One of the most important virus in the Gospel of John, and the most difficult for many in our time and place to accept, is John Chapter 14, vs. 6, which reads as below in various translations:
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (NET, ESV, NIV, HCSB; “but through me” NASB)
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. (KJV)
Jesus answered him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by me. (GNT)
(We will discuss the bolded font words, the way, later in this post)
It is clear that there is no debate or confusion as to what these words say. The context of John 14 is known as “The Upper Room Discourse.” It takes place between Jesus and his 12 “disciples” (later “Apostles”) shortly before His betrayal, trial, and crucifixion.
As memorable as these simple words of 14:6 are, they must have weighed heavily on the thinking the “the eleven” (the remnant after the death of the betrayer Judas) after the horrific experience of witnessing the crucifixion of their Speaker. What “way…truth…life” after the Cross? It must have looked like an absolute dead end, with the death of Jesus, the intense hatred of the important Jewish leadership, and the murderous contempt of the all powerful Roman government and army.
However, there was something fundamental about Jesus’s claim to being “the way.” The original word in the original language (of the Greek New Testament) is, transliterated, hodos, from which we likely get our English word “road.” Clearly, Jesus’s use of the word hodos would have been understood in literal terms as a presecribed path, a roadway to a specific destination, or simply “a way” as the translators have given us but “a way” to someplace. Roads were a central, important element of the vast Roman Empire. They were one of the amazing engineering feats of the ancient world that can still be seen and traversed in many places in the Mediterranean world even today.
But of course the reference to a hodos in John 14 means something much more, much deeper, than even the most important of such Roman roads. The word is a literary trope, a word that connects a well-known physical entity with a deeper non-physical reality.
Since the expulsion of fallen man (and woman) from the Garden (Genesis 3), we have all been looking for the road back to God. It took many thousands of years for God’s Plan and Revelation to unfold before the very words spoken by Jesus in John 14:6 occurred.
The claim of Jesus, and the New Testament, and the Old Testament, is the hodos (road) is a unique, narrow one. CS Lewis in his book on the imaginary world of Narnia has Aslan the Lion make clear to the one desperate for a drink, “there is no other stream” but the one guarded by Aslan, the Christ figure. In John 4, Jesus used this very drink metaphor for the Samaritan women searching for physical water but needing true Spiritual water, only available by Christ alone.
Here is John 14, the metaphor shift from water, and bread (John 6), to the very hodos (road) to God. The Resurrection, and the present church age ministry of the Holy Spirit calls us to that road to God.