As tomorrow begins the Christian Holy Week, I would like to take this moment to highlight a line in the Christian scriptures that carries a lot of weight for such a very few words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
For many people, that verse has functioned like a combination theological border wall and test question — a statement interpreted to mean that spiritual access is exclusive, guarded, and limited to one particular tradition. And if you don’t align, you don’t belong. You are not their neighbor. The result, as intended, is Christian exceptionalism. Cornering the market on God.
And yet scripture is never a single-layer document. It is poetry and politics, memory and metaphor, theology, translation, all braided together across centuries. When we encounter a line this dense, the question is not only what does it say, but who was hearing it, when, and why did it need to be said at all? The way we frame “the way” changes everything.
The Gospel of John, where this passage appears, was written near the end of the first century — long after Jesus’ lifetime — when early Christian communities were small, vulnerable, and often trying to define themselves under social and political pressure. Identity language tends to specify and sharpen when people feel threatened. We still do this today. Consider all new identity terminologies and gender definitions in today’s society if you want a clue as to who it is that is being marginalized. We draw clearer circles when we’re afraid of disappearing. The argument that because the Bible reports Jesus said, “I am the truth and the way and the life” it becomes weaponized as evidence for a conviction of some sort. But what if it may originally have functioned more like a reassurance to a marginalized group trying to hold itself together in a dangerous world?
There is also the linguistic layer, which is where things start to get interesting. The Greek word translated as “the way” is hodos. It doesn’t only mean a road or route. It can also mean a manner of living; a way of conducting one’s life. In the earliest decades after Jesus’ death, his followers were not even called Christians. They were referred to as “people of the way.” Not a brand name. A description of practice. To walk “the way” meant embodying compassion, humility, courage, and care for those on the margins. It was less about signing a statement of belief and more about adopting a pattern of living.
Seen through that lens, the verse begins to soften and widen. “The way” stops sounding like a password and starts sounding like a posture. It becomes less about institutional membership and more about alignment with an ethic. If we borrow language from other traditions, we might even call it the dharma of Jesus — not a rulebook, but an underlying pattern of intention and action.
And that pattern, if we read the stories closely, was not about recruiting followers so much as cultivating leaders. People who would disrupt authoritarian systems not with swords, but with care. Not with dominance, but with empowerment. Conformity does not resonate with that way of doing battle. It loses its power and a drive toward authenticity starts showing signs of becoming the norm.
Another interpretive key lies right inside the teachings themselves. Jesus speaks almost entirely in parables and metaphors. He asks questions more often than he gives instructions. He heals without checking credentials. He praises the faith of outsiders. He repeatedly warns against spiritual elitism. When we hold this broader narrative up next to a single line that sounds exclusionary, we are given a kind of ethical sniff test. If one interpretation contradicts the overall trajectory of compassion and inclusion, perhaps we are meant to look again.
There is also the mystical reading, which has always quietly existed within Christianity even if it hasn’t always been loud. For, by nature, it would not. In this view, “through me” does not refer to institutional affiliation of similar belief but to a state of consciousness; an orientation rooted in love, forgiveness, and unity with the divine. The “Father,” then, becomes shorthand for the Ultimate Reality rather than a distant gatekeeper, and “the way” becomes the practice of aligning one’s life with that deeper current. It’s not about joining a club, it’s about tuning an instrument.
I have to say that none of this contradicts someone’s sincere and responsibly-held belief in the divinity of Christ. Though it may not seem like it, my view of “the way” does not comment on Jesus’s relationship with God. Viewing “the way” as the living practice of his teachings does nothing to diminish the actual nature and purpose of Christ, as each of the faithful will individually hold.
But, in the most bass and earthly levels of human drama there is the social-political layer, which we sometimes forget because it asks more of us. Jesus lived under Roman occupation within a rigid hierarchy that fused religious and civic authority. That was the reality of his world. So, his message consistently challenged systems that concentrated power and marginalized the poor. To proclaim “the way” in that environment was not merely spiritual language; it was declaratively subversive. It suggested an alternative order grounded not in dominance but in mutual care. Followers were encouraged to become agents of change — not as passive recipients of doctrine but active participants in reshaping their communities.
When you hold all these facets together: historical, linguistic, ethical, mystical, and political, the phrase begins to expand rather than contract. It stops sounding like a locked door and starts feeling more like a direction of travel. “The way” becomes recognizable wherever compassion interrupts cruelty and empowerment replaces control. It becomes less about who is in and who is out, and more about how we treat one another while we are here.
Framing it this way does not require dismissing tradition or discarding reverence for the text. It simply acknowledges that scripture, like all enduring literature, invites interpretation shaped by context and conscience. The enduring question shifts from “What do you believe?” to “How do you live?” And that shift, gentle as it is, changes the entire landscape.
In that light, “the way” ceases to be a line drawn in the sand and becomes instead a lived practice — one that asks not for followers who recite, but for leaders who embody. It moves from gatekeeping toward guidance, from dogma toward dharma, and from superiority toward service. And perhaps that is where the verse quietly hoped we would arrive all along: not at a border, but on a sacred path.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
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