Thomas’ heart is troubled. He’s worried and concerned about all this talk of Jesus going away. So he asked that fateful question, “How can we know the way?” Jesus’ statement about being the way, the truth, and the life is a response to a question by Christians, and Jesus’ answer is directed to Christians and is about Christians. Of course, Jesus’ followers wouldn’t have called themselves to “Christians” yet; but, as we learn in the book of Acts, “The Way” was one of the earliest names for Christianity.
Part of what Jesus was doing was offering comfort to Thomas: “Don’t worry, Thomas. You know me. When I’m gone, just continue to ‘do the works that I do.’ Follow the path I have set forth with my life, and you’ll be following the way.” So perhaps I wasn’t so wrong all those years ago to find comfort in John 14. But Jesus’ instruction doesn’t end there. Included in Jesus’ pastoral assurance is the challenge to keep on following the way of Jesus even when it’s difficult. The best summation I’ve seen of this perspective is by the pastor, writer, and spiritual director Eugene Peterson. Peterson encapsulates Jesus’ point in John 14 by saying, “Only when we do the Jesus truth in the Jesus way do we get the Jesus life.” Isolating only the so-called “Jesus truth” yields a disembodied orthodoxy: all the right words with no behavior to make the words believable. More important is the “Jesus Way” of loving God and loving neighbor.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2011/05/lectionary-commentary-%E2%80%9Ca-progressive-christian-reading-of-john-146%E2%80%9D-for-sunday-may-22-2011/
No comments:
Post a Comment