Jesus is the Answer

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A

You may have heard this glib cliched line: “Jesus is the answer.” Some cheekily retort, “but the answer to what? What exactly is the question?” But what I’m going to say today is going to ruffle some feathers, if not shock and scandalise many of you. Before we say that Jesus is the answer, we must recognise that Jesus is also the problem.

Jesus is the reason that the Christian faith is a problem. See what He claims in today’s gospel. “…No one can come to the Father except through Me” is the bone of contention. There is no way of getting around this declaration, unless you choose to ignore it or expunge it from the Bible for being too fundamentally exclusive. He tells us in no uncertain terms: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Not just any way, or one among many truths or merely a path of life among other valid paths. He is The Way, The Truth, and The Life.

That Jesus is the only necessary Saviour of all is a truth that for over twenty centuries – beginning with Peter’s discourse after Pentecost – it was never felt necessity to restate. This truth is, so to speak, the minimum threshold of the faith; it is the primordial certitude, it is among believers the simple and most essential fact. In two thousand years this has never been brought into doubt, not even during the crisis of Arianism, and not even during the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. The fact of needing to issue a reminder of this in our time tells us the extent of the gravity of the current situation.

When people claim that all religions are principally the same, with merely insignificant and superficial differences, as open-minded as they may sound, it actually betrays a certain ideological superiority and ignorance. No one could ever possibly make this claim unless he is abysmally ignorant of what the different religions of the world actually teach. Certainly, there are similarities and analogous parallels, but there are also many differences and even contradictions between truth claims. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that there’s a world of a difference when one religion that states that there is no God and another one that asserts it, and one could obviously not sweep this inconsistency under the carpet and term it as ‘insignificant’ or ‘non-essential.’ To ignore or to collapse every single difference and contradiction into a single voluminous salad bowl of beliefs is like thinking the earth is flat.

Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search for man. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails but God continues to reach down, in spite of our failure. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. Of course, if these roads to salvation were indeed man made, it would indeed be stupid and arrogant to absolutise any one of them. But if God made the road and the path, He must indeed be a fickle and schizophrenic deity who enjoys confusing his creation by creating contradictory alternatives. But if He made only one path – One Way, One Truth and One source of Life, His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ and the Church which He has left behind as that one certain path for all humanity – then it is humility and not arrogance to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that all our man made roads are as good as God’s God-made one.

To the common argument that this fundamental understanding of salvation radically changed as a result of the Second Vatican Council, it is good to have a look at what the Council Fathers actually taught and not what we assume they taught. The Council taught that on the one hand there is much deep wisdom and value, or “rays of truth” in other religions and that the Christian should respect them and learn from them. But, on the other hand, the claims of Christ and His Church can never be lessened, compromised, or relativised. The Church continues to proclaim that God intends the salvation of all, and He does so through the mediation of His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and the Church, which is His Body. And yet those who through no fault of their own do not know Christ or His Church, but who follow the dictates of their conscience as prompted by the Spirit, may also be saved. But their salvation too comes from Christ and never apart from Him. That is why the Church continues to proclaim that God intends the salvation of all, and He does so through the mediation of His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and the Church, which is His Body.

Has this position changed in 2026 with a new pope. Without skipping a beat, Pope Leo recently reiterated this truth to a group of altar servers who had come from France: “Who will come to save us? Not only from our sufferings, from our limits and our mistakes, but even from death itself? The answer is perfectly clear and resounds in the History of 2000 years: only Jesus comes to save us, no-one else: because only he has the power to do so – He is God Almighty in person – and because he loves us. Saint Peter said it emphatically: ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). Never forget these words, dear friend: imprint them on your heart, and place Jesus at the centre of your lives.”

Though the world may appear to be a free marketplace of ideas, opinions, theologies and ideologies, where we are constantly tempted to come up with a recipe or salad of ideas, we Christians have already made our choice. There may be many rivers which may ultimately lead to the sea, but there is only one Way, one Truth and one Life that leads to Heaven, it is Christ, for He is both the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the Source of Life itself and its destined End.