“No one Comes to The Father Except Through Me”
These famous words from our Lord in St John’s gospel (chapter 14:11) would seem to be crystal clear. They follow immediately after Jesus’s assertion that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. ” End of discussion, you might say. No wriggle room, no possibility of differing interpretations.
So, it’s hardly surprising that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has caused a bit of a stir in remarks he recently made to a gathering of young people from different faiths during his visit to Singapore.
“All religions are a path to God,” Francis said. “There is only one God, and we, our religions, are languages, paths to God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian, but they are different paths.”
But surely, Jesus’s words in John’s gospel mean exactly the opposite? Jesus did not say, “I am a way” – he said, “I am the way. ” If no-one can come to the Father except through Jesus, how can these different faiths all be paths to God as Pope Francis declared them to be?
To try and find an answer to this difficult question, I think we must re-examine our
understanding of the incarnation – that fundamental doctrine which teaches us that the man Jesus is also God incarnate, or in other words, God made flesh.
Jesus is recognised as God made flesh because Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, as we heard in Peter’s words from last Sunday’s gospel reading. But the Christ and the man Jesus are the same and yet different – just as the Word, the second person of the Holy Trinity, is God, but not the same as God the Father. The Word is both before and after the man Jesus: indeed, before and after have no meaning when we talk of God because God is outside and beyond time.
Human pathways to the divine have developed both before Jesus and after Jesus – yet because Jesus is the Word made flesh it is possible for paths that are different in time to still be the same path.
In our world in both the past and the present, these different paths have been used to justify violence and destruction. That cannot be right. Let us pray for a clearer and more generous interpretation that can ultimately bring all our paths together as we strive to understand God’s mysterious revelation of himself to the human race.
Notices
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