The Hero of Our Rescue Mission

From the Catholic Liturgy for the 5^TH Sunday of Easter – John 14:1-2 – Jesus the Way, Truth & Life.  John’s Gospel has 7 sayings of self-revelation by Jesus that tell us about his mission as well his identity. They all begin with "I Am" and they inform us as to what kind of relationship Jesus desires to have with each one of us.  The I Am Saying in this Sunday's Gospel is one of the most encompassing of them all. Jesus says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through Me." (Jn 14:6)   To truly understand this relationship that Jesus desires to have with us, we have to keep that He came to earth, became one of us, for the sake of a rescue mission.

He came to undo the mess caused by Adam and Eve's decision (which we call original sin) to live life on their own terms apart from God and take the consequences.   What did this mean for all of us humans, their descendants? Fundamentally, it meant that the way to Heaven was closed to humanity by our own choosing.  It meant that sin entered into our daily realities and caused confusion and cloudiness in our moral thinking and choosing. It meant that sickness and suffering would plague our lives, which God originally created as harmonious and joyful. Death became the only escape, the only way out of this compromised existence.  And so Jesus came to us as the Way, the Truth and the Life:

Jesus shows us the Way to live as humans and He sanctified our human experiences. So, we are rescued by Jesus the Way from living our everyday lives in alienation from God as Adam and Eve chose to do. Jesus shares our experience and relives it with each one of us if we open our hearts and ask Him to do so.  Jesus proclaims the Truth and we find that Truth in the Gospels and teachings of his Church, which apply the Gospel to our contemporary lives.  And so, we follow Jesus the Truth and are rescued from the misleading darkness of error by reading his gospel frequently and by studying our Catholic Faith. While  to follow Jesus as Way and Truth is excellent,  it doesn’t complete the rescue mission.  There is still that matter of suffering and of death to overturn.

The way Jesus chose to rescue us from these realties was by facing them head-on himself, not exempting himself from these consequences of original sin.  By his death & resurrection he destroyed the power of sickness and suffering to be victimizing and meaningless in our lives.  He actually turns the tide on them and transforms the bad news of suffering into the good news of salvation.  He faced the ultimate evil, the most final consequence of original sin, that of death, and turned that black hole of nothingness into a gateway to eternal life, to a real life, an existence beyond our imagining.

Let’s thank Jesus for the gift of this threefold relationship with us. And let’s ask for the grace to never forget that more than any other voice or celebrity that clamors for our attention, no one goes back to the Father except through Him, the hero and champion of our rescue mission.