troubles us — and recognize the method by which it comes. Each of us can check, in our own life, how we are living Easter, by what we are actually experiencing of this liberation.

But does this shift — from fear to joy — last? Or is it gone in a moment? Jesus knows He cannot truly free us unless He faces the fear that hangs over everything else: the fear of death. So He says: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. Otherwise, would I have told you, ‘I am going to prepare a place for you’? When I have gone and prepared a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

Thomas’s reaction shows that this does not settle them: “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” His restlessness pushes Jesus to clarify not only where things are going, but the road itself — the great question that haunts modern man, the one Kafka’s genius gave words to: “There is a destination [life has a destination] but no way” — we do not know how to get there. We usually picture “the way” as a set of rules or a doctrine. That was not enough for the disciples, and it is not enough for us. Only when we admit this can we begin to see the newness Jesus had announced to them — a newness they were not yet able to take in.

Something had to happen for them to understand. Jesus turns our whole framework upside down in His answer to Thomas: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Not a set of rules. A Person. A living Presence. The only response equal to this revolution is to enter into a relationship with His person. No other attempt will be enough to defeat fear and disorientation, except sharing in the truth that actually frees us from the threats — inside us and around us — that keep troubling us.

Only this way do we grasp what He means: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The Way is a relationship with a Presence that unveils its own Truth and fills us with life. A living Presence in which everything is gathered, in which we find everything we need in order to live: Way, Truth, and Life. That is why only the living experience of the risen Christ keeps us from collapsing the way back into a list of rules. The Way is not an instruction manual. It is A Presence. “I am the way.” Jesus is telling us: “My person is the way. If you want to reach Destiny, you have to enter a living relationship with me, with my living presence.” Following Christ does not mean copying Him from the outside. It means entering His way of living, His relationship with the Father: “No one comes to the Father except through me. If you have known me, you will also know my Father: from now on you know him and have seen him.”

The shock this relationship with the Father set off in the disciples comes through in Philip’s request. What must they have seen in Jesus to feel this desire well up in them: “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” His way of living that bond with the Father woke in them the desire to share in it. What newness shone out of Jesus, by virtue of that relationship, to make Him so desirable! They had lived with Him for years. They had seen Him as a prophet mighty in word and deed — and even that was not enough to reach the depth of His mystery. Jesus Himself is taken aback: “Have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

Answering Philip, Jesus makes the road clear once more: there is no reaching the Father except through our relationship with Him. But it was only after He said “I am the way, the truth, and the life” and rose from the dead that they could really take it in. We can take it in too, because His resurrection makes Him our contemporary, just as He told us: “I will be with you always, even to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20). That is why we celebrate Easter every year — to be drawn deeper into the experience of seeing our lives invested by His living Presence. If we let it in, we will see how it overcomes every disturbance and fills us with joy, exactly as it did for the disciples. “I will make my presence evident in the gladness on your faces.”

Notes from the homily by Fr. Julián Carrón

Fifth Sunday of Easter — Year A · May 3, 2026

First Reading: Acts 6:1–7 · Psalm 32 (33) · Second Reading: 1 Peter 2:4–9 · Gospel: John 14:1–12

Julián Carrón

Julián Carrón, born in 1950 in Spain, is a Catholic priest and theologian. Ordained in 1975, he obtained a degree in Theology from Comillas Pontifical University. Carrón has held professorships at prestigious institutions, including the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. In 2004, he moved to Milan at the request of Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation. Following Giussani's death in 2005, Carrón became President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, a position he held until 2021. Known for his work on Gospel historicity, Carrón has published extensively and participated in Church synods, meeting with both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

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