ON KNOWING THE TRUTH
Dear Friends in Christ:
During the Fifty Days of Easter, we hear a number of readings from the Good News according to John, including a really challenging one for us in our pluralistic society. In John 14:6, we read, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” For a good many Christians, that passage means that there is no truth to be found in any other of the world’s great religious traditions. For me, and I suspect for many others, that interpretation doesn’t make sense. We can find truth in other religious traditions and we can see that people of other faiths exhibit many of the qualities of compassion and holiness that we would like to see in ourselves. Which one of us, if we were to have met Gandhi, would not have seen truth and the holiness in him?
But if John 14:6 doesn’t mean that all other religious traditions are completely worthless, what can it mean for us? Perhaps it means that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and life for us, but not necessarily for anyone else. While it is true that in Jesus we find the way, the truth, and the life, I believe that there is a universal claim we can make about Jesus, a claim which does not deny the truth that we can find in other faiths. Put simply, I believe that Jesus shows us the very nature of God, and that nature is self-giving and suffering love. That is also our nature, that which God created us to be and calls us to be in Christ through the power of the Spirit.
When I consider other religious traditions, I look to see how their understanding of God matches up with our understanding. Do they recognize the God whose nature is love? And more importantly, do they seek to reflect that nature in their lives as loving people? Both those questions, of course, should be asked of us as well. Far too often, Christians speak and act if God was anything but loving. We are as capable of treating others with contempt as anyone, of forgetting that even our worst enemies are people whom Jesus loves and for whom Jesus died.
Living in the power of the Resurrection means growing in love, not only for our sisters and brothers in Christ, but for all people. To love someone, as we all know, does not mean approving of everything they do or say. It means, to borrow a phrase from Scott Peck, being willing "to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." I understand spiritual growth to mean our growth as whole persons, as persons rooted in the reality of God’s love for us. Loving means working for what is best for the other person, for what will help that person become more loving.
During these Fifty Days, I have thought often about how inadequate is our language and our thinking as we talk about God. Everything we say or write about God is, because of our limitations, a provisional statement and never the final word. Even to say, as the First Letter of John does, that God is love, reveals not how well we understand God, but perhaps how little we understand love. Our understanding is, as
Your brother and priest,
