Jesus said they knew the way, and Thomas honestly said they did not. He was not being stubborn; he simply could not see it. Barnes writes, "Though Jesus had so often told them of his approaching death and resurrection, yet it seems they did not understand him." Gill says Thomas "seemed to have no other notion than that Christ was talking of some particular place in Judea." Matthew Henry commends him for saying so: "If good men be in the dark, and know but in part, yet they are willing to own their defects." Thomas asked for a destination and a road. He was about to be given a Person.

Jesus answered Thomas directly: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). He added, "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him" (John 14:7). The place was the Father, and the way was Jesus Himself.

Thomas is the same disciple who had said, when Jesus went back toward Judea, "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16). He is also the one who later said, "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails... I will not believe," and then confessed, "My LORD and my God" (John 20:25, 28).

Matthew Henry explains that Thomas would have understood better if he had grasped that "Christ was going to the invisible world, the world of spirits." Barnes explains "the way" as Jesus Himself, the One who guides us to God by His teaching and example and through whose merits alone we come to the Father.

Jesus' answer moves the question from a map to a Person. Thomas wanted to know where and how. Jesus said, "I am the way." Coming to God is not first a matter of knowing a route, but of knowing Jesus: "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also" (John 14:7).

This is one of the clearest statements of who Jesus is in all of John. It comes not in a public sermon, but in answer to one confused disciple's honest question. Thomas's "we know not" opened the way for one of Jesus' greatest words of self-revelation.