The Way, the Truth and the Life

Christ Jesus is the threshold to the Father - this means we can only really know God through Him, through the humanity He took on for our sakes. At the same time, He is the vital principle of all that is truly human precisely because He is also truly God. His humanity, risen from the dead, informs our humanity with Divine Life, Eternal Love: healing us, raising us up, and restoring us to the way we were meant to be. Humanity is meant to be glorious, it is meant to thrive - and when it thrives it reveals the reality of God himself. But without love, the gravity of emptiness does not allow us to escape the black hole of our ego, we cannot get beyond ourselves, we cannot give ourselves. Trapped like this, we will perish in the hell fires of our own selfishness and indifference. Yet the Father who yearns for us to become what He created us to be cannot sit by and passively allow such disaster to unfold. So He sent his Son in history to show us the way, to speak the truth about who we are and who the Father is, to give us new life. Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, risen from the dead, comes to us now in mystery, in a beautiful presence which never tires of waiting for us. This loving presence of the Lord is the source of true love when we turn to Him in faith - a faith that takes us to the flesh and blood reality of the Cross, the place where God's love and humanity's darkness kiss. This is why Christian prayer never goes beyond Jesus. No abstract absolute can fill us with new life - because abstract absolutes cannot die - and since they cannot die, they cannot be raised up. We, frail human beings, who stand before the fire of hell - we need more than a cold truth to bring us home. Only a man of flesh and blood can show us the way back - because there is no other way to go but with and in our own flesh and blood. And, here in the broken poverty of our humanity, only God can hold back the powers of Hell, because only He has that love and life which Hell cannot overcome. So Christian prayer goes to Jesus through the Cross - and finds the secret of new life in Him.