The One Truth among Many Truths (5th Sunday of Easter - A; John 14:1-14; May 18, 2014)

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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