Most Christians, I suspect, have a little set of Bible
passages which they find very important and interesting, but also rather
challenging and a bit worrying. You may well have a list of your own; I
certainly do – verses or passages which have occupied my thoughts on and off
for years. High on my list of puzzling verses is John 14:6 -
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
This verse is pretty central to the expression of many
Christians’ understanding of their faith, and can often be seen on posters at
railway stations and the like. It is one of the seven great statements in
John’s gospel attributed to Jesus about his own nature, each of which begins ‘I
am’. It presents a vision of Jesus giving us a way to follow towards life. Yet
the second sentence, on the face of it, is exclusive and takes away the idea
that other faiths might have their own truth.
I’ve had an experience recently which has led me to reflect
on this verse again, and I’d like to share my reflections. I sing with the Open University Choir, and we’re currently rehearsing a Bach motet called “Komm, Jesu, Komm” (Come, Jesus, Come), a song about a soul close to death. It
contains a long fugue on the text of John 14:6 – in German, “Du bist der rechte
Weg, die Wahrheit und das Leben”. There are three striking differences about
this version from the standard translations – it is written from the
perspective of someone talking to Christ rather than Christ talking about
himself (“you are the way…”); it contains the word “rechte” (true or accurate)
before “Weg” (way), which isn’t found in either the Greek original or almost
any German or English translations (and may just be there to make the rhythm
and music work); and it omits the second half of the saying, about no-one
coming to the Father except through Jesus. The third of these in particular was
what got me thinking: is it possible to believe that Jesus is the way, truth
and life without saying that this is exclusively so?
If you’ll forgive me a bit more Biblical scholarship, it’s
worth noting at this point that the group of highly esteemed Biblical scholars
who form the Jesus Seminar have questioned the idea that Jesus actually said
the ‘I am’ statements himself. Instead they argue that they were words created
for him by the community who followed the words of John. This takes away any
suggestion that Jesus is arrogant or self-seeking, and indeed makes the
statements stronger rather than weaker –
as Marcus Borg (one of the Jesus seminar scholars) has written “if we think of
these not as self-statements of Jesus but as the voice of the community, they
become very powerful – if a community says about someone ‘we have found in this
person the way that leads from death to life’, that is very impressive indeed” (M. Borg & T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, 1999, HarperCollins, p.150).
So what does this passage mean to me? I’d like to look at
the three words Way, Truth and Life in turn.
First, Way. What does it mean to say that Jesus is the way?
The word sounds slightly old-fashioned, but the Greek word could just as easily
be translated as ‘road’ or ‘path’. It’s the route we are meant to follow
through life, the correct path in the wilderness. Jesus doesn’t say that he has
come to show us the way, or to give us a map for the way – he says that he
himself is the way. It is only by following Jesus’ example, by living according
to his pattern (which for me is pre-eminently seen in Luke 4:18, where he said
he had come to proclaim good news to the poor and to set the oppressed free),
that we can reach the next two parts of the saying. This vision of Jesus as the
Way was crucial to the first Christians – throughout the book of Acts (9:2,
19:9, 22:4) we can see them referred to as the people of the Way.
Next, Truth. Jesus said of himself, also in John’s gospel,
that “if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will
know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-2). Truth is
more than the absence of falsehood (just as peace is more than the absence of
war) – it is the revelation of the completely real, the lifting of the veil,
the loss of pretence and convenient fictions. As the commentator Ben Witherington has written, “the term ‘truth’ in late Jewish wisdom and
apocalyptic literature has the sense of revealed truth, the teaching of wisdom
or insight that has a moral significance”. For the Jews of Jesus’ time, truth
came from following the Torah; but instead we are told that Jesus is himself
the revealed truth, the Word of God with him from the beginning (John 1:2).
And finally, the key word of the whole gospel: Life. The
gospel opens by saying of the Word that “in him was life” (John 1:4), and
later Jesus says that “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the
full” (John 10:10). Jesus did not come to convince us of our sin, to rub
our unworthiness in our faces, but rather to show us how to live life to the
full, to become the people God created us to be. Living life to the full is
quite the opposite of a selfish and self-indulgent life. It is a life full of
richness, a life that experiences the kingdom of God as present here and now
and not simply after death. This life is focused on others, outward-looking and
generous. As the great scholar of the New Testament, William Barclay, wrote,
“it is only when we live with Christ that life becomes really worth living, and
that we begin to live at all in the real sense of the word”.
So what of the ‘exclusive’ part? If we really believe that
no one can come to the Father except through Jesus, what does that do for our
relations with people of other faiths? Do we Christians have an exclusive truth
and others are simply wrong? Orthodox teaching would certainly said that is so.
The commentator Tom Wright argues strongly that the whole Bible supports this
view of God, and Jesus through him, as the only true rescue for the world.
There are many liberal commentators who have tried to counter this, arguing
(for example) that much of John is about God’s love for the whole world, and
that we should read the ‘I’ of this verse not just as Jesus of Nazareth but as
the universal Word of God. As the late theologian John Hick put it in a recent issue of the United Reformed Church's magazine Reform, “there is just
one light, which lights many lamps, and those lamps are the religions”. I’m
unpersuaded by both points of view – I don’t like the exclusivism of the verse,
but I think the liberal answers are quite weak. For me it is something I still
need to find an answer to; others will have their own answers already.
However I wholeheartedly feel that the first sentence of the
verse (the bit which Bach used, going back to my beginning) expresses a
profound truth, that Jesus gives us a way to life.
So what is life in Jesus’ way? I have already suggested that
for me it is about following the path he presents, living the life he did,
being on the side of the poor and the oppressed wherever we find them. Tom
Wright, again, puts the implications of this life clearly: “The truth, the
life, through which we know and find the way, is Jesus himself: the Jesus who
washed the disciples’ feet and told them to copy his example, the Jesus who was
on his way to give his life as the shepherd for the sheep.” As individuals, as
a congregation, as the universal church – we are called to follow in that way,
which will show us the truth and bring us life to the full.
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