|
The Way
John 14:1-7
5th
Sunday of Easter
5 May 2007
Today’s Gospel reading includes a
line that strikes fear, or at least embarrassment, into the heart of many a
modern mainline Christian. “I am the
way, and the truth, and the life. No one
comes to the Father except through me.”
Now for some, this sentence of
Jesus’ has served as a kind of talisman in an increasingly pluralistic age –
proof-positive that the Christian faith is the right faith. I once heard Thomas Thangaraj, professor of
World Christianity at
For others of us, though, and
perhaps for many in this room, this verse has been more a source of
embarrassment and anxiety. We do not see
ourselves as exclusive or narrow. We certainly
do not want others to see us that way.
The more we know about the great world religions, and about the
sociology of religion and the psychology of religion, the more we realize that
the ways to understand, and speak about, and approach God might be more varied
and complex than we previously imagined.
Given our modern understandings, it would be far simpler for us if Jesus
had said something like, “I am a way,
a truth, and a life. No one comes to the
Father except through whichever path they choose.”
Since that is not what he said,
some of us try instead to ignore this portion of John, as well as other
troublesome things John tells us Jesus said.
We prefer to focus instead on something like John 13:34, “I give you a
new commandment, that you love one another.”
That sounds broad-minded and general enough – it is inclusive and warm,
and something we can all get onboard with.
But “I am the way … no one
comes to the Father except through me”?
For many of us, it’s hard to swallow.
So, tell you what. Let’s set aside the theoretical approach for
now. Let’s not occupy ourselves today
with contemporary questions and answers about how many paths there may be to
God in this big world – an issue that neither John nor Jesus was attempting to
address. Let’s focus instead on the much
more direct question: Is Jesus Christ
even the way to God for us? Or are we
just here because we affirm the existence of God in principal, in the most
vague and generic way possible? I think
maybe some of us are so given to insisting that everybody else’s religion is a
valid way that we forget that we need
a way to God, that Jesus is the way we have been given. Is it possible that some of us use our
open-mindedness as an excuse not to be serious about Christ, who is our way? Is it possible that we are so ready to affirm
the validity of every other religious language that we have been unwilling to
even speak our own, let alone to learn it grammar and vocabulary more deeply?
What does it mean for us – not for everyone else in the world
– what does it mean for us to speak
of Christ as our way?
In our communion liturgy, the words
are said over the table, “When we turned away, and our love failed, God’s love
remained steadfast.” We have turned
from love, in countless ways, individually and corporately. It is the human story, it is our own
story. And to speak of Jesus as the way
back to love, Jesus as the way back to God, our
way back to God, is to see that in Jesus, God has done something decisive and
unique, something we were unable to do for ourselves. He opened a road. He became
the road. And he invited us to walk that
road back to God.
In his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, the Trappist
monk Thomas Merton tells of how he and his friends built little huts in the
woods and would not allow their little brothers to come anywhere near. If the younger boys did try to come to the
hut, the older boys would chase them away with stones. But Merton remembers that his own younger
brother, John Paul, was undeterred. Merton writes:
When I think now of … my childhood, the picture I
get of my brother John Paul is this:
standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of
sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid
in short pants and a kind of leather jacket, standing quite still, with his
arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any
nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes
full of indignation and sorrow. And yet
he does not go away. We shout at him to
get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in
that direction, and he does not go away.
We tell him to play in some other place.
He does not move.
And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but
angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing
…. And his tremendous desire to be with
us … will not permit him to go away.[i]
It is a picture of the whole human
story in relation to God and each other.
This is what we do: We throw our
rocks. We show our meanness. We shout our hatred. We turn away from love. This is our story.
And God stood outside our little
world, watching us throw our rocks, hearing us shout our insults, seeing us
turn our backs, and he would not leave.
When we turned away and our love failed, God’s love remained
steadfast. But that love did not change
anything for us, because we could not receive it. Would not receive it. And so he chose to come in a way we could
accept, and maybe even embrace.
In Merton’s reflections on his
childhood, he goes on to tell of how he and his friends in their hut formed a
little gang. They knew of a real gang, a
group of tough kids in a neighborhood called Little Neck, and decided they
would challenge them to a fight. They
would go to the gang’s neighborhood and stand outside and shout their
taunts. But no one from the Little Neck
gang would come out.
Then one afternoon, when Merton and
his three friends were at Merton’s home, they looked out the window and saw a
group of the Little Neck kids gathering outside the house. There were about 20 or 25 of them, ranging in
age from about 10 to 16, and they stood outside with their hands in their
pockets, and their caps pulled down over their eyes, looking at the house, and
waiting. Things grew tense as the four
boys anxiously huddled inside the house.
And then suddenly the maid ordered the boys outside, so she could do her
work. The boys begged to stay inside,
but she insisted that they go out.
Finally, the four frightened boys ran out the back door, through several
back yards, until they safely reached the home of Bill, one of Merton’s
friends. When they got there, they
looked out the window. They could see
the gang from Little Neck, still silently standing around Merton’s house,
clearly not planning on leaving. “And
then an extraordinary thing happened,”
Merton says. He writes:
The front door of our house … opened. My little brother John Paul came walking down
the steps, with a certain amount of dignity and calm. He crossed the street…. He walked towards the Little Neck gang. They all turned towards him. He kept on walking, and walked right into the
middle of them. One or two of them took
their hands out of their pockets. John
Paul just looked at them, turning his head on one side, then on the other. And he walked right through the middle of
them, and nobody even touched him.
And so he came to the house where we were. We did not chase him away.[ii]
In Christ, this is what God
did. He wanted to be with us, and so he
came to the house where we were. When
the powers of evil and death circled round, when everything that would keep us
from love and life threatened us, God in Christ burst forth, looked those
powers in the face, and walked right through the middle of them. And they could not touch him. Do we now chase him away? Do we refuse what he offers us because it
seems preposterous or too radical or too difficult to accept? Or might we find a way to walk the road that
opens before us now, the road that is Christ himself?
When we turned away, and our love
failed, God’s love remained steadfast.
He sought us out. He faced down
the powers. He came to our house. And he gave us a way back to him. Can we take it?
|
 |