There are two significant learnings from a weekly bible group studying the Gospel of Matthew that I lead which can and should be applied to John 14, verse 6, in particular.
“Jesus said to [Thomas], ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
The first is that Matthew was not used apologetically, that is, as a proof of Jesus’ identity, a tool for evangelism -to grow the church, but rather was used by an existing worshipping community as a testimony as to what had been already experienced, both in the physical sense but also existentially. It is a collection of stories, events and sayings that attests to Jesus’ identity, life and mission meant to shape the worshipping community hearing it.
The second learning was that any study of the Gospels must first address the meaning of the text within the context of the first century church and not the one we know 2000 years later. The configuration of church as we know it would not be recognizable to the people of these first Christ-centered communities to which the Gospels are addressed.
Gail O’Day, who is considered a leading scholar on John’s Gospel, wrote on chapter 14, v. 6-7 (‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ in particular): “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 20th century, the sweeping claim of a majority world religion, but it is the conviction of a religious minority in the ancient Mediterranean world (emphasis mine). It is the conviction of a religious group who had discovered that its understanding of the truth of God carries with it a great price. This conviction has led them into conflict with the Judaism that previous had been their sole religious home, and so they have had to carve out a new religious home for themselves, a home grounded in the incarnation. It is possible to hear an element of defiance in the proclamation… a determination to hold to this experience and knowledge of God against all opposition and all pressure to believe otherwise.”
O’Day goes on to say: “It is a dangerous and destructive anachronism to cite John 14: 6-7 as the final arbiter in discussions of the relative merits of different religions’ experiences and understanding of God. The Fourth Gospel is not concerned with the fate, for example, of Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, nor with the superiority or inferiority of Judaism and Christianity as they are configured in the modern world. These verses are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life it has received in the incarnation. The Fourth Evangelist’s primary concern was the clarification and celebration of what it means to believe in Jesus…. John 14:6 can thus be read as the core claim of Christian identity; what distinguishes Christians from people’s of other faiths is the conviction given expression [in Jesus’ saying …’I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’]. It is, indeed, through Jesus that Christians have access to their God.” (Gail O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible, p. 744-5)
The first century believers who had experienced God, who had seen the face of the beloved one in the face of Jesus could not un-see what they had seen, they could not go back to a way of life that was prescribed by the Judaism of their time. They knew too much, had seen too much, understood too much and there was no going back. Just like you. You have known too much. You have seen too much. You have understood too much and for you, and for me, there is no going back. Theologian John Shea says, “The more our minds entertain larger truths about God, the more we are personally and existentially in a relationship of trust.” (John Shea, Gospel of Matthew, p. 185.)
Rumi, the renown Sufi poet and saint of the 12th century, expresses our individual and collective forward movement in relationship with God in this well known poem:
“The way of love is not a subtle argument.
The door there is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling, they're given wings.”
The verses of John 14 may be seen as the feathers on the new wings of a young bird separated from its mother, falling from its nest. Turning over and over again in a free-fall the new wings begin to catch air. Each feather extending out from the bone and skin of the bird and lying close and neatly together begin to form a sail, and eventually work to right the animal who can then glide on an air current. And from its lowest point having fallen so far it can then soar to the highest regions of the sky and look broadly at the world. This bird sees itself, not as a thing apart from the world, but simply a thing of the world. It is a creature with a viewpoint about the world that encompasses all that is below it. The creatures on the ground also have a viewpoint. Instead of wings they have fins to swim, others have padded feet to walk upon the soft earth, or hairy, sticky appendages that adhere to things enabling them to walk up walls, still others have smooth, tough skin for slithering across the ground and hiding under rocks. And beyond these things there are all manner of expressions of life having every possible viewpoint and experience of the manifestations, the incarnations of the divine.
Each of us has a viewpoint of the incarnate Christ, each capturing the variations of the Spirit within the boundaries of our experience. And sometimes, like Thomas, when we are perplexed, when our hearts are troubled, we think we do not know the way forward.
In these unsettling times of the present pandemic it can feel as if the ground below our feet is shifting day to day. Many things we took for granted are no longer as they were. For many health concerns have given way to economic devastation. For others economic concerns have given way to catastrophic health crises. Jobs and money have evaporated. Thousands who lived a month ago are gone from us now. It is hard to know which way to turn, where to go from here.
Jesus, however, assures us that, in fact, we do know the way forward; to surrender to the fall. To be given wings. To find freedom through devastation. To die to death and to enter into a new life, with new sight, new knowledge, a new way of living - this is the way of Love. It has been said that no one ever awakened spiritually having never experiencing crisis. It is through crisis and insecurity that Jesus leads us - in and through and all the way to the other side.
Reflecting of John 14:1-14, John Shea writes:
“[Jesus] is the way into the many dimensions of the house of love… when I ponder the combination of divine immanence that suffuses all creation and divine transcendence that stretches beyond it… to surrender to this reality is to let the wind carry me…and calm[s] the heart.” (Ibid., p. 185)
Those who fall are given wings to make great sky-circles of freedom. Jesus calls us into flight.
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