Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 24, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have a confession to make that I suppose as a Christian pastor I really should keep to myself; but then I don’t like keeping things from you that affect my pastoring, so here goes. The Gospel of John sometimes drives me straight up nuts! I mean, I have favorite passages in other Gospels, and all of the other Gospels have passages I could do without or that just don’t speak to me; but John’s Gospel is different. John has passages that I love and other passages that I not only don’t like or that don’t speak to me but that I think are pernicious. I know that, whatever they may have been in the past, they are not the word of God for us today. And the thing is, John often puts the two things, the beautiful divine truth and things I just cannot accept in adjoining verses, or even in the same verse, and that, frankly, drives me nuts.

The best example of what I’m talking about is found in the passage from John that we just heard. It is verse 6 of chapter 14: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." The first sentence is the good part: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." It is divine truth, at least for us Christians. There is also a way in which it is true for everyone that I explained when I preached on this text here three years ago (The Way, April 28, 2002). But then, with the next breath, in the very same verse, comes the bad part: "No one comes to the Father except through me." That line is pernicious, and it has been used for pernicious purposes throughout the history of Christendom. I don’t believe that Jesus is the only way. I doubt that many of you believe that, despite the fact that that understanding is all around us in popular Christianity today. I don’t think that this understanding is consistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I think, frankly, that we are free to ignore it and ignore it we must if we are to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ in our world today. Let me try to explain.

I need to begin by giving you what I believe to be a fact that some of you know but that some of you may not. The historical fact almost certainly is that the historical person Jesus of Nazareth did not say any of the things attributed to him in the Gospel of John. That at least is the conclusion of the Jesus Seminar and of many other Bible scholars. Now let me quickly add that the fact that Jesus didn’t actually say the words John put in his mouth doesn’t necessarily mean that the statements John’s Jesus makes are not in some profound sense true. Many of them are, but some of them aren’t. What’s going on in the Gospel of John is that the author is working within an ancient literary convention in which it was considered proper and appropriate to express what an author wanted to communicate by putting the author’s words in the mouth of a prominent, respected, even worshipped person. Certainly John didn’t think he was doing anything wrong when he attributed words to Jesus that Jesus didn’t say. It was his way of expressing his experience of who Jesus had become for him and for his community. I am stressing that much of what John had Jesus say was divine truth for John and his community for a reason. You see, what John needed to say to convey truth to his people nineteen hundred years ago may not be what we need to hear to have divine truth conveyed to us today. That’s what I think is going on with the second statement of John 14:6, that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus. Let me try to explain.

We have to start by looking at what John 14:6 actually says and what it doesn’t say. Listen to it again: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." If you’re like me, you probably don’t actually hear what the verse really says when you read it or have it read to you. I’ll bet many of you hear not what the author of John actually said but something like this: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to God and be saved except through believing in Jesus Christ. That is in fact what the Christian tradition has for the most part taken the second sentence of this verse to mean. But listen again. It doesn’t say that. There’s no problem with I am the way, the truth, and the life. That’s true for John’s community and for ours. The second sentence, however, mentions neither God nor believing in Jesus, does it? It says no one comes to the Father, not no one comes to God. And it says "except through me," not except by believing in me. Those of you who have done any amount of Bible study with me know that I often say that we need to try to read the Bible without all of the traditional Christian presuppositions that we bring to it and impose on it. This verse is a classic case in point. It just doesn’t say what most Christians take it to say.

So what does it say? It talks first of all not about coming to God but about coming to "the Father." Now, "the Father" isn’t just John’s term for God. It is his term for a specific understanding and experience of God. "Father" was not a common term for God before Jesus. Father, "Abba", is what Jesus called God. When John says Father he means the new, for Christians definitive revelation of God as Father in and through the incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Gail O’Day, the scholar from whom I take this interpretation, puts it this way: "It is indeed only through the incarnation that the identity of God as Father is revealed." She says that we need to take that distinction between coming to God and coming to "the Father" seriously, and so we shall here this morning.

Then there’s the "through me." It’s not "by believing in me," and although in other places the Gospel of John has Jesus talking about believing in him (see for example John 3:18), I think the author did not use the language of belief in Jesus here for a reason.

The line about no one coming to the Father except through Christ is not in fact about some necessity of believing in Jesus. Rather, it is nothing more than a restatement of the truth that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the knowledge of God as Father, to knowledge of the God revealed in Jesus Christ except through Christ as the revelation of that God. We come to God as Father not simply by believing in Jesus, whatever that may mean, but because Jesus is the revelation of God as Father. He is what makes knowing and coming to God as Father possible because he is the one who makes God known to us in that way. This, I think, is a reading of this text that is truer to its original meaning than the exclusivist meaning that we usually read into it.

Then there is the audience to whom the author of the Fourth Gospel was speaking when he had Jesus say "No one comes to the Father except through me." In religion, as in most other areas of life, context is everything. Let me cite a non-Biblical example. You’ve probably all heard the line "first let’s kill all the lawyers." It is often cited as a statement about the evil of lawyers, and on its face that’s what it sounds like; but context is everything. The line is from Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, Part II, where it is spoken by a henchman for a would-be tyrant. Shakespeare’s point is not that lawyers are bad but that as those who seek to assure the rule of law they are the ones standing in the way of tyranny or anarchy. It is a pro-lawyer statement, not an anti-lawyer statement.

So we need to know the context before we can know what a Bible verse means for us. The context of John 14:6 is that of a small religious minority struggling to hold on to their faith, a faith that has led to persecution and expulsion from their former faith home in Judaism. The verse, O’Day says, is not "the sweeping claim of a major world religion." Rather, "in the unambiguous words of John 14:6-7, the Fourth Gospel declares where it stands in the first-century intra-Jewish debate about the character of God and the identity of God’s people." In that context the statement was probably necessary to give strength and hope to people struggling against pressure and even persecution to change their beliefs. It is a very different matter when we transport John’s words from his context to our own and use it to speak to questions that John never asked. As O’Day says, John is not concerned with the fate of Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. He is not even concerned with the relative superiority or inferiority of Christianity and Judaism as those great faiths exit in the world today. O’Day says that we need to "bracket out the questions that contemporary Christians falsely import into these verses...." What was God’s word of hope to a persecuted minority nineteen hundred years ago gets turned into our word of Christian exclusivism and even religious imperialism in the world today, where Christianity is and for centuries has been the faith of imperial and imperialistic nations. The words were probably true in a way for John’s audience when he wrote them; but context is everything. They are not, or at least an exclusivist interpretation of them is not, true for us.

So, what do we have? We have a statement-Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life-that is profoundly true combined with an understanding that it is profoundly true for us. We know that it’s true. We’ve experienced it. We feel it. We know it in the marrow of our bones. Yet we must reject any interpretation of the next line, that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus, that makes Christianity the only way, that excludes non-Christians from God’s grace or that seeks to justify compelling people of other faiths to conform to our faith. To us, as opposed to what it may have been when it was written so long ago, John’s exclusivism appears as just one more human attempt to limit the love of God; but the great Good News of the Christian faith is that God’s love knows no limits. Our failings, our sin do not limit it. God loves us anyway. Cultural prejudices do not limit it. God knows no such prejudices. Religion does not limit it, no matter how hard it may try to do so. God transcends the religions through which we come to God, and that includes Christianity. Jesus is the truth, the way, and the life for us and for all who find God through him, but people come to God through other expressions of God’s truth too. So: Everybody come! Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and everybody else, come to the banquet of God. Come and be nourished and blessed. Come by your way. We’ll come by ours. And we’ll meet you at the place where God reaches out to all of us, and there we will rejoice together that God has found us, all of us, and we, all of us, have found God. Thanks be to God. Amen.