Reflection This Week
THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE

   Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel that he is "the way, and the truth, and the life." (14:6) And, of course, he is, and, of course, in precisely that order. Unfortunately, too many of us do not see it that way. We change the order slightly by making "truth" first in line. It is not, nor can it be nor is it ever. Nevertheless, that truth does not prevent some of us from declaring the truth of what we find in the Gospel and about Jesus and what Jesus teaches without first discovering that truth in the only way truly possible: by following Jesus' way, following Jesus’ example.

   If we truly want to know what it means to be a Christian, if we want to know the Gospel truth about anything, we have to first live into that truth. And the way we do that is to live as Jesus taught us to live, to love one another as he loved. We know what that love was/is. It is a total and unconditional love. That means that we are to love the sinner even as we do not love the sin. The difficulty for us is that we allow the sin to so consume us that we find it difficult, if not impossible, to love the sinner, to even begin to love.

   Loving as Jesus loved does not come naturally, sinful and selfish people that we are. We have to work at it and often work very, very hard, something we are also often loathe to do. It is easier to make judgments about another based on what we see, namely the other’s sinfulness, than it is to follow Jesus’ example of first loving before making judgments. We come to know the truth about another person only by getting to know that person. Again, that takes work.

   Whenever I reflect back on my life, I am ashamed to admit that I propounded what I believed to be the truth without ever making any attempt to get to know the truth. "This is the truth and this is the way it’s supposed to be," so I said and assumed and even believed. "The truth is, " I said and wrote and thirty years ago, "that women cannot be ordained much less become a bishop and, God forbid, Presiding Bishop!"

   It took a while, but I found my way to the truth by encountering and serving with ordained women. What a notion! Once I found my way, I found the truth and now live a life of fully inclusive ministry, at least as far as women are concerned. Learning the truth only comes from living into the truth – which, again, was Jesus’ way. He could speak the truth about how we are to treat one another because that was the way he lived.

   Thus, when we live as Jesus lived, love as Jesus loved, we find truths in what we once thought were false because they went unexamined in our lives even if we were convinced in our minds. Experience is the world’s greatest and best teacher: it’s the hot-pan technique. Would that there were an easier way to learn the truth. Would that we did not have to walk the way. Would that we all come out of the womb loving as Jesus loved. Yet, if the truth were known and we will only learn this in the life to come, I suspect Jesus has to learn the truth the hard way as well.

   It is only when we learn the truth by following Jesus and Jesus’ way that we come to live life in the fullest, or at least as fully as possible in this world of ours where too many of us proclaim the truth without knowing what we are talking about because we have never walked the road to truly learn it.     WJP