Week 5—Tuesday 1 John 5:20-21
Week 5—TUESDAY
“REALITY, WHOSE OTHER NAME IS JESUS”
Apart from Jesus, the Word become flesh, we despair of finding reality. The search ends in nihilism. Lao-tse the Chinese philosopher puts it: “The Tao [way] that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging name.” Into the midst of this doubt Jesus steps and says: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” He concretes the abstract—puts shoes on the abstract and makes it walk on lowly ways. A white explorer was going through the dense jungles of Africa and as he threaded the trackless labyrinth, he said to his African guide: “Is this the way?” And the guide replied: “There is no way—I am the way.” And he unwittingly put his finger on a profound truth. The philosophers and moralists could not find the Way, for there is no way by words. The nature of reality cannot be described by words. It becomes something else when the attempt is made to put it into words. There is no way through words—the only Way is the Word become flesh. Reality can only be seen in Reality, in Life.
No wonder Dr. Radhakrishnan, the great philosopher of India and President of the Union of India, said in an Easter morning service at Riverside Church in New York: “May I suggest to you Christians that you emphasize: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,’ and ‘Ye must be born again.’” The great Hindu philosopher saw that the Way could not be the way of words; it had to be the Way of the Word become flesh—“I am the way.” And the Truth could not be spoken, it had to be embodied; the Life could not be uttered—it had to be lived. The proposition was not the answer—the Person was! Jesus is the Way that can be trodden, for it has been trodden—he trod it. Jesus is the Truth for he is the Truth under life—it rings true there. He is the Life because this Life was lived out and life says: “This is the Life.” When reality renders its verdict it says: “There is reality, whose other name is Jesus.”
O Blessed Reality, you have made the complex simple, the hidden known, the unknowable plain. You have come into our lowly doors and in your stooping and coming in we see that the Divine Everything has come in. I wonder and am captured forever. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I go singing down the years, for in him I live in Eternity—what can the years do to me?