The
Unique Jesus (6):The Way, the Truth and the Life
- Rev Norman Cameron
A recurring dream I have
is of being late for a service. I like to be organised and I do not like being
late for anything – certainly not for a service I am meant to be leading.
The dream only came
close to reality once. Once I was in serious risk of being late for a service I
was taking. I was swapping with the minister of Glenwherry Presbyterian. I knew
the church. I knew it was on the Ballymena to Larne road. The trouble was I had
never gone to it from Killyleagh before. I knew roughly the road and the
direction but as I took turnings after Ballyclare it was becoming increasingly
apparent that I was getting more and more lost. There were many side roads and
not one had a road sign. There were no houses even to ask and I had ten minutes
to go before the service started. I imagined the Clerk of Session pacing the
floor, wondering where his guest speaker was, frantically trying to think up a
sermon on the spot.
The ironic thing was I
had a map in the car – in fact I was going to talk tot eh children about maps
and the Bible being like map directing is to God. Oh how ironic – the map was
not helping me here – it was not detailed enough for all these side roads. What
did I do? I panicked, but I also prayed. Five minutes to go and then I saw a
car in the distance ahead of me. I accelerated to try and catch it. It was
going fast but eventually I saw it stop at a junction and I flashed my lights
and blasted the horn. I am sure they thought I was a maniac.
The car stopped and I
ran up to it. It was a lady and I said can you tell me how to get to Glenwherry
Presbyterian Church. She said “well actually I am going there, just follow me”.
Oh the joy, oh the relief: I nearly kissed her. But I didn’t. I arrived at the
church with two minutes to go. The Clerk of Session nearly kissed me he was so
glad to see me.
Being lost is one of the
worst feelings any human being can have. In the context of this “I am” saying of Jesus the disciples were
afraid that they were going to be lost, they were going to be bereft of a guide.
Jesus, with whom they had spent the past three years and who they had come to
know intimately was talking about leaving them – he says in 13:33f. “My little children. I will be with you only
a little longer. You will look for me but where I am going you cannot come.”
Peter asked him, Lord where are you going?
Jesus replied – “where I am going, you
cannot follow now but you will follow later.”
Increasingly Jesus had
been talking about his death, increasingly he had said the completion of his
work was near, darkness was closing in and Judas had left the Upper Room under
suspicious and foreboding circumstances. And now Jesus was talking about going
somewhere they could not come. They were to be left behind. What was going on?
They were troubled in their spirits. They felt lost. It is in this context that
Jesus tells them that he is going to the Father. If they also want to go the
Father they need to know that “I am the
way, the truth and the Life, no-one comes to the Father but by me.” (14:6).
AN EXCLUSIVE CLAIM
I want you to note the exclusiveness
of this claim. He did not say I am a way, a truth and a
life. He could have but he did not. He says “the” not “a”. Note also
he says “no-one comes to the Father but
by me” No-one is a sweeping word.
It is exclusive, it is all encompassing. Further note also that he says in v.9
“anyone who has seen me has seen the
Father (God)….I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”
Here we have some huge
and audacious claims. He claims to be the way to God; he claims that no-one can
get to God except by following him; and he claims to be at one with God. This
passage alone is enough for us to be driven in two directions – either towards
Jesus as indeed the Son of God and worthy of all our trust and worship; or away
from him as a proud, egotistical, deluded, tyrant. There is no middle way here.
Anyone who claims not
just to know the way to God but be the way, or who claims not just to
know the truth about God but to be all truth and all life can
only be totally right or totally wrong. These statements are breathtaking in
their audacity. No other respected religious leader has made such claims. Jesus
is unique. He is more than just a godly man, he is more than just a good
teacher, he is more than a faith healer. He either is who he says he is or he
is an imposter. He urges the disciples to believe the former – he says in 14:11
“Believe me when I say that I am in the
Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the
miracles themselves.” The miracles that John records show Jesus’ power over
bodies and over natural forces - he heals the official’s son, he heals an
invalid at
Yes these claims he
makes are exclusive and Jesus knows this. He knows the import of what he is
saying and thus he points the people to the evidence. Faith, if it is to be a
reasonable faith, needs to be based upon evidence. Jesus did what no-one else
has ever done and he calls the disciples to place their trust in him based on
the evidence of what they have seen over the past three years. He is the way to
be followed, the truth to be believed, the life to be lived.
Let us look at each of
these in turn.
1.Jesus is The Way to be Followed.
Jesus said “I am the way….” In one of the messianic, prophetic passages
in Isaiah the prophet speaks of one who will come and prepare the way for the
Lord. That was John the Baptist. He prepared the way, but the true way, or the
real highway to God would be Jesus. He is the road to heaven. He is not just
the sign pointing us, he is the road itself. He is the way to be followed.
Did you know that long
before believers were called Christians they were called followers of the Way.
We find in the book of Acts that at least six times believers were referred to
as The Way. In Acts 9 Saul, who was persecuting the church, asked the high
priest for letters to go to Damascus to find any who belonged to “the Way and take them as prisoners to
Jerusalem.” In Acts 19 after Paul was converted he preached for three
months but it says many “refused to
believe and publically maligned the Way”. In Acts 24:14 Paul is before the governor
Felix and he says “I admit that I worship
the God of our fathers as a follower of the Way”.
The early church were
known as followers of the Way before they were called Christians. As Christians
today we are followers of the Way. It is not just the teaching of Jesus that is
the way, it is Jesus himself. When we trust in him we are on the way to heaven,
we are on the road. Jesus is on the way to the Father and he leads us to God.
In Hebrews 1019-25 we find that we have boldness to approach the Holiest by the
new and living way which Jesus has opened up for us through his blood.
As we approach Easter we
remember that Jesus came to open up the way to God – a way that had been closed
by our sin.
“There
was no other good enough to pay the price of sin,
he only could unlock
the gate of heaven and let us in.”
This is why Jesus is the
way to God and the only way at that. If there was another way to be reconciled
to God, if there was any other way to get to heaven why did Jesus come from
heaven and go through all he went through culminating in a painful death on the
cross? Why did he do this if it was unnecessary? His death was a necessary
death, it was the God ordained means of putting human beings right with God. To
say there is another way is to say that what Jesus did was unnecessary. Jesus
says I am the way, not a way. Get on the way.
2.Jesus is The Truth to be Believed
In our first sermon
looking at the unique Jesus we saw that Jesus was making exclusive claims for
himself and we saw that this raises questions of truth. What is truth? If Jesus
says he is the way to God and no-one comes to the Father but by me that claim
is so excusive that it must be either true or false. He insists that he is the
way and the truth. It is not showing integrity to say he actually meant
he is one of many ways.
Truth is an important
theme in this gospel. John mentions truth 25 times compared to truth being
mentioned just once in Matthew and three times each in Mark and Luke).
According to John “Jesus is full of grace
and truth” (1:14); Jesus says in knowing him “you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
(Jn.8:32) The Spirit of Jesus guides us into all truth (16:13); Jesus says “everyone on the side fo truth listens to me”
(18:37) In contrast there is “no
truth in the evil one.” (8:44)
Truth was important to
John, to Jesus, and it ought to be important to us. The trouble is that we are
living in days when truth has been devalued. Today there is a battle for truth.
We are living in days of
relativism where this philosophy is being pushed out from media and even our
government that something can be true for you but not true for me. Instead of
God being our standard of truth our standard becomes ourselves and our
opinions. To say that there is no absolute truth helps us to hide from moral responsibility
and allows us to make up our faith and morality as we go along.
John
Piper says – “Relativism is a revolt
against the objective reality of God. The sheer existence of God creates the
possibility of truth. God is the ultimate and final standard for all claims to
truth—who he is, what he wills, what he says is the external, objective
standard for measuring all things. When relativism says that there is no
standard of truth and falsehood that is valid for everyone, it speaks like an
atheist. It commits treason against God”.
Or listen
to Michael Novak in the Templeton Prize address he gave in the United Sates: To surrender the claims of truth upon humans
is to surrender Earth to thugs. It is to make a mockery of those who endured
agonies for truth at the hands of torturers. Vulgar relativism is an invisible
gas, odourless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It
is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most
perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor
economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism. . . .
During the next hundred years, the question for those who
love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous
attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing
in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,”
they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to
you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings.
Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Michael Novak,
“Awakening from Nihilism: The Templeton Prize Address” in First Things, August/September, #45, pp.
20-21.
There is a battle for truth
in our age. Jesus declares I am the truth. He either was and is the truth or he
is not. If he is then we need to stand with him. GK Chesterton said one hundred
years ago (1908), “What we suffer from
today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of
ambition and has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant
to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the
truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man
does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he
doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason. . . . We
are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in
the multiplication table” (Chesterton, Orthodoxy).
Jesus is the way to God, he is the truth of God, and he is
the life of God.
3.Jesus is the Life to
be Lived
We have run out of time to consider Jesus as the Life, but
what we said two weeks ago about Jesus as the resurrection and the life still
stands. He is the creative life, he is the resurrection life, he is eternal
life and he is abundant life. He is both quantity and quality of life.
This is the Jesus that we worship. He is altogether
wonderful and worthy of all our trust. Let us follow him for in an age of many
so called paths to God he is the way to be followed, in an age of confusion and
relativism he is the truth to be believed and in an age where we fear death
more than anything he is the life to be lived to the glory of God.