Reading: John 14:1-7 Any understanding of this passage begins with a recognition of the obvious. It is from John’s gospel and John’s gospel is different from the others. Matthew, Mark and Luke seek to present the data concerning Jesus of Nazareth – and they do it in the language, style and thought forms of their day. They see their essential task as presenting the data concerning Jesus of Nazareth. John, however, deliberates on the data. He seeks to present the significance of Jesus. The first three gospels seek to present the historical Jesus. John seeks to present the theological significance of Jesus and to do this in terms of Greek philosophy which was dominant in his day. You see this from the very outset of his gospel. It begins with a statement about the Greek idea of the Logos- the word which lay at the heart of life. ‘In the beginning,’ John says, ‘was the Word and the word was with God. The Word was God.’ And then he dives straight in. ‘In Jesus of Nazareth the Word was made clear, was made flesh.’

What John sought to do was to present the significance of Jesus to his day and generation, and he did it in the thought forms and philosophy of the Greek culture of his day. He presents, for example, the significance of Jesus in a series of ‘I am’ statements – statements that William Temple describes as ‘parables of the Lord’s person’. To take them as the verbatim words of Jesus is to miss the point. Indeed for me they would then have a sense of arrogance that I do not associate with Jesus.

What John is trying to do is to present the theological significance to his day and generation – and all strength to his arm, and to the arms of those who seek to do the same for our day and generation. We desperately need people who can represent, re-present, Jesus to our contemporary society – to do for our day and generation what John did for his. John knew nothing about evolution and an expanding universe but he did know the cultural context of his day and it was to that context that he applied himself.

Context is so important! You have heard me say it before and I say it again today. ‘No text without a context.’ Let me illustrate how important it is. When I say that the Demons will thrash the Saints, I am not making some profound statement about Armageddon or the like. I am simply talking AFL football and anyone with an inkling of social awareness would recognize it. Likewise in John’s gospel, when he represents Jesus as saying, ‘No one comes to the Father but by me’ he is not talking about Muslims, and Hindus and Buddhists. He is talking to a disciple called Thomas who had real doubts about the way forward. Thomas is not sure whether he has what it takes to continue in the way. And John has Jesus saying here ‘Thomas. I am the only way you will come to know God as a loving parent. Let not your heart be troubled, You believe in God believe also in me.’ To make these words, words of exclusion would be to run counter to everything that John is trying to do in his gospel. It would be as senseless as extrapolating the conflict between the Saints and the Demons into some kind of eternal conflict. No text without a context!

And just in case you think that I am dodging the question of our relationship with other faiths, let me say two things. Firstly, that the Christian faith does not necessitate us being hostile to people of other faiths. Love, not hostility, is the basis of Christian theology. The relative merits of other religions are not a major concern for us. To see Jesus as the way, the truth and the life is! And, secondly, let’s also be very clear that the Christian faith necessarily makes us distinctively and boldly different. The way of Jesus stands in stark and confronting contrast to the more prevalent quests for image, power and prosperity. ‘If we are faithfully and boldly following Jesus, we will be growing into a radical hospitality that welcomes the stranger as an icon of the risen Christ and that will stand in contrast to the selfish and xenophobic stance that has the majority of Australians calling for border protection and mandatory detention of those who come seeking refuge.’ (1) This is not to say that we should not order the situation. It does mean that our attitude is different to those who see it as a political football. The same goes for non violence. Our God is non violent. Jesus refused the way of the sword and chose the way of the cross and this puts us in stark contrast to those who choose the way of violence, be they Osama or Obama. It really is a case of Jesus or Osama or Obama!

In my dotage I have taken to re-reading some of the books which were meaningful to me in the early days of my faith journey, and in one of Joe Oldham’s books I read last week these words. ‘Whether truth and justice, or caprice and violence are to prevail in human affairs is a question on which the fate of humankind prevails … Christian ideas have lost their hold over, or faded from the consciousness of large sections of the population . . .As ideas and values change… it is vital to know where these changes are taking us and to ensure that they take us where we want to go’ (2)

In the week that I re-read these words Osama Bin Laden was killed with a shot to the head and jubilation became the order of the day. The next day’s Letters to the Editorwas full of it. One was from someone who said ‘Being a Christian I have two choices: ‘an eye for an eye’ or ‘forgive those who trespass against you’. He went on to say ‘With due respect to the Lord, I prefer the former’. Bully for you buster! You are surely entitled to your opinion but please don’t associate the Christian faith with a shot to the head! There was also a letter from Bill Loader saying that the glee at the death of Bin Laden was ‘barbaric’. The next day’s letters were the opposite. They were a celebration of the death of Bin Laden and the way it was done.
As far as I personally am concerned it showed how tenuous is our grasp on values. Western society is supposed to be based on the rule of law and human rights. And yet in a moment, in a shot to the head, politics shows its primitive nature and the crowd goes wild with joy, and the leader of a so called Christian nation says, ‘Got him’. It is a farce enacted before our very eyes, the politics of brutality, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth with the world ending up blind and toothless. As Neitzsche so vividly puts it ‘God is Dead’. The law of the jungle is our society’s reality, our truth. Truth is about what is real and in the death of Bin Laden we saw our own reality, our own truth – a shot to the head. And just to add the icing to the cake President Obama says, ‘And may God bless America’. One is tempted to announce with one of our own politicians, ‘Well may he say God Bless America for nothing will save America or the world if we adopt the philosophy of a shot to the head.’ The future of Western Civilization is very tenuous and nothing shows this more clearly than the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

This leads me to some remarks about Jesus as the way the truth and the life – a great description of the significance of Jesus – three separate and yet connected aspects of Jesus.

Jesus as the way is quite simple. The early Christians were not known as Christians. They were described as ‘People of the Way’ - the way of Jesus. Jesus reflected a different way of life and called people to follow him and live differently. The Christian faith is not a set of beliefs. It was about what you do with your life. It is not enough to read the map. It is about undertaking the journey. The early Christians saw themselves as on a journey to a new world order. Their confession of faith was that they were people of the way – the way of Jesus. That in itself was enough to get them persecuted – because it was a way of life very different to that of their contemporary society. It is still the same today. Speak out against the culture of alcohol and you will be regarded as intolerant, notwithstanding that come Monday we will be reading again of alcohol fuelled violence.

The idea of Jesus as the truth is more complicated but just as important. It is a central theme in John’s gospel. You will remember that when Jesus is on trial before Pilate on a charge of treason Pilate says, ‘You are a king, then?’ and Jesus replies, ‘King is your word! My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this reason I was born and all who are not deaf to truth listen to my voice’. And Pilate asks, ‘What is truth?’ (18:37) You will also remember that earlier when Jesus was talking with his disciples he said, ‘If you stand by my teaching you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ (8:1) And in today’s reading comes the clincher where John has Jesus saying, ‘ I am the truth’. And later in the chapter he speaks of Jesus giving us the Spirit of Truth. The question of ‘What is truth?’ goes to the heart of the Christian faith.

The concept of ‘Truth’ is a little tricky for those of us who know little about Greek philosophy but essentially it is about what is the real state of affairs over and against what appears to be the situation. You see it in a court case between two people. The aim of a court of law is to arrive at the truth, the real state of affairs, as distinct from what the parties are asserting. Truth is about what is real, the reality of life, what life is really about as opposed to what in Plato’s words are ‘the shadows of life’. Knowing the truth is about what is genuine as distinct from what is fake, a real diamond as distinct from a piece of glass. As we say in our Third Sunday worship ‘Jesus gives us real eyes to realize where the real lies’. And John here says that Jesus constitutes the truth, the truth about life.

The Christian faith is about life. It is not about pie in the sky when you die. It is about life here and now. We live and we die – and the tragedy is so many never really live. The Christian faith really is a matter of life and death. God is the pulsating principle of life and Jesus is the key to life. It is a bold claim but it is the claim of the Christian faith, the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

One of the books I have been re-reading is Joe Oldham’s Life is Commitment and of the search for meaning, and truth and life, there are three possibilities

1 One is that life is without meaning and everything is permissible – a pretty good description of what we know today as post modernism. God is dead. Values are dissolving. The first possibility is that there is no truth, no meaning. Come, let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

2 The second possibility is that the truth about life is found by reasoning together. This is what Karl Popper was on about that in the search for truth we need to listen to each other. Hegel’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis is another way of expressing it. Come. Let us reason together.

3 The third possibility is that the reality in which we find ourselves should at some point reveal its essential meaning. This is the Christian claim, that in Jesus of Nazareth the truth about life is disclosed. Come, let us praise the Lord.
This was Joe Oldham’s analysis of the situation – which I think is very good providing we don’t see the three as mutually exclusive. There is a place for recognizing that life as we know it is collapsing around us. There is a place for reasoning together. And there is a place for seeing Jesus as ‘the way the truth and the life’.

I close with another statement from another book I am re-reading: Gerhard Ebeling’s The Nature of Faith.. ‘It seems to me that our time provides every reason for reaching a new and real understanding of what Christian faith is about (p14) For about three hundred years our world has been involved in a revolution of unheard-of extent . . . Whether or not we want to be or not we are all people of this changed world, living in it, marked by it and responsible for it. The language of our Christian preaching on the other hand, and the way in which Christian faith is understood and expressed, spring from a period preceding that great revolution. (p17) . . .The problem lies too deep to be tackled by cheap borrowing of transient modern jargon. It is not a matter of understanding single words, but of understanding the word itself, not a matter of new means of speech, but of a new coming to speech. (p16) . . . We must be clear that there can be no understanding of the Christian faith unless this task is undertaken. (p17)

Good on you Gerhard! Good on you, Joe! Good on you John! We need a host of people to bear witness to Jesus as the way, the truth and the life – not only for past generations but for our generation and all those to come.