“…
EXCEPT THROUGH ME”
Rev. James
Clubine
Sunday,
April 20, 2008
Acts 7:54-60
1 Peter 2:1-10
John 14:1-14
Text: John 14:6 Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way,
and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Introduction
From a list of prayers written by children come this one from a boy
named Charles; “Dear God, I do not think anybody could be a better God than you.
Well, I just want you to know that. And I am not just saying that because you are
already God.”
Permit me a question: Do you
have to like God for God to be God? We humans
have this propensity to choose the god of our own liking as if human preference were some
sort of ultimate guide. We in Western culture
so cherish personal choice that religion is treated like a smorgasbord of faith dishes
from which it is thought we can choose a meal to our own taste. Faith claims have been relegated to the category of
personal opinion. In a 2005 interview rock
singer Cheryl Crow said; “I believe in God. I believe in Jesus and Buddha and
Mohammed and all those that were enlightened. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m
a strict Christian. I’m not sure I
believe in heaven.”
So when we hear a saying of
Jesus like this one from John 14:6 - ‘I am
the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’
– it has a rather disquieting feel to our modern ‘everyone-is-entitled-to-their-own-opinion’
sensibilities. What is the source of our
uneasiness with Jesus’ claim? It wasn’t
that many years ago that the reading of this text would not have generated the sort of
angst some feel today. There are voices within
Christian faith that call for us to soften our talk of Jesus – let Jesus be one among
many – his word ‘except through me’ is for Christians only.
There is also this mood in our culture that seems to
have rejected the notion that there can be any ultimate claims made about anything
(excepting, of course the ultimate claim that ‘there are no ultimate claims’). Extremist, fundamentalist, elitist, exclusivist,
dogma and doctrine are labels used to reject ideas or claims deemed harmful. Jesus’ word ‘no one comes to the Father
except through me’ puts him in the category of extremist fundamentalist.
Are our sensibilities about
ultimate-sounding religious claims because people of the religions of the world now live
in close proximity to one another in our cities and communities like Markham rather than
in distant lands? To be sure, this has had its
impact on our faith perceptions. However,
these first century Christians lived in a society of religious pluralism – some
religions had legal status in the Roman empire, others did not – and they do not seem
uneasy about this saying of Jesus. In fact,
Jesus lived in just such a world and yet makes this claim.
I think something else is going
on in our Western culture and it is that secularism has the levers of power and it will
allow no rivals to ultimate claims about God or about the nature of life. Look, for example, in our country how talk of God
is expunged from the public square – political life and public schools. We have set aside the notion that God is the source
of all truth and the ultimate authority of all governance.
The President of the United States in his welcome remarks to Pope Benedict
put his finger on this very issue when he said: “In a world where some no longer believe that we can
distinguish between simple right and wrong, we need your message to reject this
"dictatorship of relativism," and embrace a culture of justice and truth.”
I
think it is evident that the President’s speech writers read Pope Benedict’s
2006 lecture on faith and reason given at the University of Regensburg. In it he spoke of how modern understanding of
reason has become uncouple from faith and called for the necessity of faith and reason to
come back together in a new way. In his
response to the President’s welcome he cited an example of the danger of this
separation when he said: “history shows time and again that in a world without truth,
freedom loses its foundation, and a democracy without values can lose its very soul.”
I am
not convinced that people of other faiths want Christians to give up what they believe for
their sakes. In some of the courses I have
undertaken recently Jewish Rabbis, Muslim Imams and Christian clergy will be studying
together. We profoundly disagree on many
things, yet it does not seem to prevent us from these studies. It seems to me that secularism in effect says; you
religious boys and girls can study together all you like, we just want you to know that it
doesn’t mean anything.
‘I am the way, and the truth, and the
life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ This
word of Jesus was offered to his disciples as a word of hope, a promise that all would be
well in the long run, a word of assurance or surety that was aimed at calming troubled
hearts. This is the night on which Jesus
betrayal will take place. He has told his
disciples; ‘I am with you only a little longer’ and ‘where I am going you
cannot come.’
This news is very troubling to
these disciples – if Jesus is gone all is lost as far as they are concerned. The vision of the future they envisioned with Jesus
at the helm has just been shattered. What did
they follow him for – or as Thomas asked – “Lord, we do not know where you
are going. How can we know the way? This word
from Jesus is the answer to that question - ‘I
am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’
It is a word of assurance to
any human seeking for God – how can we know the way?
It is the promise of the One who is the way, the truth, the life that such
desire would never be ignored by God. Jesus
said; ‘I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my
voice.’ Peter said; ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35but
in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. Psalm 145:9 The Lord is good to all, and his
compassion is over all he has made. Our trust
is in God who is truth and will do what is right.
No one comes to the Father
except through me – is not spoken as if this were to impose some barrier to God but
to remove the barrier – to make the way possible.
He is not making some new requirement, but telling the disciples the purpose
of his life given for them – to make the way possible that is otherwise not possible.
I invite you to consider that
Jesus word ‘no one comes to the Father except through me’ is conveying the very
same idea that the prophet Isaiah uttered when he said; ‘All we like sheep have gone
astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity
of us all.’ This word ‘no one comes
to the Father’ expresses the reality the Apostle Paul spoke of in saying; “all
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Now I know that the Biblical
message that human sin has separated the human from God is often rejected as distasteful. I wonder if some of this is because of how the
message has been delivered by some preachers who seem to take delight in calling people
sinners. As I hear this word from Jesus I hear
the broken heart of God – God who is so in love with the human that God’s heart
is broken by this separation. It is a word of
hope because even though the human, left to themselves, does not seek God, God has come in
Christ Jesus to show that God is the one who makes the way.
And I also wonder if the
negative reaction to this all-encompassing claim by Jesus proves the point. The challenge of the claim ‘no one come to the
Father except by me’ is that this means me – that is, it has a claim on my life. And we seem to naturally bristle when someone
proposes to know something about me without checking with me first. Our response to Jesus – ‘hold on a
minuet, I do the choosing about how I will get to the Father, assuming I even want to’
– shows that we have indeed ‘each turned to our own way.’
The flip side of ‘no one
comes’ is the one great exception ‘except through me.’ On the landscape of the world where like sheep all
have gave gone astray, the great Shepherd takes action to go and find them. Humans, left to themselves, do not rise up to
apprehend God, rather God takes action to apprehend us.
In some sense, then, all coming to the Father, all seeking after God is
initiated by the one who comes seeking for us because of God’s own great love for us.
“Except through me”
is the claim that God makes possible what is otherwise impossible. It is isn’t a statement about which line
to get in – it is the glorious hope of the gospel that God in Jesus Christ turns what
is otherwise a big “No’ into God’s great “yes.” It is a wonderful word of assurance that God is not
about to give humans up to the consequence of their straying. It is a great word of peace that things have been
made right between us and God by Him. It is the great word of rest that we don’t have
to struggle to find God but that God comes for us.
If everyone were to write on a
piece of paper why they came to church today, I am sure that there would be some
differences of what was top of mind in response to that question. However, the similarity is that the Sprit of God is
the same one moving in all our lives to draw us to God’s self. Those inklings of our imagination that niggle at us
that we need God in our life, that something bigger is going on than what I can detect
with my five senses, those reminders to pray, the peace we sense in worship, the myriad of
way that the Spirit of God woes us – these are because of the great exception –
the exception that God comes to seek us out.
As Christians we are called to
bear witness to Christ in the world who said ‘no one comes to the Father except
through me’. This is not the same thing
as saying ‘we’ve got the best religion.’
In the ongoing conversation with other religions, this is the great
contribution we have to make to that conversation – that the impossible is made
possible through faith in Christ. That our
seeking after God is God initiated. Other
religions may well have their own contributions to this conversation – we need to
trust God that he is quite capable of resolving how this all works out.
And as for the ultimate sound
of what Jesus says, I suggest to you that we have many experiences in life that point in
the direction of one ultimate source for life. All
humans breath the same substance we call air, do we not?
We must all have food to be sustained, if we are standing outside on a rainy
day we will all get wet, peace of heart is better than turmoil – and I could go one
and on with one after another. Why would it
surprise us that God is one?
So today, we baptize these
children in the name of the Father and the Son and The Holy Spirit because the way that
was made for us in Christ Jesus, we believe is made also for them. The God who apprehended us is also at work in their
hearts and lives to apprehend them that as they mature they will come to experience the
great ‘yes’ of God’s presence in their lives through Christ Jesus.
Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth,
and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
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