“I am the way… no one comes to the Father except through me”, says Jesus, using a turn of phrase which expresses movement (Jn 14:6). The Father is the goal of our walk following Christ, on the way that is Christ.
It is good, I think, to eliminate a serious misunderstanding that today very often surrounds these words by which Jesus describes himself as the way, the only way! These words are contested because they are misunderstood, considered controversial because there are other ways besides Christianity which lead to God, which is true. The interreligious dialogue causes us to pay more attention to the diversity of spiritual paths. But these words of Jesus say something else, something much deeper. Jesus does not say that he leads us to God but “to the Father”. It is not a man who leads to God but God the Son who leads to God the Father. Jesus is not a great teacher or the founder of a religion who leads to God but God who leads to God, the Son who leads to the Father, into the bosom of the Trinity. In that sense, within the bosom of the Trinity, Jesus is indeed the only one who can say: “No one comes to the Father except through me!”. If we neglect the deeply Trinitarian dimension of the gospel of John, these words of Jesus are prone to be misunderstood, they are even incomprehensible, unacceptable. But when we take this Trinitarian dimension into account, we avoid such misunderstanding.
