Have you ever gotten lost? I suppose we all have at one point or another. If you’re driving your car and you get lost it’s no big deal these days. The maps apps on our phones can usually quickly get us back on the right course. They’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated too. Not that many years ago you used to have to put in your destination and you had to stick to the route. If you got off the route it would tell you to make a U-turn. Or else there would be a pause and it would say “recalculating” as it took several moments to figure out a better way.
Of course there is also getting really lost. Like wandering off the path in a forest and losing your sense of direction. Every tree looks the same. You can’t tell what’s a path and what’s not. This quickly goes from being annoying and into being dangerous. The world seems like a small place until you realize just how vast the forests of the Catskills and the Adirondacks really are. The risks of not ever being found are significant.
Have you ever gotten lost in a familiar place? That probably sounds odd, but I think of the way my grandfather would not take his boat out fishing in the Susquehanna River if it was foggy. He had a small airboat, so basically a flat bottom boat with an engine and airplane propeller mounted on the back to blow you around. At his house the Susquehanna River was a mile wide. It was very shallow. In some places you could walk across it. But there were also many partly submerged rock ledges. And there were also many places where there were deep holes and swirling currents. Other places it was flat and calm but still with a current. Of course the fish aren’t too interested in the flat calm areas. They like the holes and rocks. So that’s where you head for fishing. One morning my grandfather and a friend went out in fog; counting on their familiarity with the river to guide them. But pretty soon they were lost. There were rocks and ledges but none of them looked familiar. My grandfather thought they had traveled upstream. His friend thought they had traveled downstream. It turns out without the broader perspective of landmarks all the rocks and ledges looked alike. Of course they were never in real danger. They just had to throw out the anchor and wait for the fog to clear, but he said it was disconcerting to not know where you are despite being in familiar territory.
That takes us to our gospel reading from John 14. Like all of these chapters, there’s a lot going on here. I want to look at just one part. It is probably the most troublesome verse of it all, and it has been misinterpreted and misapplied for ages.
Jesus says in 14;6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” What does that mean? Is believing in Jesus the only way to eternal life? Are all non-believers doomed to eternal damnation? What about everyone who lived before Jesus? Is the salvation of God limited to a very small number?
Those are all good and fair questions. And to answer them we need to go back to being on a river lost in the fog.
It is difficult…, no, it is impossible for us to fully understand the lives of the original readers of John. We live in a society where Christianity and overall Christian philosophy has dominated for centuries. Even if you are of a different religion, or a staunch atheist, you still live in a society where the thought patterns are built around Christianity. We cannot hear this text in any other way.
But for the original readers life as a Christian was a fog. They knew the world in which they lived. It was familiar to them. And yet it is as if they were lost in it. If the original readers were, as many biblical scholars believe, Jews who had been thrown out of the synagogue for believing in Jesus, then their lives had little to hang on to. There were no creeds, no scriptures, no social philosophies that they could look to. There were no Christian buildings or facilities. There was nothing really tangible they could attach their faith to. They had their old Jewish faith, but what did that mean in light of Jesus? They probably had families that were torn apart by faith issues so they probably couldn’t turn to relatives for guidance. All they have is a new small fragile community that is scared.
Into that lost scaredness comes the news of Jesus which gives them light, direction, and something solid to hang on to.
They have discovered that God is not some far off generic deity. God has come in a definitive way they could see, hear, and touch. When Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” don’t interpret it as this is your only hope for eternity and all depends upon you finding it. It is more of here is a joyous solid reality that has been revealed to you. If you want to know what God is like, here’s the solid answer.
Commentator Gail O’Day notes this in the New Interpreter’s Bible, “It is important to try to hear this joyous, world changing theological affirmation in the first-century context of the Fourth Gospel. This is not, as is the case in the [twenty-first] century, the sweeping claim of a major world religion, but it is the conviction of a religious minority in the ancient Mediterranean world.” (Volume 9, Pg. 744) She goes on to say, “It is possible to hear an element of defiance in the proclamation of [this chapter], a determination to hold to this experience and knowledge of God against all opposition and all pressure to believe otherwise… [John’s gospel] declares where it stands in the first-century intra-Jewish debate about the character of God and the identity of God’s people.”
Or let me put that into my own words. Jesus saying that no one comes to the Father except through him is not a theological statement about salvation at all. It is saying that if you want to know about God, if you truly want to know about God, if you truly want to know what God is like, then Jesus is your answer. Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension reveals God’s nature better than anything else ever has or ever will.
You’ve heard me say before that other religions in the world talk about God being loving. That’s fine. I agree with that. But what example of love is there? How do you know? And what form does that love take? What does it look like?
Each religion has its own answer. But if I can humbly but boldly confess John’s answer – Christianity’s answer is to point to Jesus. Jesus is the master and teacher who washes the disciple’s feet, who turns water into wine and can feed a crowd of thousands with a few loaves of bread and a couple fish. Jesus can still the forces of nature and raise a dead man from the grave. And Jesus will himself go on to die, and because of his self-giving love, be raised again.
That takes us to the final thing.
People ask me to pray for healings and sometimes miracles. I gladly do so, but I also know what the Bible tells us about God’s love.
God’s love cannot be counted upon to make us immune to reality. Death still happens. Pain and unfairness still happens. God does not help us escape. But God’s love guides us to live through it.
As many of you know, for the last year I’ve been regularly visiting an elderly woman from Syracuse who was placed in Monroe County Hospital because it was the best place that could give her the care she needed. Since she lived in Syracuse it made little sense for her pastor to make the trip to Rochester. And so I filled in as a professional courtesy.
This woman died a week an a half ago. It was a relief. She’d been on a ventilator for over a year. That was her choice. She had no quality of life, and that was her choice as well. And every time I would go in to see her I would ask God what I was to make of this. She could hear what I said but she could not reply. What should I pray for? For her to die? For her to somehow be miraculously cured despite suffering two severe strokes which put her in this situation?
Given that God through Jesus has revealed Godself in such a way that God did not stay immune from the pains and problems of life, and even was willing to die an unjust death, what does that tell me about God and about what God is likely to do?
Should I expect or pray for a miracle? No. Sure, God can do it. But if I look to Jesus as the example that would not be God’s way of expressing love.
God works in ways that are simultaneously weaker and more powerful than we expect. For God is not a divine vending machine of supernatural cures. God is one who comes with us, deciding to be with us as the world does its thing.
As to paths to eternal life. That’s God’s business and we don’t worry about it. As to what God is like, there God has given us answers. And God has told us to rejoice in that and to share in that so that others know God too.
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