John 14.4-7
Nearly thirty years ago now, it was homecoming morning in Charlottesville. A month into the fall semester of my fourth year at the University of Virginia, I’d planned to skip the football game and was holed up at an empty carrel back in the stacks of the old Alderman library.
I had a Bible on the desk for a class I was taking on the Fourth Gospel— the Gospel which begins by declaring that Mary’s boy is both the Son of the Father and his only Word. Along with the Bible on the desk, I also had a couple of LSAT prep books which I’d already started to dog-ear and underline. At the library carrel on the other side of the row of bookcases was a tall, skinny, African American man wearing large headphones and an orange-and-navy track suit. He was busy highlighting a biochemistry textbook and taking notes on colored index cards. I’d started working on some sample problems from the prep book when suddenly there was a guy leaning against the end of the bookcase, with his feet crossed nonchalantly and a crinkly, plastic-covered book in his hands.
“What are you workin’ on?”
“Me? Um, studying for the LSAT,” I said.
He had a beard on a tan face and dark hair that stuck out from the black knit hat on his head. He was wearing jeans that were ripped at the knees and a brown Henley shirt.
“You’ve got a lot of lawyers in your family already, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Wait, how did you . . . ?”
“Don’t freak out, Jason,” he said, and pulled a different book—anthropology—from the shelf and flipped through it.
“You like that other class a lot, don’t you?” he said, pointing at the Harper Collins Study Bible.
“Yeah, I really do,” I said. “But I like the other classes too. It’s hard, you know, knowing what God wants you to do with your life.”
“I just want you to enjoy your life,” he said.
I looked around for my roommates who surely must be punking me.
“Don’t do anything just to satisfy someone else’s expectations and don’t go down any path just to measure up to what the world defines as success. That’s what I freed you from,” he said, smiling.
And then he pointed at the Bible and said, “If you’ll have the most fun doing that, then that’s what you should do.” He slid the book back in the empty space on the bookshelf. He held out his arm to fist bump me and said, “Relax, man. You’re going to have a grand time.”
“Hold up,” I said, trying to find my voice, “I didn’t catch your name.”
But he’d already disappeared behind the graffitied, heavy fire door at the end of the long row of stacks. After a few moments, I turned to the premed student on the other end of the bookcase. Speaking up so as to be heard over his headphones, I said, “Did you catch that guy’s name?”
“What guy? Nobody been here, boss, but you and me.”
He is both the Son of the Father and his only Word; that is, Jesus is God’s image for us and he is God’s address to us.
Jesus alone and none other.
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In his first epistle, John the Evangelist writes: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life.”
Notice— it is not limited to audition.
The Word of the Father is something that can be seen and touched.
Which is to say, the Father’s Word is not a something at all.
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A few hours after Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, Judas leads a torch-carrying mob of religious officials to the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives where Jesus is praying. The chief priests and the Pharisees have been hunting Jesus for over a week— ever since the LORD raised his friend Lazarus from corruption in the tomb when Jesus had declared to the astonished onlookers, “I AM Resurrection and Life.”
“We’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth,” the mob announces in the Garden.
The same Jesus who had earlier slipped through crowds untouched and unseen voluntarily and deliberately gives himself up. The one who has preached peace does not resort to violence in order to resist them. He identifies himself. No, he reveals himself.
“We’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth.”
And Jesus responds with his final I AM saying in the Fourth Gospel. The last self-attestation is as stripped down and bare as he soon will be upon the cross.
“I AM,” Jesus answers.
“And immediately,” John writes, Judas and the lynch mob stumble backward— bowled over— and fall to the ground.
“I AM.”
Ego eimi.
As Fleming Rutledge comments:
“The final I AM saying of Jesus is the climax of them, and it cannot be construed as anything other than a deliberate appropriation by Jesus of the name given by God to Moses from the Burning Bush. Precisely at the moment when his passion begins, Jesus unequivocally identifies himself as nothing less than the living presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the creator of the universe, the Lord who is and who was and who is to come.”
In reply to the LORD’s call of him, Moses had said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
“Tell them I AM has sent you,” God says to Moses.
“We’ve been sent for Jesus of Nazareth,” the accomplices of Judas say.
“I AM,” that same Jesus of Nazareth— strangely— replies.
Christ’s final “I AM” saying merely compresses what he asserts to the eleven in the Upper Room. If his last “I AM” statement is his most compressed testimony, this one at the beginning of his Farewell Discourse is the most comprehensive, admitting no compromise with other claimants. Jesus is thoroughly humble and absolutely without modesty. To proclaim Jesus— Jesus himself insists—is to do nothing less than posit his unique, singular identity as God with the Father. “I AM the way, the truth, and the life,” Jesus reveals to his disciples, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Here in the Upper Room, Jesus has just announced that the place to which he is going (i.e., the cross), the place by which they will all have a share in the Father’s own life, is not a place where they can immediately follow.
“Where I am going you know,” Jesus says.
But, despite having already predicted his passion on three different occasions, they know his whither no better than they understand his whence. Thomas is bold enough to admit his puzzlement, “LORD, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” As he did with the grief-stricken sisters of Lazarus, turning their belief in the when of the resurrection into a claim about his very own identity (“I AM the Resurrection and the Life.”), Jesus responds to Thomas’s question about a destination with another self-attestation. He takes Thomas’ where question and answers in terms of who.
“I AM the way to truth and life.”
Jesus is going up to the cross and down into death and, through them, to the Father. And through him— and only through him— we will follow. Not only is he the exclusive way to the true and living God, he himself is the truth of God; this is why he remains silent in the face of Pontius Pilate’s cynical question, “What is truth?” Again, the truth is no more a what than the Resurrection is a when; the truth is a who. No account of truth has priority over this person. And the one who is the Way of God and the Truth of God is, just so, the Life of God.
He is the liveliness of God.
He is God at work in our world; the infinite out and about in the finite.
Which is to say, he is God’s Visible Word.
Or as Thomas Aquinas comments on verse six, “Walk with the man Jesus and you will arrive at God.”
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Only with the man Jesus will you arrive at God.
There is no other way.
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In the fourth book in his Chronicles of Narnia, The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis depicts narratively the immodest claim Christ makes for himself in verse six of his Farewell Discourse.
In the story, Jill has entered a strange and magical country at the top of a very high mountain. After wandering for some time in search of water to drink, Jill encounters Aslan the Lion. Desperately parched, Jill discovers that the lion is lying between her and a deliciously babbling stream. Jill is terrified of the lion, but she is also dreadfully thirsty. Aslan asks her if she is thirsty, and she replies that she is dying of thirst.
“Then drink,” the lion tells her.
She is too afraid to venture near the Lion and asks if he would mind leaving while she drinks. She quickly realizes the presumption of this request, “She might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.” Meanwhile, the sounds of the running water make her more and more thirsty. Jill asks the lion if he will promise not to do anything to her if she comes to the stream and drinks, but the Lion responds that he makes no promises.
Driven nearly frantic with thirst, Jill comes a step nearer without noticing it. She then asks the lion if he ever eats girls. The lion responds matter-of-factly, “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms.”
When Jill tells the lion that she does not dare to come and drink, the lion replies that she will then die of thirst.
Jill comes another step nearer and says, “I suppose I must go and look for another stream, then.”
But the lion replies, “There is no other stream.”
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Not long after I was encountered— called— in the stacks at the university library, I shared my story with the committee of pastors charged with vetting candidates for ordination. I quickly learned not to tell the story. Not only because clergy were the quickest to dismiss the liveliness of God but because of the claims implicit in the one who so encountered me.
“Excuse me,” I remember a pastor interjecting, “Exactly how do you know the person you met in the library was Jesus?”
“What was that?” I asked her. The identity of the one who had encountered me struck me as so unavoidable and obvious that her question surprised me.
“How do you know it was Jesus? It could’ve been anybody, or some other spirit.”
I shook my head.
“There’s no one else it could’ve been,” I replied, “God called me. And just as humanity has no way of approach to God apart from Jesus, God has no way of communication with humanity apart from that same Word. So it had to be Jesus— the way is exclusive for God too.”
“So you believe salvation is exclusive to Jesus?” he rebutted, “What about other pathways to God?”
“There are no other paths,” I said, “There is just him.”
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In his 1939 lectures Christianity and Culture, writing on the eve of the second world war, the poet T.S. Eliot attacked secularism for wanting to banish Christian practice to a private world of feelings and attitudes while, at the same time, expanding the realm of the public— i.e., politics— to include every aspect of life. Paganism had returned to western culture, Eliot judged, because Christianity no longer rightly understood itself.
He writes:
“We must treat Christianity with a great deal more intellectual respect than is our wont. It is a very dangerous inversion for Christians to advocate Christianity not because it is true but because it might prove helpful. Instead of showing that Christianity provides a foundation for morality, Christians must show the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity. It is not spiritual enthusiasm or religious experience but dogma that differentiates a Christian from a pagan.”
Christianity is not an ethic for a community, Eliot argues, but a claim about a particular person. In other words, Jesus did not come to show the way to God. He is himself that way. In an un-fallen history, God would be a given. There would be no need to seek him, and so no problem about his identity. As it is, in a fallen world, God is not self-evident. His true identity, therefore, can be neither inferred nor discovered. He himself must reveal himself. And in the meantime, there are many other false claimants to his throne.
From the time of the exodus, Israel suffered persecution because of her unflagging belief in her solitary, jealous LORD. The way to Israel’s God the one Israelite, Jesus of Nazareth, reserves for himself alone. He is the fulfillment of Israel’s long fidelity to the one whose name no other may bear. The church’s burden is no less than Israel’s. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it, “The way to God for human beings has been diverted once and for all by God’s way towards humankind.” Just so, any exclusive claim to the true God’s name will be met with ferocious offense.
As Robert Jenson notes:
“The whole gospel is one long provocation…The message of the church is always a provocation to any conceivable antecedent view of things. Perhaps we should recognize provocation as an ontological category. Perhaps provocation is the LORD’s only possible affirmative relation to a fallen and nevertheless beloved creation.”
“I AM the way, the truth, and the life.”
Though this is a provocation to ecumenical etiquette, Christ’s claim about himself in the Upper Room is no different than what the Fourth Gospel announces about him in its Prologue. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” John proclaims. Why is the second person of the Trinity Jesus of Nazareth? So that, John continues his prologue, the Son might make the otherwise unknowable God known. This is simply what the Book of Hebrews likewise says of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, “We have confidence to enter the holy places (that is, come near the Father) by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he alone opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh.”
Jesus is the way to the Father.
Jesus is the truth of his Father.
Jesus is the liveliness of God; God’s only image and address.
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Another preacher squinted disapprovingly at me and squiggled in his seat.
“Are you suggesting only Christians are saved?” he asked me on behalf of the committee, the rest of whom, I could tell, thought I had infracted some nicety.
“Of course not,” I said, “How could I possibly know such a thing; only the one doing the saving could know who gets saved. What I’m saying is that to the extent that anyone will be saved— Christian and non-Christian alike, it will be Jesus who saves them and none other.”
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There is no other stream.
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No doubt you have heard, if not espoused, the slogan about how all the religions of world are but roads that lead to the same destination; never mind that the slogan never specifies how we might disqualify certain of the world’s many idolatries. Not only is the cliche ( as designed) politely trite, it is— as most simplicities are— heresy. Just ask Saul: whatever road you are on the risen Jesus can find there, yes. But, quite obviously, only the LORD can know what paths might intersect with himself. Only God can know what paths might lead to himself, and God has already told us that the only way that leads to himself is himself.
The Son is the only way to the Father.
In a fallen world, in which God is not a given, what Jesus claims about himself and what the church then proclaims of him will always be a provocation. He is not one way to the Father. He is not a truth among others. His is not one life from an array for us to consider. Christ’s self-attestation is indeed rudely singular. So much so, what Jesus tells the eleven in the Upper Room is either blasphemy or it is true.
To be sure, Jesus does issue an exclusive claim about himself, “No one comes to the Father except by me.” But what often gets missed is how the exclusivity of this way is in service to a cosmic inclusivity. Jesus is the only way for the sake of all. This is the same Jesus who declares that when he is lifted up he will draw all people to himself. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world— not the sin of the church, not the sin of the deserving, but the sin of the world. This is the one of whom Paul writes that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and that at the consummation of all things Christ will be all in all.
The way is singular.
The stream is solitary.
But it runs in every direction and to every shore.
For the empty tomb of Jesus has swallowed up the whole world.
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Speaking of eating, in a moment the risen Jesus will feed you himself from the loaf and the cup that are his body, at the table where he is simultaneously host and meal.
The dogma is what makes us different.
The LORD’s Supper is but another of God’s provocations. Rather than waiting on us to make our way to him—by dint of our morality or religiosity—he brings the Way to you through these visible words, so that the forgiveness of your sins is not a point of conjecture but a promise you can not only hear but touch and taste and swallow.
In that the Father and the Son are one, to receive Christ’s gospel in word and wine and bread is nothing less than salvation. After all, what all the debates about Christ’s exclusive claim get wrong is starting with the assumption that we know what the word salvation names apart from the name of Jesus. A generic god cannot save us exactly because it can make no particular promises. Thus, in the Scriptures, salvation has a straightforward sense. It is simply whatever happens when the God of Israel finally has his way with us.
Salvation is freedom from the fear of death.
Just so, salvation is freedom from the fear of the future—from everything death teaches us to fear while we are still alive.
Salvation is freedom from sin— not merely its guilt but its tyranny. It is reconciliation with the Father, so that we are no longer strangers or enemies but sons and daughters. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that we are never abandoned. It is the resurrection of the body, so that nothing God has made and redeemed is finally lost. It is a place in the Father’s household, where no circumstance can revoke our belonging. It is the promise Jesus makes to his disciples: “I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”
These are not consolations inferred from abstract deity. They are the concrete promises of the living God. This is what salvation means. This is what happens when this God— and no other—has his way with us.
So come.
Come to the table.
Come to the Visible Words.
Come to the Way who has already made his way to you.
Come to the Truth who answers every lie.
Come to the Life who has trampled down death by death.
The bread and the wine are the way, the truth, and the life.
(Thanks to Darek Latta for use of his artwork).
