‘Nobody comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14 : 6b). Can we really take that literally? Can we even take it seriously? ‘Nobody’ (he is talking about the whole human race) ‘comes to the Father’ (he means God) ‘but by me’ (he means himself).

There are, I think, around four or five thousand million people alive today and countless millions have lived in the past; and most of them—apart from a few eccentrics—have thought about God one way or another, communally or individually. I mean they have thought about the mystery that things are, the mysterious purpose of human life, or however they have put it; and they have sought to come to God. There have been great religions devoted to meditating on these things, whole civilisations sustained by some kind of worship of God, there has been endless striving to come to the Father. And now, amongst all these teeming millions, it is being asserted that, after all, nobody comes to God except through this individual carpenter in Palestine.

The egoism is breathtaking. Surely there must be some mistake.

Let us then think about this for a minute or two.

First of all, St John is not saying that nobody sees or understands God except by getting to know Jesus of Nazareth. People can seek to understand God, they can wrestle with this problem or explore this mystery quite apart from faith in Jesus Christ. John does not think they will get very far, for he says ‘No one has ever seen God’; but having faith in Jesus Christ will not get them any further.