We are in the fourteenth chapter of John at today’s liturgy, at the beginning of the Last Super. In chapter 13, Jesus had just washed the feet of the uncomfortable Apostles, then he told them that one of them was about to betray him and that he was about to leave them all and that they could not come with him then. Finally, he tells Peter that he would deny him three times before that night was out.
 
Yet, after all that, chapter 14 begins with Jesus telling them all, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God and have faith also in me.” There is in this simple admonition of the Lord’s, a profound spiritual truth. Whenever we feel troubled, worried, bothered or afraid in any way, it is because we have allowed our hearts to be so. The source of our fears and feeling troubled is entirely within our own hearts, not in what is happening. We often believe that it is the world that causes our difficulties and troubles. We hear of wars and violence and suffering, often on a great scale, and it all leaves us feeling frightened, vulnerable and in dread of it coming to our doorsteps. But all of those feelings are actually a choice we make.
 
The great question is why do we make that choice? Why do we choose fear? Because ultimately, everything in the human heart is motivated by only two things, love and fear. They are the final choice we are all asked to choose between. It really is that simple. It is precisely as Moses laid before the people in Deuteronomy 30:19, “Life and death; the blessing and the curse. Choose life.” When we choose fear it is because we do not have that faith, that complete trust in God and in Jesus, God’s son. We are trusting rather in what we want, what we think is good for us. And most of what we want is predicated on our fear of pain, which is the most ancient of all fears for us, from the very beginning of our lives, and that fear causes us to draw back at any possibility of experiencing that pain.
 
More than anything else he said, Jesus kept saying to us, “Do not be afraid.” But the only way to overcome our fears is to face them. It is to become aware that we are indeed afraid and to become aware of what it is that we so fear. There is only one way for us to do this. Like Thomas, we cry out in our fears that we do not know the way. It is then that we must truly hear and believe Jesus when he tells us, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus also told us earlier that, “I am the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.” If we come to believe these things then we, “will in fact do greater things than these,” (the things Jesus did).
 
But to overcome our fears we must allow the Good Shepherd to take us through that “dark valley of the shadow of death.” It is the dark valley of our fears. Only Jesus knows the way through it that leads to the light (“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Jn 8:12). With Jesus at our side leading us, we shall fear no evil for he is there, “with his rod and his staff that give me courage.” We only come to fully trusting in Jesus to guide us through our fears by daily prayer and seeking. We seek and pray to abandon ourselves to God’s great care and love that alone leads us out of fear to finally know love and to love in turn. For then, on the other side of that dark valley, “Only goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”