The One Truth among Many
Truths
5th Sunday of Easter - A
John 14:1-14
May 18, 2014
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First
United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
“I am the way, and
the truth, and the life.” Wow!
Jesus is the
way. There isn’t any other. There is only one mountain and there is only
one road that goes up the mountain. If
someone isn’t on that road, they’re on the wrong road. Pretty simple, huh?
Jesus is the truth. There isn’t any other truth. Anything that looks like truth that isn’t that
truth isn’t the truth at all. This could
save a lot of money for anyone who had thought to go to college—what would be
the point, really? We already know the
whole truth.
Jesus is the
life. Any life that isn’t Jesus is
really death in disguise. If you want
the life that God has to offer, it’s right there in Jesus and nowhere
else.
Jesus is the way,
and the truth, and the life. Apart from
Jesus there are only false roads, falsehoods, and death.
If we follow this
logic, then the practical upshot is this: the only way to get to heaven is to
profess Jesus and believe in him in our hearts.
Otherwise we are going to hell. There
are hard truths in life and this is one of them. Good people whom we may admire, people like
Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, even our grandparents and our children are all either
in hell or headed there unless they—the ones who are still alive at any
rate—become professing Christians. After
all, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.
Now there are, I
think, at least three problems with the reading that I have laid out. The first is a pastoral problem. The problem is this: how do I go about
explaining to a family’s Aunt Sarah that her husband Fred, though he was a good
man who worked hard, loved her and their children, and strove to leave the
world a better place than he found it, is in fact not in heaven because he
wasn’t a Christian. It seems that he
experienced the church as falling pretty far short of its ideals and this
scandalized him, so much so that he refused to have anything to do with Jesus or
with Jesus’ God who, after all, ought to stand behind the brand name of the
family business. I can’t paper over this
difficulty, either, not if there is a chance that someone will misinterpret my
kindness as suggesting that they don’t need to be a Christian to avoid his
fate.
So, at a time when
this family needs the love and care and support of God that is present, however
imperfectly, in the church, they get from the church instead a proclamation of
God’s merciless wrath against those who don’t believe or say the right things.
The second
difficulty with this “Jesus’ way or the highway” reading of John is
theological. It asks us to believe that
the God who loves us so much that Jesus came to die for us is also the same God
who sentences people to hell forever with no possibility of parole for failing
to confess the right creed or have the right experiences. It asks us to believe that God is not as
merciful as the governor of Iowa or the President of the United States because
they pardon people, but God does not. It
asks us to believe that because I am willing to forgive Gandhi for not being a
Christian I am more loving than God.
I know I can’t point
to a specific biblical text that says this, but from what I have learned from
the Bible of what God is like and how God is with us, I have come to believe
that God never stops loving us. God will
woo us through this lifetime and into the next if need be until we respond in
kind. Because we are free to refuse
God’s love, I believe that hell exists, but I also believe that it’s mostly
empty and that the only residents are the temporary ones who still think they
don’t want to be in heaven. If God’s
ultimate nature is love and if love is the deepest meaning of the universe, then
hell as proclaimed by the Christian right makes no sense.
The third problem
with this line of thinking has to do with the fate of the world and the
splendid and bewildering array of life that it hosts. If there is only one truth and we are in
possession of that one truth and everyone else is either wrong or agrees with
us, then any other opinion firmly held must be a threat to us. This line of thinking carves the world up
into “us” and “them.” “We” must oppose
“them” with every fiber of our being, because we are right and they are
wrong. “We” can never make peace with
“them” because that would mean betraying the truth. “We” can’t even engage “them” in serious
conversation, at least not the kind where we really listen to each other, because
we dare not risk being converted away from the truth.
By definition there
is only room for one absolute truth in the universe. It must exclude every idea that is not
already implied by it. Of course, each
of us will understand this truth differently and so only one of us is right and
the rest of us are wrong and the one who is right has an obligation to persuade
the ones who are wrong. By force, if
necessary.
So what, then, do we
toss out John’s gospel, since I seem to be saying that everything is
relative? I mean, what’s the point if
we’re all going to heaven anyway?
Well, I don’t have
any problem opposing a text of the Bible.
Remember I’ve said that the Bible is not a book so much as it’s a
conversation. We are not so much being
asked to submit to the Bible as we are to enter its conversation. And sometimes in conversations we agree and
sometimes we disagree—at least if it’s a conversation worth having—and the
important thing is to stay with it. So
if we need to disagree with John, I’m okay with that.
But let’s make sure
that we understand him first. At first
reading John’s Jesus is serene and lofty, far removed from the ordinary
world. He may give his life, but no one
can take it from him. The Jesus of
Matthew, Mark and Luke struggles to understand and do what God wants, but not
John’s Jesus. John’s Jesus knows what is
going to happen before it happens and is untroubled by it. The disciples may not get it, but Jesus lays
it out for them over and over again.
The reality of
John’s community was far from the serenity we see in John’s Jesus. John’s community was in trouble. They had come to a final divorce from the
Jewish synagogue. The anger and pain left
over from that are very much in evidence.
They were having real struggles trying to decide who they were as a
community and what their task in the world was to be. They were wounded and confused. They felt abandoned. They took it out on each other and their
Jewish neighbors.
John was writing to
a demoralized community, divided against itself and threatened from the
outside. Jesus’ declaration, “I am the
way, and the truth, and the life” was meant as a comfort for their grief and as
a support that would strengthen them in their difficult struggle for existence.
It was not meant to
become a program for oppressing people who did not follow Jesus. It was not given as a creed to an institution
with a membership of a billion so that they could use it as a club against its
non-member neighbors. No, it was
something more modest than that. It was
reassurance and a reminder to a struggling community of Jesus-followers.
John’s community had
other options available, other ways of being in the world. There were other ways of thinking, speaking and
seeing the world, other truth systems that they could choose. There were other possible lives than the hard
one they were living. John wanted to
remind them of who they were. John
wanted to remind them of the commitments they had made and how that shaped the
world they lived in. For
Jesus-followers, Jesus is the path.
For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the truth. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is life.
When the going got
rough these Jesus-followers needed to be reminded of this.
We find ourselves in
difficult times, too. Our difficulties
are not the same as those faced by John’s community, but sometimes we need the
same reminders. We’re not always sure
how to live in the world as Jesus-followers.
In fact most of the time we’re pretty unsure. There are other ways of being in the world, there
are other messages, there are other lives.
Being a Jesus-follower is not the only available option. Any of us can see this simply by turning on
the television or opening up a web browser.
I’m here is to
remind us of the commitments we have made.
At one time or another we stood in front of this congregation or another
and committed ourselves to being Jesus-followers. If we’ve tried to do that on our own, we may
have discovered just how easy it is to place that commitment in the background while
we’ve gotten on with seemingly more important things: getting good grades, making
a successful career, or raising kids.
I’m here to remind
us all—on behalf of the Church—that we are Jesus-followers. Jesus is our way, our truth and
our life.
That’s not an
invitation to intolerance or arrogance. Our
neighbors may have their way, their truth, their life and they may be different
from ours. We don’t have to impose our
way, our truth or our life on our non-Christian neighbors. We just have to follow the Jesus who is our
way, our truth and our life. That’s
all. Because we are
Jesus-followers. And that’s what we do.
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