"Ways and Means": Is Jesus the only
Way?
By Hugh Reid
"A crew of highway workers in rural Saskatchewan
barely noticed when a woman drove past their sign only to discover that the
bridge that had once been there was no longer. She came back to the
construction crew and they gave her directions for an alternate route into
town. A few hours later she appeared on the other side and she shouted across
the gap: "You mean it's closed this way too?"
Sometimes life is like that. Every direction
leads to the end of the road. The way ahead seems blocked or obscured - there is
no going forward. But the way behind is also blocked. There is no going back
either. We are caught between two hostile worlds.
More than caught, because the place where we are
is also hostile and threatening. The past and future, the way forward and the
way back are like the two jaws of a vice, pressing in on us; and we lack the
energy, the vision, the resources, or the hope to push back. These are times
when a Star Trek fan would want to say, "Beam me up Scotty."
These are also times that reveal how impoverished the contemporary Western
understanding of the self is; when the entire self-help industry grinds to a
halt, because you come to a gap in the road that is impassable, a reality in
your life that is unavoidable - a crisis, a tragedy, an illness, old age - that
you simply cannot talk yourself or work yourself around. You have come to the
end of the road.
While these times reveal the poverty of the self, they also reveal the richness
of Jesus' promise, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." These words of Jesus
come across, not as words of exclusion or segregation but of acceptance and
inclusion; not as words that bar the way but that open a way of grace and love -
a way that has made its way to us. Jesus' words come as the refreshing rain that
breaks the drought of summer.
"
Thomas said to Jesus, 'Lord we don't know where you are going how can we know
the way?' Jesus said to him, 7 am the way the truth and the life, no one
comes to the Father except through me.'" John 14:5-6
This
has become a problematic text for many today. In a pluralistic world where we
want to be respectful of people of other faiths and no faith, it strikes many
well meaning and caring people as exclusive, intolerant and offensive. I was at
a meeting of United Church colleagues not long ago where this passage came up
along with other similar texts (Matthew 28:19; Mark 8:34-37; Luke 2:1 Off;
9:46-48; Acts 4:12;
Romans 10:9; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Rev. 21:17ff, etc.) The room burst into a
cauldron of energy. Some, motivated by care and concern, felt compelled by
scripture to confess "Jesus is the only way"; while others, also motivated by
care and concern, said:
"That's not my theology! Jesus might be 'my way' or the 'Christian way' to God;
but there are many 'ways.' All faiths are true and valid." Setting aside the
logical problems of saying that all belief systems and ideologies are equally
true; and ignoring the patronizing assumption that everyone's "way to God" means
what the Christian tradition has meant, to say "there are many ways," does seem,
at first blush, to be more "tolerant" than to say "Jesus is the only way." But
we're left with the problem of what to do with John 14:6.
Back
in the 1970's, when we were become increasingly aware of the smallness of our
world and the value of other cultures and beliefs New Testament scholar, Krister
Stendahl, proposed something he called "love language." Stendahl distinguished
love language from, say, the language of a courtroom or the strict language of
logic. As Blaise Pascal said: "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot
know." Love language is heart language. Stendahl argued that John was using love
language in chapter 14. When it says that Jesus is the "only way," it is as if
someone were speaking poetically of a relationship: "Well she's the only gal for
me, or he's the only man for me." When a Christian says, "Jesus is the only
way," it is not meant to offend or exclude others but merely to speak love
language rather than systematic theology. This notion became very popular but
did not survive long on a scholarly level. One does not need to read far in the
Fourth Gospel to see that John could not have meant what Stendahl suggests. We
can begin with John's Prologue: "In the beginning was the word, and the word
was with God, and the Word was God... the true light that enlightens all people
was coming into the world.. .the Word became flesh and dwelt among us... No one
has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart,
who has made him known." This is sublime poetry but it is more than the poetic
musings of love language. These are among the most profound descriptions of the
nature of being ever uttered. No, the category of love language is not a way
allowing us to escape the claims of this text.
Neither can we use the avenue, taken by some, that these are John's words, not
Jesus' words. Setting aside the pitfalls of distilling your own personal,
comfortable, and self-justifying Jesus from the complex and proximate witness of
scripture, these words do not seem to be an isolated claim confined to this
passage or even to the Fourth Gospel. We can reject John 14:6 only if we claim
that our time and place are innately superior and if we reject large swaths of
the gospel account because they clash with modern western liberal
sensibilities. John 14:6 is not an anomaly. It is integral to the message of
the whole New Testament.
It
seems that if we're going to be tolerant, we have no choice but to reject this
passage outright or pass over it in silence.
But
there may be another way open to us. There are often possibilities that are
right in front of us that are difficult to see. Like the time a preacher decided
her congregation needed a lesson on forgiving their enemies. After a long
sermon, she asked how many were now willing to forgive their enemies. About
half held up their hands. Not satisfied she gave them another twenty minutes
and repeated the question. This time she received a response of eighty percent.
Still unsatisfied, she lectured for fifteen minutes and repeated her question.
With all thoughts now on Sunday dinner, all responded affirmatively except for
one elderly lady in the rear.
"Mrs. Jones, why are you not willing to forgive your enemies?" The preacher
asked.
"Because I don't have any."
"Mrs. Jones, that is very unusual. How old are you?"
"Ninety-three."
"Mrs. Jones, please come down here in front and tell the congregation how a
person can live to the great age of ninety-three and not have an enemy in the
world."
The
little lady teetered down the aisle, turned around very slowly with a face like
an angel, and said, "Easy. I've outlived them."
Maybe there's another way to understand Jesus' statement not by outliving other
interpretations but by sharing life with them through a closer reading.
We can draw upon a theory
from the world of business known as "Policy Resistance" or "the law of
unintended consequences." Some see it as a variation on Murphy's Law. It comes
from the simple observation that when people try to solve a problem but are not
aware of the complex interrelations within a system they will, by acting,
actually make the problem worse. The classic example is the driver in a
rainstorm who needs to make a sudden stop and applies the brakes only to have
the car hydroplane on a cushion of water. Rather than slowing the car, the
brakes react with other elements in the system to make it slide faster. The
result is the crash the driver was trying to avoid. "Policy resistance" the law
of unintended consequences describes what happens when your policy or action has
the opposite effect to what you intended.
Another classic example would be to tell a teenager not to do something.
When
we dismiss John 14:6, "I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the
Father except through me," in order to become more tolerant, we are committing
an act of policy resistance. In the commendable effort to be respectful towards
other faiths and beliefs, we end up saying something that is actually
intolerant, exclusive, and even oppressive. Two thoughts on this.
First, to say that Jesus is "my way" or a "Christian way" to God is a critical
misinterpretation of this passage and indeed of the gospel. Jesus is not the
"Christian way" or a "personal way" to God for me or anyone. Listen to what the
Gospel of John says: "The word became flesh and dwelt among us...for God so
loved the world that he sent his only begotten son... I have come that my joy
might be in you and your joy might be full...as the Father has sent me so I am
sending you..." The real message here, not only John but in the whole New
Testament is that Jesus is not our way to God, but God's way to us. This
is grace, "not that we loved God but that God loved us." This is the shepherd
who leaves the ninety and nine to seek the one. This is the landowner who at the
eleventh hour is still scouring the alleys for workers for the vineyard.
Certainly, when we are sought we must turn to, respond to, and receive this love
and life and community; we must open the door on which love knocks. But this
does not in anyway make it our path, our claim, our boast. The
divine and eternally gracious love that seeks us, pursues us, goes to the cross
and through an empty grave to reach us, that continues to make its way to us and
to all creation, is not our way. It is God's way to the lost, the
abandoned, the disenfranchised, the dead, to you and to me. The way to God lies
through God's gracious self-giving. We cannot get there on our own, and we do
not have to.
To
say that Jesus, the way of God's own self-giving, is "my way" or "the Christian
way" to God, is to say something profoundly intolerant and exclusive. To say
that grace is "my way," that unconditional, self-giving, unmerited love is "my
way" but, "friend, I'm afraid you're going to have to do it by works," is
intolerant and exclusive.
It is also false and unfaithful. Individuals and
the church have no proprietary claim on God's grace. This is God's work and way
in Jesus Christ not ours. The church and its members may serve God's gracious
love but we cannot confine it. The mission has a church; the church doesn't have
a mission.' The grace incarnate in Jesus is that lavish wave of redeeming and
liberating love that flows into this pluralistic world. It flows to this world
blighted by hate and injustice, poverty and intolerance and beats upon the
shores of our resistance and rejection until it has won us and gathered us into
the community of life, until at last we say yes to our belonging to God and to
one another.
To proclaim Jesus as "God's way to us, all people,
all creation" is far more than to be merely tolerant. Tolerance is a half
measure that will bear the existence of the other perhaps grudgingly, at best.
To proclaim Jesus as God's way to us is to proclaim not only that we are to be
tolerant of one another but that we are to be for one another, that we
are bound to one another in a proactive, caring, and healing solidarity or
communion of God's love and concern.
To be tolerant is to be aware of Djamshid Djan
Popal, the little Afghan boy who has been brought to Canada for heart surgery
and is very much in our prayers. It is to be aware of him, perhaps even of his
heart defect; yet mere tolerance requires nothing more of us. To be gracious,
though, is to seek him out to share in bringing him here, regardless of his
faith or race that he might be made well. We do not merely live and let live,
that is tolerance. We seek those whose lives are threatened, we seek those who
are alone and abandoned, we seek to understand how we participate in systems of
injustice and violence and end them, we change the world in accordance with
God's love and reign that is grace. We are not simply to tolerate one another
but to be for one another, gracious to one another, in the way that God is
gracious to us in Jesus' self-giving. This takes us to the second way of hearing
this passage that I would like to briefly develop.
Western culture has misconstrued both the human self and authentic human freedom
for the last three hundred years. The philosopher Charles Taylor develops this
theme in his acclaimed book, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity.1 In this and other works3 Taylor, shows how
the notion of our "selves" as discreet individuals with inalienable individual
rights is a relatively modern one rooted in the Reformation. Before the
seventeenth century, people located themselves as selves within a larger order,
as part of a whole. Through the social and moral revolution of the Reformation
that people in the west began to see themselves first and foremost as
individuals who can then come together to form a whole, rather than a whole
consisting of individual participants. We need to recognize this as a
peculiarly western understanding. In this pluralistic world of ours,
there are cultures in which people still identify themselves first as part of a
whole or a movement and not as a discreet individuals who might deign to
participate in a whole. Even within cultures where individualism is celebrated
as the highest pinnacle of human achievement, there are still times when we see
ourselves as belonging first to something larger. For instance, later today,
Toronto will be divided into Portuguese and Greeks, the team coming first.4
But for the most part, in the west, we are now individuals first and a great
deal flows from this construal of our human identity. Some of it is positive. In
some ways, the Enlightenment did enlighten us. But there have been other
"malaises" that indicate the current sense of the self is not an unambiguous
achievement.
I
want to relate this to the question of human freedom, or rather the
misconstrual of what constitutes human freedom. Over the last three hundred
years, western culture has come to define authentic freedom in terms of
individual choice. One is not an authentic individual unless one has chosen
one's own way. This understanding of human freedom has been explored
beautifully in an article by the theologian John Webster. Webster argues that
freedom has come to be defined in terms of self-constitution,
self-actualization and self-assertion. Freedom, in other words, is conceived of
in "oppositional terms," meaning that it is first of all "freedom from",
not "freedom for." This is an impoverished view because, coupled with our
notion of the self, it condemns people to loneliness. To find "your own way" to
God (or anywhere else for that matter) is not an option, it is a necessity;
because unless you are on your own spiritual path, you are on an
inauthentic path. This generation must necessarily be different from the
previous generation, this child from the parent, this brother from the sister.
In the end, this is a burdensome, alienating, and desperate orientation to life,
producing what Robert Putnam has called the loss of social capital," and what
Robert Bellah has labelled, "Sheilaism."' Philosophical critics of this notion
of the self (Foucault, Derrida) have pointed out that it is not really a "self"
at all, but a social construct without depth or genuine identity, driven,
panicked, burdened with the need to assert itself in some new way, to be
different in some new way, or else risk collapsing into insignificance. Charles
Taylor calls this the "Nova Effect," an explosion of individual ways of running
and willing outward and away from each other, until we are all finally dying
embers streaming into space, on our own journeys, alone.
Furthermore, when it all depends on you, when you have to do it all by yourself,
when your identity is only as good as what you have done lately, when the only
way is your own way and you have to find it on your own, otherwise you are
inauthentic, you find yourself on a very lonely, tiring road, and finally a very
intolerant and exclusive road that comes to a lonely end.
At
that end, though, when you come to a place where there is no going forward and
no going back, what a blessing to discover that there is someone who has made
his way to you; that you are not alone. No one is alone. Like a refreshing
summer's rain that ends a time of heat and drought, the world changes.
As
did the world of Allan who thought he was at the end of his road and discovered
another way. Allan (not his real name) is someone who came to me at my previous
church in Hamilton, wanting to be baptised. He was a child (or perhaps a
victim) of the "me" decade who felt compelled to leave home and family to
"find himself" and, of course, lost himself, becoming a stranger to himself,
wandering the streets of East Vancouver trapped by addiction. One night he
managed to get off the street into an overnight shelter. He crashed into his
bunk, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the groans, trying not to be
overcome by the odours of the strangers in the beds around him. He did not know
where he was, he did not know who he was, he just wanted it to be over with and
so he considered how he might take his own life. He
was shaken out of his thoughts when someone came in and called out a name from
another world.
"Is
Allan Roberts here?"
That
had been his name once but he hadn't heart it for some time. He hardly knew
Allan Roberts anymore. It couldn't be him being called.
The
caller persisted, "Is there anybody named Allan Roberts here?"
No
one else answered so Allan took a risk, "I'm Allan Roberts (or used to be)."
"Your mother's on the phone."
"My
mother? No, you've made a mistake. I don't know where I am, how could my mother
know where I am?"
"If
you're Allan Roberts, you're mother's on the phone."
Unsure what to expect he went to the desk in the hall and took the receiver.
"Allan", it was his mother, "it's time for you to come home."
"Mom, I don't know where I am, I have no money, you don't know what I'm like. I
can't go home."
"It's time for you to come home. There's a Salvation Army officer who's coming
to you with a plane ticket. He's going to take you to the airport to get you
home."
She
could not trust him enough to send him the money or the ticket, he'd use it to
buy drugs. She had not really known where he was, she just called every shelter
and hostel for months until she found him. He went home and, supported and loved
by his mother who had never ceased to know him though he had forgotten himself,
and influenced and inspired by the faith that had sustained his mother's hope
and love, he began attending church services and one day he came to my office
seeking to be baptised. I had the additional pleasure of later marrying Alan and
then baptising his first child.
He
did not find his own way to my office, the way found him through his mother's
love and faith. His own road had ended but the way of grace met him and opened a
new way that was not his alone but a shared path; a journey not away from but
toward others; a path, not of his own making, but made by the love that found
him, that knew him better than he knew himself, and invited him to "follow me."
"I
am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through
me," said Jesus. It was as if he was saying, " I am the grace that seeks you and
calls you, the lavish wave of unconditional and redeeming love that breaks down
the walls of inhuman isolation and lifts all creation into the community of
life." When you are tired, burdened, at the end of your ways, what a joy to
discover that we are not alone and that we do not get "there" on our own.
' Cf. Jurgen Moltmann in
The Church in the Power of the Spirit, SCM Press: London, 1977, p.64: "It is
not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill to the world; it is the
mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Pother that includes the church,
creating a church as it goes on its way." [Emphasis mine].
2Harvard University Press, 1989.
3Cf. "The Malaise of Modernity", Anansi: 1991 ], and "History,
Secularity, and the Nova Effect" Unpublished Laing lectures, 2001.
4The final of the two 2004 Cup was played in Lisbon between Greece
and Portugal the afternoon of Sunday July 4th.
5In "Evangelical
Freedom" pp 109-123 in The Homosexuality Debate: Faith Seeking Understanding,
Catherine Sider Hamilton, ed. ABC Publishing: Toronto, 2003.
6Robert D. Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon 8, Shuster:
New York, 2000
7 Robert N. Beliah,
Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American life. Harper &,
Row: New York, 1985. See especially pp.219-237.
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