Main news for 22 April 2017

King James Version (en)

John, Chapter 14, verse 11

⁶ professeth himself the Way, the Truth and the Life, and one with the Father

¹¹Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.

NOTES

Jesus' words about His unity with the Father, spoken during the Last Supper, take on a new meaning compared with what they conveyed before. Now Jesus speaks of this unity as the way, the truth, and the life. His life itself proves to be not only the fullness of living truth but also the living embodiment of the path everyone must travel—the path of the Kingdom. In those days, the ideas of way, truth, and life were traditionally associated with the Torah. The Torah was regarded as the way, the way of truth and the way of life, leading the one who walked it to God and to the threshold of the messianic Kingdom. The ideal was a living Torah, which a person could become if his life conformed to it completely.

By calling Himself the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus speaks of Himself as the living Torah. But His way becomes the way of the Kingdom. His relationship with the Father contains a dynamic that is revealed to the world as the dynamic of the Kingdom entering it. He goes to the Father—and the Kingdom enters the world. Such is the path of the Man who revealed the Torah to the world in all its fullness, the living Torah. But it is also the path of every Christian, everyone who wants to follow Christ into His Kingdom and travel that path to the end.

The Savior goes so that there may be a place in His Kingdom for each of His disciples and followers. But to become His disciple in truth, to reach those dwelling places in the Kingdom that He promises to prepare for them, one must repeat His journey. Not imitate it outwardly, but repeat it in essence, travel it oneself—and oneself become a living Torah.

Of course, a person does not remain alone on this path. Otherwise no one could become a living Torah, for without help from above this is impossible for a sinful human being. Yet everyone must still walk for himself. A person can be helped to walk, but only if he is walking rather than sitting on the sidelines. This is the path to which Jesus calls His disciples. He is confident that they know the way, for He Himself is before their eyes as a living example. They do not yet see or understand everything, of course, but what they do not yet see or understand can be understood only through their own experience, which each of them will gain in due course. Words are useless here. Jesus has already told His disciples the essential thing; the rest will become clear once they set out on the path.

When telling His disciples about the Kingdom, Jesus describes it by the example of the relations between Himself and His Father, and also between Himself and His disciples. He says to the disciples: if you ask anything of the Father in My name, then I will do what you ask, and if you ask Me anything, I will do it. Thus, as we see, Jesus illustrates His own words that He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. In His presentation, the Kingdom turns out to be, first of all, a spiritual space, the space of the relations that unite Him with the Father and with all His disciples, uniting them in such a way that He becomes the Mediator between His disciples and the Father.

Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus means when He says that His Kingdom is "not of this world." Indeed, the only thing in us that does not depend in any way on the laws of our untransfigured world is our relation to someone or something, for it is determined exclusively by our will, which, unlike the body or the soul, remains free under any circumstances. And if the space of the Kingdom is precisely the space of our relations, then it truly can be completely independent of the laws of the world in which we live.

The only thing that can hinder this is our own fallen nature. After all, the fall became, first of all, the result of a wrong choice, an erroneous decision, and the consequence of such errors is above all the weakening of the will, which in a fallen person tends to submit to the very nature that, in a normal state, it should have governed. The only way out of this situation is the intervention of another will: also human, but not subject to original sin. For the spiritual space of the Kingdom, the will of the Messiah becomes just such a will. That is why He becomes the Mediator between God and His disciples and followers: without His will the Kingdom is impossible; it simply will not be the Kingdom of God in the true sense of the word.

Once the space of relations has been created, it is filled with the breath of God, thanks to which this space can spread wider and wider, including more and more hearts and saving more and more souls, right up to the moment when the Savior's return marks the completion of this process and the full triumph of the Kingdom that transfigures the world.

"I am the way and the truth and the life." That is how these words sound, in a way unfamiliar to our ear. We are more accustomed to "I am the way, the truth, and the life"; then it would be a list of coordinate terms, each of which could be moved into first place. See Fr. Georgy Chistyakov's book Light Shines in the Darkness, chapter 19. Yet such an approach substantially distorts the picture: the word "way" stands at the beginning for a reason, for Christ is the way, and "the expression 'and the truth and the life' has, to use the scholarly term, an explicative character, from the Latin explicatio, explanation" (ibid.).

But it is hard to come to such a conclusion by limiting oneself to an attentive reading of this one phrase alone; it is necessary to turn to the whole New Testament text as a whole. Let us recall the words where the way and life again appear together: "narrow is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life" (Matthew 7:14). The way that leads to life. What sort of way is this? Let us note that here it says "gate and way." But the Lord says, "I am the door; if anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture" (John 10:9).

A door, like a gate, is something one must pass through in order to go out onto a way. But when the way is finished, one must pass through the gate and the door again, for this is the beginning and the end of the way. The Lord is the beginning and the end, but also what lies between them: the way itself. Let us recall another saying: "I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one can shut; you have little strength, and have kept My word, and have not denied My name" (Revelation 3:8). The opened door becomes, as it were, an icon of the Lord, who sends us on the way and waits for our return.

So we have tried to understand the link between "way and life." Now let us turn to the expression "way and truth." The word "truth" (like the words "to do," "works of God," "light," "hour," and some others) is key for the Gospel of John and does not occur in the synoptic text. First of all we must recall a fragment of the prologue: "for the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). It is not He Himself who is truth, as one could think if the words in the phrase we are considering were separated by commas; rather, truth came through Him. And although neither the Greek nor the Latin originals contain this etymological connection, in Russian the word proiskhodit, "comes forth," has the same root as khodit, "to walk," and one can walk only by one way or another.

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