It was a drizzly January afternoon in Jerusalem and I was sitting in the Mahane Yehuda market eating Iraqi bamia (okra) with an Observant Jewish friend. As usually happens in Jerusalem, the talk quickly turned to politics and religion. He’d read some of our better Christian theologians (he was impressed with N.T. Wright and Raymond E. Brown) and I’d read some of the better Jewish ones (I was impressed with Abraham Joshua Heschel).
While my friend respects the teachings and narrative of Jesus, he has no interest in becoming a Christian. Nevertheless, he is intrigued by the Jesus who stood on the Mount of Olives and wept over Jerusalem. He easily referenced the passage from Luke 19 that played a central role in his doctoral dissertation on Renaissance English literature.
“As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you” (Luke 19:41-44 NIV).
My friend has wept over Jerusalem himself. In his own words, “grieving for the calamities its citizens bring upon it through arrogance and ignorance in a cycle that is as painful today as ever before.”
A few moments later he asked me a question that a Muslim student would also ask me during our English class a few weeks later. “How do you interpret Jesus’ statement,
“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”?
We have so many assumptions and unasked questions between us – we Christians, Muslims and Jews. Questions like this have their own particular relevance in a place like Jerusalem where devout practitioners of their respective faiths pray and chant and fast and sing and light candles and pass beads through their fingers regularly; all focusing their attention towards the God of Abraham, the God of Creation, the One God.
My Jewish friend was relaxed and curious. When I was asked the same question by my Muslim friend a few weeks later, his eyes shone with intensity and challenge.
For those unfamiliar with Islam, Muslims regard Jesus very highly. They believe that He is the “Word of God,” and that He is helping to bring them to God, but they have major issue with His references to God as His Father because it is written in the Qu’ran, “Praise be to Allah, Who hath not taken unto Himself a son, and Who hath no partner in the Sovereignty” (Sūrat l-isrā 17:111). Jews have their own reasons to take issue with such an exclusive statement. Weren’t they already God’s covenant people for thousands of years before Jesus was even born? What then meaneth this statement?
I know how the scowling man that I saw on a Seattle street holding a large sign emblazoned with the verse would have answered my friends; they knew it too. And yet, they asked again.
Clearly, the plain meaning of the verse points towards the exclusivity of Christ. I have no desire to weaken the force of His statement or to tease something out of the verse that He did not intend. But on the other hand, there may also be a subtext of inclusivity that could be understood if the verse is taken in light of the much larger religious context in which Jesus lived; one that could enable a particularly fruitful and ecumenical “meeting place” for Abraham’s children.
Knowing full well the “heresy” of approaching this particular verse with any interpretation other than the ultra-exclusive one I was taught in Sunday School, it is nevertheless my suspicion—and hope—that Jesus may have meant something much simpler than is traditionally assumed.
The Abrahamic Family’s Names of God
In Jerusalem, we must start any such discussion with what we families of Abraham have in common. That God is known by many names and descriptions is a basic truth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Islam famously knows God by 99 names, while the Hebrew Scriptures list at least 16 names for Him. As we follow the characters of the Bible through their struggles and triumphs, we discover new names of God through which they relate to Him. Their journeys are our journeys and their discoveries our discoveries. Through these names, we are persuaded to see God as not just a vague force behind creation, but in very personal ways that pertain to the immediate context of our lives.
When we arrive at King David, we meet a poet who repeatedly refers to God by what I think of as numerous affectionate and possessive “nicknames.” In David’s lexicon, God is my glory, my shield, my high tower, my stronghold, my strength, my light, my salvation, and so forth. This possessive approach to God—at least with this frequency— is new in Hebrew Scripture and reflects David’s perpetual striving for intimacy with the Divine. In David’s worldview (a viewpoint that belongs to all who live in healthy surrender and loving dependency) God must be mine—because, of course, I am His. It is not insignificant that David, the king and man after God’s own heart, is the first person in Scripture to refer to God as “my king.” God is David’s because David is God’s.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect there may have been at least a few people in David’s day who thought he was taking it a bit too far. Who did he think he was, audaciously declaring and even demanding God’s personal attention to every detail of his life?
Nevertheless, David does not compose his songs out of religious theory but out of a deep longing for the Divine. Long before he becomes the shepherd of Israel he is well-acquainted with the One he knows as “my Shepherd.” His ability to lead others well is intimately connected to his ability to be led by the Lord Himself. Because of his experiential knowledge of God as his king, he is also aware that his reign from Zion is only as good as the degree to which the Most High reigns from the inner Zion of his heart.
That’s an aside, but it is also a bit of foreshadowing of One to come.
My Father
Jesus may not have been the first in His tradition to refer to God as a Father, but it was His favorite and almost exclusive way of referring to Him. And like His ancestor David, He favored that audacious personal pronoun most of all. If God was anything to Jesus, He was “MyFather.”
In the Davidic tradition, Jesus spoke with an unusual level of clarity and confidence that repeatedly pointed his followers towards the accessibility of relationship with the Father. For Jesus, God was not only “my Father,” but also “our Father,” “your Father” and“the Father.”
Because of His perfect union with the Father, Jesus could confidently declare that He was the clearest demonstration of His nature. According to Jesus, the Father is the One who is in Him, washing our feet. The Father is the servant of all. The Father is “gentle and humble of heart.” The Father is the One who is heading towards the cross in self-giving love, carried there in the vessel of Christ. If we had not yet known the Father in these ways, we will now through the demonstration of Jesus.
In John 14:9 (my paraphrase*), Jesus tells us clearly:
“Anyone who has really perceived Me has seen the Father! Haven’t you been able to perceive that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that flow from me are not coming out of a fanciful imagination. The Father abides in me continuously and HE is the one who has been doing all these things” (John 14:9).
Jesus not only demonstrated who the Father is, but also what it looks like to be the Son of such a Father. (This is not an issue of gender). Like David, he understood that his anointing, at its deepest essence, was about unity of spirit with God and His enthroning within the heart of humanity. The kingdom of Heaven is a lofty simplicity. It is walking in sweet companionship with the Father in the cool of the day and becoming a child through whom His will and purpose flow like rivers of living water—until Eden fills the whole inner earth of our souls and outer earth of creation; until all is at shalom.
And yet, while Jesus paints a picture of the Father that is very accessible, He also wants us to be aware that He is in a sense, introducing us to Him for the first time, even as he introduces the “old commandment” of love as a “new commandment.”
“No one knows who the Father is except the Son” he confidently declares in Luke 10:22. He shows us our alienation from and blindness towards this same Father from whence we came. The fact that we are baffled by Jesus is indication that we are also baffled by the Father. Thus, Jesus goes to the heart of our need: to restore our heart-knowledge of the Father; to remove every barrier between us.
Unlike other prophets, Jesus is not merely one who glimpses this restoration from afar and prophesies of it. Rather, the entirety of His life is a living demonstration of it. He is the reality of all that is to come. He is a prophetic signpost of the restoration of all things which must find its culmination in the heart of humanity.
“Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am,” he prayed. And where was Jesus? In the Father and going to the Father!
The Connection to the Father
All through John 14-17, Jesus speaks of union. If Jesus is the Vine and we are the Branches, the Father must indeed be the Root. The image is a Tree of Life through which the Holy Spirit flows like sap, in which many parts are a unified whole.
And thus He prayed,
“…that they all would continuously be one, just as you oh, Father, are within the midst of me and I am within the midst of You. Let them also find their continual existence in Us so that the rest of humanity and the systems of the world would begin to progressively believe that You are indeed the One who has sent me for this very purpose”(John 17:21-22).*
This restoration of Oneness to the Father through the Spirit is a vastly different thing than simply believing in and praying to God; steps that once took us to the edge of the door or through the house but not into the most sacred chambers. If our walk with God is a journey, to know Him as “Abba Father” through the Spirit of sonship imparted by Jesus is the pinnacle of that journey.
Thus, when Jesus greets Mary Magdalene after His resurrection, he instructs her to return to “His brothers” and tell them that He is ascending to “towards My Father – and your Father too, and to My God – and Your God also!” We have the feeling that Jesus is communicating something significant here, that something has forever changed in the way that we will relate to the Father. Jesus has busted open a new door for us. The Spirit of the Son will now dwell inside us, loving the Father. God will now dwell inside us, loving God. The tide has turned. The motion of restoration has been activated.
We who are coming to the Father feel the longing and the tension. We feel the “deep calling to the deep” within us; cries that are sometimes beyond language and sometimes speak volumes through one small and exceptionally sweet word: Abba!
“Now, because we are sons, God sends forth the Spirit of His own Son as an Emissary into the midst of our hearts,” says Paul. “This Spirit habitually calls out to Him, crying in the articulate and inarticulate speech of the heart, ‘Abba! Oh Father!’” (Galatians 4:6).*
And again:
“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fear, but on the contrary, you have received a spirit of sonship, with whom in union you are crying out, ‘Abba! O Father!’ This same Spirit bears witness within the depths of our being that we are children who are born from God Himself” (Romans 8:15-16).*
Coming to the Father
Let’s look again briefly at John 14*:
On the night of his crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples that He is “going on a journey.”
"But I will come again and bring You even closer to me and we will look at each other face to face. Where I dwell and exist, you will also dwell and exist. (We will abide in the same place together). You know where I am going, and you know the way there.”
His disciples are bewildered by this enigmatic promise. “How can we possibly know the way there, Thomas cried, 'when we don’t actually have a clue where you are going?'”
Jesus reassures him:
“You DO know the way, because I am the path and the reality and the real way of life. No one is moving towards the Father apart from me. Because you have experienced and known me, you have also experienced and known Him. Even right now, you are experiencing and perceiving Him.”
Later, he tells the disciples that “…anyone who habitually trusts in me will also proceed to do the works that I am doing, and even greater than these…”
Growing up in a Charismatic church, I often heard preaching and sermons around that verse. We shall do even greater works! But why? According to Jesus, we will do greater works “because I am going towards the Father.”
What does Jesus going towards the Father have to do with us doing “even greater than these?” I suppose the answer to this question has many dimensions. One dimension is that once Jesus has ascended to the Father, He will have the authority to pour out the Holy Spirit (His Spirit) upon us in a new scope and magnitude, and we will be Christ-empowered in a new way. Closely related is this thought: Even as the Spirit will abide with us, we are also called to “abide in Jesus.” As we abide in Him, Jesus carries us to His abode; the Father, in whom are “many abiding places” (a word that has often been translated as “mansions.”) Thus, we come—or rather are carried to the Father—through Him. His ascension is our ascension. The Father is Jesus’ dwelling place and He is bringing us to dwell where He dwells.
In short, whatever the “greater works” look like in each of our lives, they will all be born out of abiding in our Heavenly Abode.
This is very mystical. But this multi-faceted mystical reality is the gospel of John.
Of course, this is a greatly expanded version of how I answered my friends’ questions. To sum it up more simply, we could say that Jesus, in the tradition of the prophets (especially David) introduced us to a new “name” or reality by which we may relate to God; something so personal and fundamental that only the word “Father” suffices. And He is the one who initiates and facilitates the Father-Son relationship—such as He experienced it—for all who come to Him and desire it.
But what of those of a different faith?
Because Jesus has introduced us to His Father does not necessarily mean that He is asserting that from now on God will only hear the prayers of Christians, or that the other sacred names or facets of God through which people approach and know Him are untrue or invalid. On the contrary, they remain! “I have not come to abolish, but fulfill,” He tells us in Matthew 5:17.
But if we want to experience the kind of unity with the Father that He did, He will be our faithful guide to bring us to that place, because He has and is able to give the Spirit of sonship.
This is not a word of exclusion, but a word of invitation.
When I shared this with my Muslim friend, his fierce gaze turned into flashes of light in his eyes. “And what of people who do not consider themselves Christians? Is it possible that some of them may also be coming to the Father through Him?”
I think it is very possible, and so did John Wesley, Billy Graham and C.S. Lewis.
“There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand….” —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (New York, Macmillian Publishing Company, 1960), pp. 176.
To conclude, I hope it is clear that “coming to the Father” through Jesus means more than merely addressing God as “Our Father, who art in heaven.” To come to the Father is to begin to perceive something of His Fatherly character and attributes and in so doing be changed in how we live and think and treat one another on this earth. To know God as our Father is to grow into His image and likeness; to begin to see and love others—and indeed all creation—as He sees and loves it. Thus, to “come to the Father” is really just another way of saying, “repent (i.e. “change your way of thinking”) because the kingdom of heaven is at hand – close enough to touch!”
May God be the true judge of all such repentance.
As we came to the conclusion of our discussion, my Jewish friend—who does not believe that Jesus is Messiah or the incarnation of God in human flesh, who finds language like, “elect” and “saved” to be alienating at best, who struggles deeply with the idea of Israel’s chosenness, and who is uninterested in becoming a pseudo trophy of a Jewish convert in the mind of an ambitious Christian—had a profound question; one I have thought about many times since then.
“So, if I stand with Jesus on the Mount of Olives and weep over the city of Jerusalem, am I coming to the Father through Him?”
I know what I think, but I would rather put the question to you, dear reader.
What do you think?
*My paraphrase primarily based upon Jonathan Mitchell’s New Testament
Dear Mercy, I see some of these things differently. I would answer your question regarding weeping over Jerusalem as indicating ones' coming to God, with a "no, not within itself". I believe when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, it was at least in part - if not mostly, at that point - because they were not seeing and accepting Him as Messiah. I don't believe we come to Jesus - any of us - based on a kind heart or tender tears. We come to Him fully through the proclamation and acceptance of the Gospel; which according to Paul is "Jesus Christ crucified and risen again". A scripture brought to mind to correct the proposition of "salvation by osmosis" [attitude or works "like Jesus", yet not really recognizing and accepting Him as Messiah] is "if you deny Me before men, I will deny you before My Father.." I am saddened when the Gospel is massaged to appear more amenable to those who are in actuality rejecting it. I'll share one more scripture for consideration. The cross is foolishness to those perishing, but is the power of God to us who are being saved. God help us never compromise the truth for any reason, including trying to "include" those who truly need to hear Jesus Christ, crucified, risen. James.
Posted by: James Berry | November 08, 2018 at 11:59 PM