WAY TRUTH LIFE
“Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me” (Jn 14,6ss). “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” (Mt 11,5)
If the history of the world only has makes sense if it starts from Jesus, who is the centre towards which it tends and from whom it is re/directed towards its end, even more so does the particular history of each individual only find its full meaning in Him. Jesus in fact is the way that leads to the fullness of life because, having come from the Father and returned to the Father, he opened up a sure path that leads to God. He is the truth that revealed who God is and who man is, what life is and what death is, which means that apart from him all the other explanations about God and about man are incomplete or false. He is the life the profound meaning of which he revealed and the way to live it to the full to the extent of conquering death. All of which could be paraphrased by saying that Jesus is the way because he is the truth and also therefore life, or better still, that Jesus is the way because he reveals the truth that gives life.
The expression reported in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus in introducing himself says, “I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life,” presents us with the fact that the gift of life bestowed on man is not the gift of an object but the privileged sharing in his own person. Our life is a participation in the divine life. God is life which becomes for men participation and grace. Seeing life as a gift has as its direct consequence recognising its sacred character: life is not merely natural or biological. God’s gift of Himself is intended to lead to communion between the creature and Himself, to a vocation and a mission that can be summed up as sharing in God’s life. Saint Ireneus expresses it in a marvellous way in his well-known declaration. “The glory of God is man fully alive, and man’s life is to see God.” Human life, the result of creation, in reality, is the direct consequence of and flows from the loving will of the Father totally fulfilled by the Son at Easter.
In God love and life coincide. We have been created in his image by love and for love. In this way love becomes the supreme virtue precisely because it is the only one that makes us similar to God and at the same time the only one to survive death. This is its greatness. Saint Paul, in one of the best-known pages in the New Testament, places love at the summit of all the charisms and all the divine gifts. He defines it as “a still more excellent way,” because “love never ends” and if it is true that “faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 12,31-1313). Love has the extraordinary power to change a person from within, thus leading him to invest his life in the wisest and most responsible way: giving it. This is the meaning of the saying of Jesus: “There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus gives his life not because he does not value it but because it is the most precious thing and the greatest gift he can offer, and it is also the only way to conquer death. In this way one can explain the gospel paradox that is radical and provocative but universally valid because it is addressed to everyone: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life?” (Mk 8,34-37).
Jesus the Life gives and sustains life, his is the essential path to reach the longed-for goal of mankind of all ages, from that of the caves to that of the skyscrapers. Jesus is the truth for man. Following any other easier path or any other escape route is bound to lead to the most abject failure: that of not reaching the fullness of life.
