Fifth Sunday of Easter - The Way, really?

Fifth Sunday of Easter

The Way, really?

‘Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.’

John 14.6-7

This is controversy! This is arrogance! Surely, this cannot be the only way!

Is this not thinking that relegates all other faiths and all lives well lived to mere irrelevance because they do not believe that Jesus is ‘the way and the truth and the life’? It is not Jesus’ words that have misguided us but the arrogance of Western Christianity in recent centuries that insists that everyone else should give up their own ways of life and follow the way we worship and understand Jesus’s teaching. To think this way is to deny the very truth of the Gospel message. Many Christians and churches are guilty of promoting a truth and a life that Christ would not recognise. This is not the way.

On the other hand, this is not to suggest that all religions and well-intentioned lifestyles are the same in some kind of wishy-washy democracy. In this way, God becomes unknowable, unapproachable, distant. It becomes impossible for any religious figurehead, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna or Jesus to lead us to God.

We find the truth and the life in the way Jesus led his life; the perfect example. The man who cared for the downtrodden, poverty stricken, and ailing people that came to him. The man who served to the point where he washed his disciples’ feet and told them to do likewise. The man who wept and prayed. The man who obeyed to the point of death on a cross to save us all from spiritual destruction. I cannot believe this was arrogance or self-serving.

I long for the day when the church has the courage to truly profess the mission of Jesus without their own blinkered vision of God’s kingdom and who fits in there. Only then will we begin to see Christ in those who are on other journeys. Only then will we be believed when we profess the lifechanging message that he first spoke.

I heard the voice of Jesus say:
‘I am this dark world’ Light;
look unto me, your morn shall rise,
and all your day be bright.’
I looked to Jesus and I found
in him my star, my sun;
and in that light of life I’ll walk,
till travelling days are done.

              Horatius N. Bonar (1806-90)

He is risen indeed. Hallelujah!

The Methodist Church provides worship and devotional resources at www.methodist.org.uk