4/12/53

Scripture: John 14: 1-14

Text: John 14: 6; “... I am the way, the truth, and the life....”

Through the weeks of another Lenten Season and the days of Christ’s passion and resurrection, we have turned our thought to events in the life of Jesus. We have tried to interpret some of the meaning of those events for our living. And it has been a good exercise and discipline for our spirits.

Now let us turn our attention today to a part of the Master’s teaching. We may think of it not as so many words, or a section of erudite wisdom, as an expression in meaning-filled words, of Jesus’ life at the point where his life interprets, or may interpret, ours.

The occasion of the teaching to be considered today was the meeting in an upper room where Jesus had desired to remember the Passover with his chosen ones. He was talking quite directly to them. Time was so short; he had so much to say; they were still so limited in understanding. Soon he would be suffering unto death; and they would be confused and in need of vital reassurance. His whole work and purpose would depend heavily on them, from this point on.

They would, for a time, lose direction and assurance. They actually did a day or two later, scatter in confusion and despair. Some tried to recover themselves in returning to their former vocations. But the remembrance of what he had taught them helped to rally them to his continuing purpose. When these disciples thought over what they were to do next, they could remember what their Christ had told them about the way, the truth, and the life.

As they had listened to him in that upper room, they must have been deeply disturbed that he had told them he was to be with them only a little while longer. It is a characteristic of us people that we like leadership on which we think we can depend. Untold woe has come to the world because men of selfish ambition and unholy purpose have seized upon this desire for leadership and welded nations of people into an uncritical allegiance to the leader’s decisions of unworthy purpose.

This little band of apostles had been quite carried away with their new Master. They would have followed him gladly into any campaign for freedom from outside political control or ecclesiastical domination. But they had not thought much of carrying on, themselves, the message and spirit he had imparted to them. Now they were faced with Jesus’ assertion that he was to be with them there only a little while longer. Then how could they ask him what to do; what to say; what to plan? He quickly reassured them. If they were to stand on their own feet and their own resourcefulness, they might do it better by remembering that he is their way, their truth, their life.

It is astonishing that Jesus did not point the way to them. Instead of being a pointer, or a significant signpost of life, he is the way. Union with Christ is the one way to God, and to being at home in the universe of His spirit. It was a tremendous idea that Jesus was giving them. Thomas, often called the doubter, was one who liked the feel of solid facts beneath his feet. Perhaps he did not have enough poetry in his nature. At any rate, Thomas blurted out, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

What did Thomas mean by that? He had been quite certain, a short time earlier, that if Christ returned to Jerusalem it was certain death for him. He had been so certain of it that he had risen to his feet to say stout-heartedly, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” [John 11: 16]. Was he now less confident that this was to be the end?

Or was he staring out into the beyond, honestly admitting that he could not then see a trace of this “Father’s house” of which the Master had been speaking? “What lies ahead? What kind of life can one expect? It is all dark and blank to me.” To which Christ answered: “I am going to my father.”

What else could be done with a life that had been lived so unselfishly and with such kindness, except that he be set in his natural element, with God and in God? There is nothing arbitrary in the destiny that awaits us. Each of us will receive that destiny for which we have fitted and prepared ourselves. “Where am I going?” “To the Father,” says Jesus. “And the way?” “I am the way.” The way to what? To many things. But here, specifically, to the Father. And that is precisely true. “No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” Which might be difficult to prove or credit.

The writer of Psalm 103 knew quite a bit about the Fatherhood of God. Some others have known quite a bit about it. A Negro woman of Jamaica was hearing, for the first time, the gospel. And she turned to her neighbor, crying out, “I knew it! Did I not tell you that it must be so? My mother’s heart was sure God is like that!” Even in her unenlightened condition, she had seen deep into the heart of what is ultimate. But even so, Christ’s teaching of the fatherhood of God is amazingly original, and still is.

Under stress of World War I, people of differing faiths in India felt they would like to meet together in united worship and self-dedication. The idea had to be abandoned because they could find no common standing ground. For when a Christian had innocently suggested that at least they could all repeat the Lord’s Prayer, with its “Our Father,” this was quickly turned down, even with a little indignation, by others, as being unacceptable.

It is Jesus Christ who has brought home to mankind how fatherly God is; and with what trusting confidence we can draw near to Him. He has given us the happy feeling that to turn to God is a coming home. “I am the way to God,” claims Christ, “because in me, at last, men come upon the truth about Him as He really is.”

The misconceptions about God are dissipated. Misunderstandings are blown away. Formerly, because they were sure that God was holy and of entirely pure sight, and because they themselves were soiled and sin-stained, people did not dare to come to Him. It would seem an effrontery, inviting doom to do so. They had not taken in to their understanding that part of the divine holiness is a divine pity for poor souls who are lost in bewilderment or in stubborn self-will. But seeing all this in Christ, people can and do come confidently by the new and living way which Christ has consecrated for them. They come, being now sure that it is not an alarming judgment seat, as they had supposed, but a throne of grace, where mercy is given without bargaining, freely, for the receiving. They come before a God who is not hard and implacably just, as they had feared, but a Father, wise, understanding, gracious, and full of worthy expectation for his children. Augustine said, “The main cause of Christ’s coming was that men might know how much God loves them.”

Christ further claims to be the way to the Father because it is through him that we really experience closeness with God. The way to know the Father is not through assembling correct thoughts of Him, and right notions in one’s mind; it is to live with Him; to have first-hand experience with Him; to put the whole matter to proof in living, testing it for one’s self. Christ keeps inciting us to such a life of experiment and endeavor, patiently correcting us in what would blur the open vision for us. Did not Christ admonish us to be therefore perfect, even as the Father in heaven is perfect? [Matthew 5: 48]. The open vision of God, as seen through Christ, burns up the unworthy in us and cleans it away.

A Scottish preacher, with marvelous audacity, says, “I shall be so like God as that the devil himself shall not know me from God, so far as to find any more place to fasten a temptation upon me, than upon God; not to conceive any more hope of my falling from that kingdom than of God’s being driven out of it.” Of course this assumption must not give us complaisance. The farther we go on the Way, and the surer we are of it, the rougher my be some of its paths, as indeed it was with the Christ.

Alice Meynell has put it in verse:

“Thou art the Way. Hadst Thou been nothing but the good,

I cannot say if Thou hadst ever met my soul.”

It may be steep and straight and rugged, but it is a good way which Christ leads us. Samuel Rutherford says it is only the lazy flesh that raises a word, against it, and that whimpers and complains about it.

“Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.”

Well, could Christ be any less or easier, way?

But Philip breaks in, after Jesus’ assurance to the disciples that he is the way, the truth and the life, with a question about the Father. He may have felt fairly sure of Jesus. But about God, he had yet so many inquiries. “Ah yes, the Father! But is there really such a Father? Show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.” It seems a natural enough question to us. But it was as though Jesus was taken aback by it. So patient was he, so moderate in his pose to suit the slow minds of his followers, repeating, illustrating, repeating, till they had a grasp of what he taught. Yet tolerant though he was, Philip startled him.

“Philip! Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me? He who has seen me, has really known me, has seen the Father! How can you say ‘show me the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” As if to say, “Surely you have not lived with me for years and have not grasped that, if you want to know what God is like, you have only to know what I am.”

This is the most staggering saying recorded in literature, search where you will. There sat Jesus Christ, with work-roughened hands, hounded by the evil designs in selfish men, and soon to be done to death by that evil, calmly making that astounding claim as if it were too self-evident to need proof. Yet it is true. And a host of people the world round, know it is true. Once one has come to know Jesus Christ he can think of God only in terms of what he is. For the whole of Christ, all that he did and was, is authentic, with no reservation or watering down or apology necessary or in order. One does not have to explain him away, or pass by uncomfortable episodes.

When, with violence, he cleansed the temple, it was no petulant fit of temper over some affront to himself. But it was clean, refining anger, like the white heat of a coal fire, that the house of worship -- where man should worship God stripped of all selfishness -- was being desecrated.

When he set his face like flint against sham, it was no holier-than-thou superiority that was speaking, but a terrible anger with hypocrisy, with which he would make no peace. He was as direct and God-like in dealing with evil as he was in showing kindness and loving forgiveness. No one escaped his utter honesty -- not the Pharisees; not the Judas whom he had called and to whose traitorous ears he said, “What you are about to do, do quickly;” [John 13: 27]; not to his beloved Peter to whom he said, “get behind me, Satan.” [Mark 8:33].

There are two types of faith, so our Lord tells us. One can believe in him for the sake of the works. What he says and does -- is it effective? Does it work? And one who asks this question finds that it does work. But Christ seeks from us a deeper faith, something more fundamental, nothing less than recognition of his own oneness with God. He is, in reality, God working upon the life and recognition of men. In him, God has come among us, unable to stay out of this living while his creatures are in trouble and in need.

His works are proof of how God bears himself toward us, lovingly, unstintingly, generously, and with unwavering righteousness. His sufferings mean the “God was quite prepared to take all the consequences” of this confused and wayward world. “And he took them in Christ.”

On the very eve of his crucifixion, Christ was telling his disciples then, and all of us ever since, that “things are not collapsing; but together you and I will see this through.” “Remember this,” he seems to say, “you are not alone. There are two of us - you and I. And together is there any good thing we cannot accomplish?”

“Follow thou me.” “For I am the way, the truth and the life.”

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, April 12, 1953.