THE WAY

TEXT: John 14:1-7

Advent is the time we have to prepare for Christmas. This year I am encouraging us to prepare for Christmas by thinking about what actually happened on that day 2000 years ago. If you've seen the most recent TIME magazine, the cover story is on the nativity of Jesus. Mostly it looks at all the scholarly debate over the virgin birth, who the wise men were, the differences in the Gospel accounts, the star, and all sorts of things. When I say I want us to think about what actually happened on Christmas, that sort of thing is not what I mean.

What I mean is that we should think about who Jesus really is, as we talked about last week, and why Jesus came, which is what I want to do this morning. If Jesus really is God in human form, what was God hoping to do by entering human history this way? If you listen to some folks, you would think God woke up one morning and said, "Hey, I think I'll go get crucified." In a culture where people often only darken the door of a church at Christmas and Easter, if that, you end up with a culture that thinks the only things important about Jesus are the beginning and end of his life.

Those are important markers to be sure. They are critical parts of the story. But I think if we want to find out why those things happened, we need to look at what came inbetween...the actual life of Jesus...the 33 years that he lived on earth, especially the three years that he spent in active ministry.

One of the most controversial things that Jesus said about himself is in the passage that I just read from John 14. Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me." The disciples took this statement so seriously that the earliest name for the followers of Jesus was "The Way." When Paul gets on his horse to go persecute Christians in Damascus, that's who he's going after...the people who follow "The Way." It is only later that the Jewish sect called "The Way" comes to be a separate religion with people called "Christians." Those who walked and talked with Jesus talked of following him in the language he, himself had used. They were followers of The Way.

After 2000 years of Christian history telling us what this statement of Jesus means, it has become almost impossible to hear the text without hearing all the interpretation that has normally gone with it. What Jesus means by saying he is the way, he clarifies in the next few verses. He claims that to see him...to see Jesus, to touch him, to hear his voice...is the same thing as to see the Father. In this passage, Jesus says that he and God are one...they are the same.

If you want more discussion on that part of it, get the sermon from last week. But this week I want to try to expand the way that we think about Jesus saying "I am the way." Most of the people I hear use that phrase, are using it to exclude anyone who doesn't formally proclaim themselves a Christian. Jesus' words about himself...which come in the context of a discussion where he is telling the disciples that there is a ton of room for everyone in God's house...are used to narrow the rooms in God's house to one. There is room for Christians only, period. End of discussion. Literally, to hell with everyone else.

That is one way to interpret the verse, and maybe it's the right way. I disagree with that interpretation, but maybe on the day when I finally meet God on the other side, God is going to sit me down and say, "Now Anne, about that Advent sermon..." You will have to decide for yourselves what to believe about this passage, but I at least want to present you with some other options.

The first of those is to say that Jesus is the way to God in the way that Thomas Edison is the way to light bulbs. The only reason I have light when I go in a room and flip a switch is because of what Thomas Edison did long before I was born. Edison's invention of the incandescent light bulb was the "way" for me to have light in my study. Even if I had never heard of Thomas Edison, even if I thought all the talk about the man they called The Wizard of Menlo Park was a bunch of made up fables and lies, when I flip the switch in my study, Thomas Edison has still made possible the resulting light. Without going back and re-writing history, there is no other way to get the same result. Maybe others could have invented it, but they didn't. Edison did. He made the road that leads to electric light.

In the same way, we can say that whatever miracle happened in the dark between the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, made it possible for human beings to be in direct relationship with God--That the work of salvation was Jesus' work, not ours. His work made it possible and whoever finds God has done so by means of the work of Jesus, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not. To say we have to assent to a certain group of doctrines is to make salvation our work. Jesus could have been saying to his disciples...the work of bringing you to God is my work, not yours. I am the way that this happens, and you won't get there by trying yourself. When you find that God is near, I am the reason that happens.

In this interpretation, there are still many rooms in God's house. In some of those rooms people know how they got there and in others they don't or they think they got there some other way, but all came through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who is the only way.

Maybe that's what Jesus meant, or maybe he meant something even more symbolic. After all, the Gospel of John is the most philosophical of all the Gospels. It is written with layer upon layer of meaning. The only thing you can be sure of when you read John is that it always means more than just the words on the surface. To look at this interpretation let's go back to last week for a minute. Last week we remembered that Jesus wasn't really some separate relative of God...that Father and Son language is just an imperfect analogy to talk about the mystery of God being able to be in two places at the same time...God unlimited in the heavens, and God, at the same time, taking on the limitations of human flesh. We call it Father and Son, but it is the same God...one being.

Jesus is God with skin on. God in the flesh. God living a human life and dying a human death in order to make a way back to God. When Jesus tells his disciples that the only way to get to God is through him, he could have been saying that the only way to truly meet God is to meet God in the flesh. Now that presents a problem since Jesus as a human being is not walking the earth anymore...or is he?

If you've been in church for any length of time, you have heard the phrase "The Body of Christ." Sometimes that phrase is used to refer to the communion elements that represent his body and blood to us. But it is also used much more broadly to refer to all Christians. The Body of Christ is the image Paul uses to talk about how all Christians everywhere should operate as one organism...different functions, different gifts, but all together as one body with Christ as the head.

To me, that means that through the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the way God is present within every person who invites God in, Jesus does still walk the earth...only instead of just being one person, he is all of us together. Martin Luther, the Catholic priest who started the Protestant Reformation, called every Christian a "little Christ." Jesus did not leave earth after just three years of ministry because he thought the job was done. He turned the job over to the new Body of Christ...those who believe that when you look at the life of Jesus, you are looking at the life of God.

Now hang onto your brains here, this is important. If, when Jesus said, "I am the way" he meant that meeting God in the flesh was the only way to find God, then each one of us is now the way. If people are not finding their way to God, it is our fault for not making God known to them through our lives.

Again, remove the old interpretations. I'm not saying that it is our job to bash people over the head with Christian doctrine and tell them that if they don't accept it they're going to hell. That's not what the original body of Jesus did. The people Jesus condemned were of two sorts...first and foremost he blasted religious leaders who were so stuck on literal interpretations of Scripture that they no longer acted with justice and mercy. They were unjust themselves and were teaching others to be so as well. Secondly, he condemned those who did not love...those who refused to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prison inmates, or care for the sick.

When Jesus was alive in his one body on the earth, he allowed people to meet God by loving them, no matter who or what they were. He made heroes out of the people the religious leaders called heretics...the Samaritans. He touched and healed those who were labeled by the society as unclean. He was always getting in trouble for hanging out with the riff-raff, with the sinners, with the despised. He gave of himself, to the grateful and ungrateful alike, eventually giving his life for the most ungrateful of all.

People were able to find their way to God because God first found a way to them. God came to them as they were...as a human being to show how God truly behaved and what God truly was like. To touch Jesus was to touch God, and people saw that touching God was not frightening and was perfectly safe. Even trying to kill God resulted in a loving act of salvation and forgiveness.

When I say I believe that Jesus is the only way to God, I mean this. I mean that the only way that any human being can come to God is by first meeting God in the flesh. It is through the unconditional love of others that we come to accept the unconditional love of God. It is through the kindness, mercy, and compassion of another human being that I begin to catch a glimpse of the divine. Jesus is the way that God made that possible, and once Jesus of Nazareth ascended into heaven and sent out the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the job of becoming the way to God passed to the new Body of Christ...Christians.

It is not our job to keep others out. It is our job to show through the love in our lives the same thing that Jesus showed through his life on earth...that God is love and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

Christmas is not just about history. It does not just look back to what happened before. It looks at history in order to interpret the present. It looks at what God did for us so that we might understand what we are to do for others. Jesus is the way to God because, as John put it in one of his letters, "those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen."

The job of Christian evangelism is not to persuade or coerce people into confessing a certain doctrine. The work of the Body of Christ is to live as Jesus lived, making a way for those who do not know God, to meet God in the flesh...to be Christ for others, so that God's love can infuse their hearts and re-create their souls. "I am the way," Jesus said. He is, and as the Body of Christ, so are we. Amen.