I am The Way

Even though we are just beginning Genesis in my Disciple class, one of the members was troubled by John 14:6 last night, and so we talked about it. The passage in question reads, "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'" The man was troubled, as many are, by the exclusion. What of those who don't know, who haven't heard, or for some reason can't get there? Does God really cast them out? Are they really not welcome?

This is one of those passages that has been so intertwined with a single interpretation for so long that it is hard to hear it without the implications of exclusion tied to it. The traditional Christian interpretation of this passage has been...you have to believe the Christian proposition that Jesus is divine and that Jesus died for our sins in order to go to heaven. That is one way to look at it, but I don't think it is the only way or the way that best represents a faith that also proclaims in 1 John 4:7, "Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God."

So...how else to view it? There are at least two other possibilities. One is to say that Jesus is the way to God in the same way that lungs are the way that I breathe. In a way that can only be described as mystery, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus put something into place that enables us to have contact with God in a way that wasn't possible before. Let's look at the lung metaphor.

When I was born, a rude doctor slapped me and I took my first breath. That breath would not have been possible without lungs. Doctors can slap a child without lungs all they want, and that child will not breathe. The only way to breathe is with lungs. As a newborn, however, I didn't know any of that. I wasn't consciously trying to breathe and I didn't know the first thing about oxygen, lungs, or the respiratory system. He slapped, I breathed, and that was that.

In that same way, it is possible that Jesus is the way that we come to God. We may not understand how that works, we may not know anything about Jesus, we just find God beside us and learn later how that came to be possible. Some might find that arrogant, but it is not exclusive. Jesus as the way, in this sense is simple fact, not an intellectual proposition which offers no benefit without assent.

And there is still a deeper way in which John 14:6 can be read. John, after all, is the Gospel of many layers of meaning. When Jesus says he is the vine in the next chapter, he doesn't mean he is filled with chloryphyll. Anyway, "No one comes to the Father except through me" could simply mean that to truly meet God we must first meet God in the flesh. We must meet God in others, love God in others, recognize God in the least of these (Matt. 25), love the brother or sister that we have seen (1 John 4:20) before it is possible to know and love the God who is spirit and truth.

That seems to me, from my experience, simply to be a psychological truth. So many times I run into people who cannot get to God because their human relationships have been so disordered. With an abusive family and no one who has ever given you either any slack or unconditional love, it seems hardly possible to imagine that such things can come from God. You have no frame of reference...nothing to say, the love of God is like... Hurtful human relationships are the hands-down winners for why people I've met can't reach God. We must go through Jesus...that is to say we must go through the incarnation of God in the flesh. That happened supremely in Jesus, but it happens also through a glass darkly in those others of us who try to live as Jesus taught and to love as Jesus loved. Martin Luther called Christians "little Christs," and we call ourselves the Body of Christ. If we take that seriously, we become either the way or the block to either help or hinder others as they try to learn what it means to say that God is love. Using this verse as a weapon to send people to hell for not assenting to an intellectual proposition would be, in this last interpretation, blasphemy.