In response to a question from the apostle Thomas Jesus says that he is ``the way, the truth, and the life.'' This leads us to reflect on the pull we feel, as Christian people, towards the universal and the particular. In our pluralistic world what do we have to say as Christian people? Being people of the ``way'' implies being people on a journey, people more interested in life and relationships than in creedal belief systems, people who proclaim Jesus as way and light, yet acknowledge that truth and wisdom are found in other places as well.
On holy ground I was sitting in a meeting in Akron, Pennsylvania probably in the late 1980s. My friends Earl and Pat Hostetler Martin were bringing the devotional that day. Earl and Pat were revered figures for all their work in Southeast Asia. Everyone remembers how when South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 and the American helicopters flew away, Pat left with the children and Earl stayed behind to live in the new Vietnam for about a year.
They lit a little lamp and placed it on the table right in-between the papers and manila files and the pitcher of water all readied for the meeting to come. Then they began to talk about ``holy ground.'' Holy ground was for me the sandy earth in front of Moses' burning bush, or the straw around the mangers that the shepherds' knelt on, or the ground near the cross damp with blood.
But that day Earl and Pat helped to expand my horizon of where holy ground can be found. They told homely stories of ordinary people they had known in the Philippines and in Vietnam. They described profoundly moving human encounters with people of integrity, stories of facing adversity with courage, tales of meeting despair with love, accounts of great spiritual strength. While sitting on hard floors in dimly lit rooms they realized themselves to be on holy ground, places where the Spirit of God was very real and present.
Strange how it can be that when we least expect it, far from the familiar fourpart harmony hymns, the dark benches, the common rituals, the familiar ways of framing matters of faith, and the communities that have so nurtured us in the past, we can find ourselves in a new place and discover, to our amazement, that God has been there before us, preparing new ``holy ground'' for us to walk upon.
``Many dwelling places'' and ``the way'' Our passage is near the beginning of what amounts to a long discourse by Jesus stretching over several chapters. It comes after John's ``last supper'' scene, where Jesus bends over to watch the disciples' feet. If we look at the paragraph that comes just before and after what Ted read we uncover a section built around three questions.
Jesus has told the disciples that the mark of being a disciple is love and that where he is going ``they cannot come.'' So Peter asks the question, ``where are you going?'' (13:36) and asserts that he would even lay down his life for Jesus. This, Jesus says, won't happen, and in fact, Peter, you will deny me.
Then Thomas comes back to the question (14:5) and says that if we don't know where you are going, how can we possibly know the way? To which Jesus replies ``I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.'' Jesus is saying to his disciples that none of them learns about God except through the incarnational reality of Jesus in their very presence, living and breathing and loving right among them.
Then the apostle Philip asks, could you show us the Father? To which Jesus responds, look at me, when you look at me you learn about the Father. Listen to the words I say, observe the things I do, when you do you see the Father.
In between the first two questions is a little section (14:1-3) that we often read out at the cemetery as we bid a loved one farewell. Don't let your hearts be troubled. Believe in me, Jesus says. In my Father's house are many dwelling places (mansions), and I'm going to prepare a place just for you. These are words we remember to console ourselves, to comfort the bereaved. We say these things even as we realize that we are dabbling with the great unknown, and all we have is our limited human understanding. So we put the beyond in physical terms we can grasp, a place where God dwells, and our loved ones can go, with houses, mansions actually, to stay in.
The universal and the particular We can look at these verses and note a peculiar juxtaposition. If you look at people of other religious traditions with equal favor you could say, maybe the ``many dwelling places'' is a reference to the heavenly mansions that we will all inhabit, Christians and Buddhists, Jews and Muslims, altogether in the great hereafter. And then, just a few verses later, comes the ``way, truth, and life'' statement which can be read to say that, no, Jesus is the only path to take.
This brings us to the critical, fundamental questions that face us when, as Christians, we try to faithfully and thoughtfully look out upon the world. We attempt to balance our faith's longing for the universal with its call to the particular. The Christian faith imagines all peoples, of every tribe and race, gathering together in praise and in service. Yet it also nourishes and draws its power from a particular man who in a particular time and in full humanity felt the aloneness and the anguish as nails were driven through his hands.
And for me the universal and the particular confronted me in an unforgettable way over several days in eastern Chad on the desolate southern side of the Sahara desert. For several days I sat in the passenger seat of a LandRover. The driver was Paul Horala, a French and Arabic speaking Swiss missionary doctor. And in the middle of the front seat sat a skinny, graying, semi-nomadic Zaghawa man who directed us through the unmarked, uninhabited desert (except for the occasional village and now-and-then string of wandering camels and goats).
We were looking for a place to build an earthen dam. Every day we began in a place called Matadjene, and each day took off in a different direction, looking for places where the water ran when the rain fell and the flash floods would gush through the dry wadi beds. Maybe we could find a spot where to our untrained eyes it would seem that a dam could halt the water and provide another drinking spot for the nomadic herdsmen.
The skinny Zaghawa man was a very religious Muslim man and he would sit, leaning forward, pointing the way with his long, bony finger. We were using Arabic and French to communicate and since he spoke Arabic and I didn't, we could only talk to each other via Paul. But in those few days I became very entranced with this man.
Our conversations took frequent religious turns but what I remember most is this: that here I am, 24 years old, educated, wealthy by comparison, and Christian, and here my new friend is old, poor, uneducated, Muslim, and very wise. Can it be that God has somehow, ironically, bestowed on me, of all people, unique insights into the mind and mysteries of the Almighty? I didn't quite have the language for it at the time but eventually I have come to believe that those days in the LandRover, those times where we broke bread and drank hot tea together, that in those moments I was on holy ground.
I was living right then, and I still am today, on the cusp of this balancing act between the universal and the particular. I claim and I love the particular, the special uniqueness of being Christian, and to be even more particular, of being a Mennonite. This fills my life with identity, with meaning, with a profound sense of who I am. Yet I also fear the far side of particularity (including its Mennonite strains) with its temptations of fanaticism and its self-righteous fundamentalism that claims for itself truth with a capital ``T'' that it alone knows.
I claim and I love as well the universal, all of that which calls me to common ground, to seeing the inner beauty and the very stamp of God in the other. But I fear the far side of the universal as well, that dissipates into a relativism where there is no sure ground, a secularism that demands no accountability except to the self.
What can we say? As we think about the universal and the particular in the light of Jesus' words, ``I am the way, the truth, and the life,'' we ask, what can we then say? I'd like to make a few suggestions.
First, I suggest that the image of ``the way'' draws us closer to the notion of a relationship with Jesus. Christians place their faith in a living relationship with Jesus more than in creedal statements about him. Jesus said that we know more about God as we walk along with Jesus. This means we drink from the wellspring of his words and his actions. We draw meaning for our own lives as we contemplate his death, and sense purpose in a life that confronts the powerful yet sees strength in weakness. The image of ``the way'' implies being on a journey, a trip that is going somewhere, perhaps winding closer to a destination, but not there yet. As Christians we relate to people of other faiths as people, more than through the different religious systems we represent. We seek truth in relationship within the context of the setting we are facing together. So for me and the Muslim man in the middle of the LandRover our relationship was grounded in the common search for a place to build an earthen dam.
When we draw our strength from our relationship with Jesus we remember this too, that he is the one who lambastes the rich and the powerful, both religious and secular, and who also says that ``you will know them by their fruits.''
Second, I believe it is important to own, each of us, our own story. Our own ability to relate in our pluralistic environment is only strengthened when we affirm our own particularity, our own story. If we attempt to deny our own truth, or hush it down to some lowest common denominator, we lessen our ability to relate in the ecumenical, inter-faith, and secular environments. Duane Friesen says that people become Christians ``when they identify their lives with the story of God's action in Christ, when they see in that story the key to their own and the world's restoration to wholeness.'' (Friesen, p 263) When the story of coming to that alignment, and how it works itself out in our lives, when that story is deeply embraced, then we indeed have something to say.
Third, speaking at the Mennonite World Conference gathering in Zimbabwe in 2003, Siaka Traore, suggested that the key ingredients in engaging the Muslim community are ``patience, persistence, and transparency.'' Siaka converted from Islam to Christianity years ago, responding to a vision, and is now a pastor/leader in the Mennonite Church in Burkina Faso. These are qualities that, in our part of the world, are not always in large supply. But a patient stance, one that leads from the position of ``is there anything I can do to help?'' is probably the best.
Finally, our own experience tells us that we can learn a lot from the other, and from seats out in the bleachers, far from plush reclining chairs of the powerful. This is true for Christians if we think back to the early church, and it is certainly true in our own Anabaptist story. One of the hallmarks of the Mennonite experience is its impulse toward mission and service. We remember that Jesus talked about responding to the poor and desolate and said that in the very act of performing these deeds ``unto the least of these'' it is as though you are doing it to me. We learn more out in the bleachers than we do surrounded by the temptations of the box seats.
This is a very simple truth that is repeated over and over again in our fellowship (and in others as well), that when we reach beyond ourselves we find Christ there already.
Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life Here is what I affirm, a fundamental ``paradox,'' to use Duane Friesen's term, that the more I can root myself within, understand, and soak my being within my relationship to Jesus my Lord, the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, the better able I become at relating in circles outside of my own. So the more able we are to embrace our particular, exclusive faith, the more comfortably and effectively we relate in the universal realms. This takes a deep and abiding faith, one rooted in a relationship with Jesus. A ``faith'' that amounts only to assenting to a series of propositional truths will not get you as far.
We can claim that salvation comes through Jesus, but this does mean that God does not or will not work and reveal himself through people who have no relationship to or any knowledge of Jesus. Jon Isaak (MBBS New Testament professor) says ``we can say that such a confession need not equate God's `oneness' with the absolute correctness of a particular religious system even Christianity!''
Friesen speaks of the ``scandal'' of particularity, this particular faith that finds the meaning of history in Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously this comes fraught with difficulties, and we are embarrassed by the stories we hear. As Christian people we begin to relate to people of other faiths in a spirit of repentance, staying as far away as we can from the spirit of triumphalism. We eschew the Constantinian temptation, which corrupts Jesus into an imperial Christ here to conquer and dominate
In this spirit we can proclaim that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. We do so without fear knowing that God will use us and speak to us through brothers and sisters within our own faith family. But at the same time we know that God is big enough to challenge us and does come to us in unexpected ways, through the other. May God give us much joy, courage, and wisdom in going about our task. And may God fill our lives with those wonderful moments when we suddenly realize that we are standing on holy ground.
--February 12, 2006
-- First Mennonite Church, Reedley
Sources Jon Isaak's ``God Talk and an Invitation to Biblical Imagination,'' in Out of the Strange Silence Duane Friesen's Artists, Citizens, Philosophers Bob and Judy Zimmerman Herr's ``Talking Points: Interfaith Bridge Building''
Peter Burger's ``Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty''
Marcus Borg's ``Faith, Not Belief''
William Willimon's ``Answering Pilate: Truth and the Postliberal Church''
Robert Bellah's ``At home and not at home: religious pluralism and religious truth''
Brian DiPalma's ``An Annotated Copy of the Defense of Thomas the Apostle''
Diane Komp's ``Hearts Untroubled''
Harvey Cox's ``Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis of Interfaith Dialogue''
Gospel of John commentaries
