Sunday, May 7th: "I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life"

Watch the sermon here

First United Presbyterian Church

“I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”

Rev. Amy Morgan

May 7, 2023

John 14:1-7

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.” 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

Believe it or not, I have never preached on this text. I’ve managed to avoid it all the way through seminary and more than 16 years of ordained ministry. I’ve managed to swerve around it by claiming it is cliché, we’ve all heard it, we all know what it means, so let’s look at something more interesting and less overused. Halfway through this week, I even considered dodging it again and preaching on the stoning of Stephen. I also asked ChatGPT to write my sermon. That’s how desperate I was NOT to preach on this text. 

Because the truth is, I’ve avoided this passage of scripture, not because of what it says, but because of how it has been used. More than just about any line in our sacred texts, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” has been weaponized to condemn to hell anyone who does not or cannot or will not believe in exclusive salvation through Jesus Christ. This snippet of scripture has been used in a way that makes me feel claustrophobic, like the kingdom of God has been constricted so that there just isn’t room for everyone. It makes my faith feel small.

This interpretation comes not from Jesus and the words he says or from the community who committed these words to gospel. This interpretation comes from the simple fact that it is less expensive to control conquered people with religion than to control them with violence. We have heard this text for centuries, not the way the early Christians would have heard it, but how the Holy Roman Empire used it to achieve the Pax Romana. And how empires for centuries have used it to maintain power by maintaining an exclusive claim to salvation through Jesus Christ. 

And that troubles me. Because this text is not about exclusion and condemnation. It is not meant to condense God’s household down to whoever can squeeze into some pre-defined ideological box.

This is the text that we often hear at memorial services because it is supposed to be the ultimate message of comfort, the central message of hope and peace, the epitome of John’s gospel proclamation that Jesus is light and life for all people. So today my hope is that we can hear it this way again, that we can tune out centuries of domineering interpretation and hear the deeply comforting and relational and expansive word Jesus is gifting to his disciples and to all of us. 

To introduce that idea, we’re going to take in a short scene from a film called “The Invention of Lying.” The premise of the film is that the ability for human beings to lie does not yet exist. People can only speak the most honest, often very brutal, truth. But in this scene, one man suddenly and miraculously develops the ability to make up something he does not know to be true.  

[show scene]

In this scene, the idea of everyone getting a mansion in an afterlife is offered as comfort to a dying woman. It’s an alternative to the notion of a forever of nothingness. In the film, it’s described as the first lie ever told. But it’s also the first time a human being has used their imagination, the first time someone has hoped for what might be instead of the harsh reality they can see. 

This new reality, which everyone can only accept as truth, is so amazing that crowds of people camp out at this man’s house and he’s instantly famous and rich. And…he keeps adding to this new reality with rules about how you get a mansion and who gets one and the man in the sky who decides everything. Ultimately, what began as a beautiful message of comfort for a dying woman gets twisted into rigid doctrines that create unhappiness for everyone. 

Now, I’m absolutely NOT saying that Jesus is lying to his disciples in the gospel of John. But he is offering them comfort, an alternative to the reality they seem to be facing. He’s inviting them to imagine and hope.

Just before this passage, Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet and given them this new commandment to love one another. They’ve shared this intimate and meaningful meal, and then Jesus tells them that he’s going to be betrayed and sends Judas out to do what he must do. All the disciples are upset about this revelation that Jesus is leaving them, that one of them is a traitor, that the wonderful relationship they’ve been experiencing with Jesus is about to be completely destroyed. 

Jesus’s first words to them in chapter 14, “do not let your hearts be troubled,” is not addressing grief or sadness. It’s that same Greek word we talked about in the story of Lazarus, when Jesus was “troubled in spirit.” It literally means the snorting of a horse. The disciples are angry and appalled. They are freaking out. 

So Jesus says, “stop freaking out. Believe in God. Believe also in me.” Again, like we’ve talked about before, belief is not intellectual assent to some doctrinal system. It is trust in a person with whom you are in relationship. “Stop freaking out. Trust God, trust me.” 

And then there’s this part that’s kind of hard to translate. Jesus says something like, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have told you. I’m traveling on to prepare a place for you.”

Jesus isn’t leaving the disciples and heading to some exclusive gated community. If he was going someplace that didn’t have room for them to follow, he would have said so. Calm down, I’ll have your bed all made up when you arrive. 

So let’s just pause here for a second and notice that what Jesus is saying is that God is roomy. There’s plenty of space for everyone. This is a clue that maybe what follows is not a declaration of who’s in and who’s out but an invitation into an expansive, roomy relationship. Jesus isn’t cutting off access to God, he is making room for us to have a relationship with God.

Now, I want to explain a little bit about how this might have felt to the community that originally wrote and revered this gospel. The Johannine community was cut off and left out of pretty much every social group in their context. They’ve been kicked of the synagogue, the home where they used to find relationship with God. They aren’t welcome in the homes of those who practice the Roman imperial religion. They are spiritually homeless because of their belief that in Jesus of Nazareth, God inaugurated a new and particular way for humanity to be in relationship with God. 

When John’s gospel talks about “way” and “place” and “dwellings” and “knowing” and “seeing” – all of these are relational metaphors. Anytime a character in John’s gospel tries to take something Jesus says literally, Jesus rolls his eyes and sighs heavily. And tries to explain. And still no one understands what he’s talking about. Notice that in this text, two of Jesus’s disciples, the people who are closest to him and have been following him and listening to his teaching for years – still don’t understand what he’s saying. 

But the community writing and reading John’s gospel did get it. They remembered the Jewish scriptures that talked about God being our dwelling place. They grew up singing the Psalms about walking in the ways of God and not the ways of the wicked. These metaphors were drawn out of the Jewish faith that nurtured them and then rejected them. And so it is comforting to apply these metaphors to the Jesus who has given them a new way of life, taught them a truth that offers hope in the midst of brutal realities, and promised them abundant life, now and always. 

For the Johannine community, for Jesus to be the “way, the truth, and the life,” was not an exclusive claim of salvation through Jesus Christ. It was the description of a relationship. So to follow that up with “no one comes to the Father except through me” was a statement of particularity, of the hope of this community, not of exclusivity. Notice that Jesus uses a relational name for God, “Father,” to designate the particular and intimate relationship Jesus has with God and that his followers can have with God. We should acknowledge that the Father/Son relationship is not helpful, and can even be hurtful, to some of us. Changing the language to Mother or Parent doesn’t necessarily eliminate those concerns. So we do have to use our imaginations to draw up a relationship that, to us, is emotionally healthy and loving, intimate and secure. Whatever that is for you, I hope you will substitute that for Father if you find that healing. But ultimately, Jesus is telling the disciples, and the Johannine Christians, and each of us, “through your relationship with me, you have a relationship with God that is as intimate and loving as the relationship between a parent and child.” 

Jesus is leaving the disciples, the Johannine Christians are spiritually homeless, but that is not the end of the story. That is not the end of their relationship with Jesus and with God. Jesus makes room for everyone to have a loving relationship with God. As preaching scholar Gail O’Day wrote, “These verses are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life it has received in the incarnation.”

If we hear these words of Jesus addressed, not to all those “non-believers,” not to people who follow other faith traditions, but to those of us who have experienced a relationship with the Living God through Jesus Christ, we can celebrate what Jesus promises, take comfort in these assurances. We can re-commit ourselves to the Way of Jesus, live in the truth of his teachings, and know the abundant life he offers us, now and always. These words are Jesus’s gift to us, not our weapon against the rest of the world. 

God’s house, the dwelling-place of the one who created all things, loves all things, and is restoring our relationship with all things – that house is roomy. There is space for all of us to be in relationship with God. Because Jesus came to make that space. The prepare a place for everyone who has been evicted from other relationships, excluded from the gated communities of social circles, denied the shelter of human love. There is room for us. And it is ready. Not someday when we get to heaven. Right now. There is room for us to dwell with God, now and always. And that’s no lie. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.