Over the summer, BCC (warning: link contains horrible, horrible midi music and things that are animated) is doing a series called The Way and it’s focus is on how Jesus’ life showed us the Way we should pattern our lives. I haven’t been around for the whole thing to this point (birthdays and sanctuary dedication services near Barrie and things keep cropping up) but I’m really thinking hard about what it all means.
At our practice tonight (I sing bass with one of the praise teams who lead the singing), we talked a bit about what “The Way†means and I had something of an epiphany. It was in the context of a discussion on John 14 where Jesus talks about being “the way, the truth and the lifeâ€:
14:5 Thomas said, 12 “Lord, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?†14:6 Jesus replied, 13 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. 14 No one comes to the Father except through me. 14:7 If you have known me, you will know my Father too.15 And from now on you do know him and have seen him.†taken from the Net Bible
In conjunction with this, we were talking about the different ways roads and paths and ways factored into the life of Jesus. He told stories about things happening on roads (the Good Samaritan, as an example). He walked on a lot of roads and one of the most famous is the Via Dolorosa. We also discussed the Kingdom of God and its presence on Earth. A lot of the time, we look at our relationship with Jesus as “you’re my ticket into heaven,†but I don’t think this tells the whole story. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus talks about the will of God being done “on earth as it is in heaven,†which implies to me that maybe we ought to be making earth a little more heavenly while we’re here.
I consider it this way. The more traditional view of one’s walk with Jesus is kind of like our trip to Florida at Christmas time. We drove all night and didn’t really take any notice of anything on our way. It’s possible that there are some great sights and neat things to do in between our house and St. Augustine but we were really intent on our goal and didn’t stop except for gas. This to me is the “Jesus as ticket to heaven†metaphor. Your whole purpose is to get there and never mind what goes on in the meantime.
I believe we’re called to something that more closely resembles our trip to the East Coast last summer. We had an eventual destination in mind, definitely, but the process of the trip was our main purpose. We didn’t blast our way through. We took our time and tried to get a feel for the areas through which we passed. This is more in line with Jesus’ example. He was on earth for a reason, expressed at the end of the last road he travelled, but in the meantime, he worked to make people’s physical lives on earth easier and blessed them. I wonder what would happen if we as believers worked toward making other people’s lives easier not for the sake of them coming to church with us, but just for the sake of the example we’ve been set. It could be revolutionary.