The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 20, 2008

5 Easter – A
Acts 17:1-15
1 Peter 2:1-10
John 14:1-14

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” This statement of Jesus, as reported by the evangelist John in his Gospel, has been the focal point of a lot of discussion, even a lot of argument. What exactly does it mean? Does it mean, as some contend, that only Christians are saved? Does it mean that if one does not say with his lips that Jesus is Lord, then God has no use for him? Does it mean that if one does not affirm the creed of the Christian Church that he is forever cast off from the God who created him, discarded by the God of love?

The problem with this line from Jesus, when not kept within the context in which Jesus spoke it, is that many who hear it do not hear good news, but bad news. Taken out of context, it sounds like some kind of spiritual stickup: “Your belief or your life! Either believe in Jesus or burn in hell.”

Sadly, some Christians contend that that is exactly what Jesus means. It’s what you hear on many street corners, and even in some churches, even, ironically, in some churches that insist they are “evangelical,” proclaimers of good news.

Jesus does go on to say in our Gospel reading today, “You believe in God. Believe also in me.” And he also adds that “no one comes to the Father, except through me.”

Well, what kind of news is this for us here in the middle of Easter? What kind of news is it, not just here in the Chapel of Our Saviour in Colorado Springs, but over there in Iraq, where Sunni and Shia, covered by American guns, stand toe to toe with fangs bared? What kind of news is it for those in India and Pakistan, where Muslim and Hindu face each other with nuclear clubs, and well, what kind of news is it even here in the United States, and in Europe, where Christian and Muslim and Jew eye one another with increasing suspicion?

In a world such as ours, can these words of Jesus be heard as something other than spiritual blackmail or threat? How do we find Gospel – good news, not bad news – in these words of Jesus?

Well, as they say, context is everything. And context must help us to understand Jesus this morning.

It is necessary, for example, to remember that in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks Greek, not English. That’s part of the context. When Jesus says that he is the “way,” he literally says that he is the “hodos.” That’s the Greek word he uses. It’s a word which means “way,” but it doesn’t mean “way” in the sense of a gate or a door, which can be a barrier as well as an entry. It means “way” in the sense of a “way of life,” or a “road to life.”

The ex-hodos – or exodus, in English – was the road or way out of fear and slavery in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land. And that’s the larger context. In the 14th chapter of John, Jesus and his disciples know that Jesus is about to die. Jesus is taking leave of his friends, and their hearts are troubled over the way things have turned out. They don’t understand the road he is choosing. They are distressed that Jesus, their friend and their hope, is going to die. They are locked up in fear, much the way their enslaved grandfathers and grandmothers were locked up in Egypt, locked up in bondage, fearful, with troubled minds and hearts. So, many translations begin this 14th chapter with, “Let not your hearts be troubled,” or “Set your troubled hearts at rest.”

But here is how Eugene Peterson begins it:

Don’t let this [situation] throw you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.”

Thomas said, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?”

Jesus said, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well.... To see me is to see the Father.”

The reason I like Peterson’s fresh translation here is that it points to the larger context and suggests a different tone of voice. Not a confrontational “I, Jesus, am the only gate into heaven,” but an invitational “I am the road,” in the sense that “The road I am taking is the road to freedom in the face of bondage, the road to life in the face of death.” Or in the sense of “I offer the road to peace, not the way of fear, and my road is available for anyone in the kind of miserable situation we find ourselves in. Trust me when I say that you and I can trust God in this kind of situation, just as our ancestors trusted God in their miserable wilderness.”

And if we remember that when Jesus says he is the truth he also speaks Greek, then we’ll remember that he does not use the English word “truth,” but the Greek word, “aletheia,” not forgetting. That’s what the Greek word for truth means – not forgetting – which is a meaning our English word simply does not convey. Truth, in the language Jesus uses in John’s Gospel, means not forgetting what is basic, fundamental. And because of this, I can just imagine Jesus saying, “I am the road, also the truth”...

...and then adding something like, “Now remember what is basic. Remember that the fundamental fact of existence is trust in God, staying on God’s road, the road of trust in God, which is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living”...

...which is language Peterson uses to translate those verses about faith in the 10th and 11th chapters of the Letter to the Hebrews, which you’ll probably remember as more like, “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.” Faith, as Peterson expresses it, is “the fundamental fact of existence, the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living.”

But however it is translated, in the context of his last night in his earthly body, “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” is what Jesus is getting at when he says that he is the way and the truth and the life. He is urging his disciples to remember to trust God. Remember the truth – that the fundamental fact of existence is trust in God, which is that firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. “Trust God’s road through this vale of tears; it is the road through the world of slavery and fear, the road into freedom and life. It’s the road I am walking right now,” Jesus tells his very Jewish disciples. “Even now as I give up my life in love, I remember that trusting God is the road to life, which is the truth. I trust that God will not disappoint me, but will be with me, even there ahead of me, on the Cross, and even in the grave, and beyond.”

Remember – “It’s the truth,” he adds – remember that such faith has always been the road to life. It was by just such a road that our father Abraham, ”when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. So how can you say, Thomas, that you don’t know where you’re going?”

“You remember Abraham, Thomas, and the road Abraham walked. He walked by his trust in God, by his faith. It was by the road of faith that Abraham made his home in the promised land, like a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents, as Isaac did, and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise, for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect is God. (Hebrews 11:8-10) That’s the truth and the way the children of God have always lived,” Jesus is reminding his disciples as he walks his own road to death. “That’s how I’m called to walk right now,” he adds. “So remember, trust God. That way, God’s way, is the way, the truth, and the life. It’s a road you can walk yourselves, just as Abraham did, and just as I am doing.”

Because context is everything, I’m convinced that this is what is going on with Jesus and his disciples that night before Jesus’ death. He is not insisting that everyone has to recite a creed. After all, on that night in the Upper Room Jesus could not possibly have been providing a proof text for Christian triumphalism, for the simple reason that neither he nor his disciples nor anyone else had ever even met a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian. Jesus’ ignorance of today’s religions and our religious wars is also part of the context in which we must understand Jesus’ words.

“Jesus did not arrive among us enunciating a set of propositions that we are to affirm,” William Willimon reminds us. “There is no point at which Jesus says, ‘You need to believe four propositions about me: Number one, I was born of a virgin. Number two, Scripture in inerrant.... [Number three, I came down from heaven. Number four, I am seated at the right hand of the Father]’ Jesus doesn’t talk like that. Jesus never asks us to agree; he asks us to join up and follow. He did not ask for cognitive assent; he asked for a life of discipleship, involving the whole self, not just the mind.”

“To be a disciple of Jesus,” Harvey Cox offered, “means not to emulate him or mimic him, but to follow his “way,” to live in our [day] the same way [Jesus] lived in his.”

Jesus, in other words, is not insisting that everyone has to believe in the proposition that he is the Second Person of the Trinity. What he is doing is commending to his disciples the same trust in God that he has, trust in God’s promise. He is commending faith in the promise of God as the road, his road, which he trusts will see him through his death into the promised land of Easter, just as God saw Jesus’ enslaved grandparents through the wilderness on the road into the Promised Land of Canaan.

More context: Our English words, “belief” and “trust” and “faith,” are all possible translations of the same Greek word, “pisteo.” But “pisteo,” the Greek word Jesus uses, does not point here in John’s Gospel so much to the affirmation of an intellectual proposition – “I believe that such and such is true” or “I believe that Jesus is Lord” – as it points to actually trusting the truth we have received about God from the past. Belief, in the Bible, is actually living by faith in the promise of God, which carries a promise, we remember, that reaches back to Abraham, and beyond. And that’s the truth. And that’s where the power comes from when we change the word “believe” in the creed to the word “trust,” which we did once before and which we’re going to do again today. Feel the difference when we do it, the difference in tone of voice, and in possibility.

Pamela Eisenbaum, a New Testament scholar, offers an insight that supports my reading of John 14, an insight which helps us hear Jesus’ words as truly evangelical, as good news, good news for his very Jewish disciples, good news for Sunni and Shia and Buddhist and Hindu, good news for everyone, even for us Christians.

“What justifies us? What sets us right with God?” Eisenbaum asks. Is it faith in Jesus? Or is it the faith of Jesus? Saint Paul speaks to this in his letter to the faithful in Galatia when, in many of our English translations, he says that “righteousness from God” – that which saves us – “comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” (Galatians 3:21-22) That’s how the NIV has it. And the Revised English Bible translates Paul similarly – that being put right with God is made effective “through faith in Christ for all who have such faith.”

However, Eisenbaum points out, much recent scholarship, including that of theologically conservative scholars, argues that the Greek phrase that has traditionally been translated as “faith in Christ” – pisteos Christou – is more accurately translated as “faith of Christ,” so that what Paul is saying, when he wrote his letter in Greek, is that one is put right with God, justified, saved, when one trusts Jesus by having the same faith that Jesus had, namely, faith in God. That is, we are justified with God when, like Jesus, we have such faith in God that we, too, seek to give up our own lives in love, trusting in the promise of God to provide life under all circumstances, even under such a lousy circumstance as the Cross. Even at the Cross, Jesus himself trusted in God, and that’s what will see us through as well.

Ernst Haeckel, a 19th-century scientist, once said that if he could have just one question answered authoritatively, it would be this one: Is the universe friendly? An affirmative answer to that question is the good news of the Bible, the good news of Jesus, the good news of faith, the good news of Easter: the universe is friendly. The promise of God is trustworthy now, just as it was trustworthy for our father Abraham on his road long ago, and just as it was trustworthy for the Israelites on their road in the wilderness, and just as it was trustworthy for Jesus at Gethsemane and on the Cross. This is the truth Jesus is. So “we believe in God, who raised Jesus from the dead,” Paul goes on to say (Romans 4:24), which is the same confidence that Jesus himself had as he approached his death. This is the truth, the road, the same belief, the same trust, the same faith that Jesus commends to his very Jewish disciples, and to us.

Context is everything. And it is important to remember – here, once more, is truth raising its head again – it’s important to remember that Jesus’ persistent charge, the commission he comes back to time and again as he says goodbye to his disciples, is that they love one another as he has loved them. This commission is the context of Jesus’ farewell to his disciples: “A new commandment I give you,” he says in chapter 13. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And almost as if he’s afraid they might already have forgotten it, in chapter 15 he says it again: Remember, “my command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

And then, as if John is himself later recalling those final hours with Jesus before he died, and perhaps recalling his own account of them in his Gospel, as if he is reminding himself of the truth, the evangelist reminds us again in his great first letter: “This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another.... We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.... [And] this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence....”

Context is everything, John insists as he continues: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

“Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.” That’s the context, the whole context. That’s the faith of Jesus, and the faith of his evangelist John. It’s the faith of Easter. It’s the faith that Jesus himself had, and the faith he calls us to, a faith available to all regardless of creed.

This is the good news of Easter – not that we loved God, but that God loved the world so much that he sent his own Son, that whoever trusts the Father the way Jesus trusts the Father, laying down his life in love, knows both God and life. Whoever. Not whoever is right. Not whoever says. Not whoever affirms the creed. Not whoever is a Christian. But whoever. Whoever loves the way Jesus loves.

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life because of his trust in the One who is trustworthy, the God of love. And that’s the truth, also the life, also the road.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.