The Way

‍ ‍The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

5th Sunday of Easter 2026

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

In the early 90’s on the Boston underground, (we call it the T), someone had paid to put up an evangelising ad on the Red Line,  quoting John 14.6.

Unfortunately, they had decided that punctuation was too much to bother with, and compounded the problem by not paying attention to line breaks.

So as you rode from Alewife to South Station, letting your eyes drift up to the advertisements above the heads of taciturn strangers, you might read:

I am the way without the way

there is no going

there is no other way

A wonderfully Zen moment and an opportunity to reflect on the difficulty of faith in a pluralistic world. There’s nothing new about religious pluralism.

It was the great anxiety of Judaism in the classical period, it was the defining conundrum of early Christian churches.

The British experience of religious homogeneity, absolute from the 13th to 17th centuries and nearly absolute until the modern era is an aberration in human history,            enforced by violence by both church and state.

Religious plurality is far more the norm.  Religious plurality is built into the DNA of Paul’s letters and into the experience of much of Global Anglicanism; it is not a new 21st century phenomena.

Interfaith conversation is, of course, inevitably transgressive. There is a narrow gate through which we necessarily pass. But sometimes in passing that narrow gate we can becoming anxious and fierce in describing the high wall between the faithful and everyone else.

From Genesis onwards, the Bible encounters the anxiety of interfaith contamination:

Intermarriage, syncretic religious practices in the high places, even at times the mere presence of other ethnic groups with their own gods, might drive people to terrible violence.

And yet, even as the high places are burnt, the sacred poles cut down and the prophets of Baal slaughtered by the people at Elijah’s insistence…

the Scriptures also present us with faithful women and men whose religious relationship to the God of Abraham is unclear at best — Jethro and Malchezidek, the Egyptian midwives, Rahab, Cyrus, the Good Samaritan, and the Centurion seeking healing for his servant.

Scripture invites us again and again into offering our hospitality to strangers, knowing that we ourselves are strangers here on earth.

A theology which cannot offer hospitality to the religious other is in conflict with the imperative in Scripture to welcom and sometimes to be, the stranger.

In the wake of the antisemitic Golders Green stabbings as well as in attacks on Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus in Britain, it is not enough to resolve these contradictions with simplistic feel-good theology.

The bloody history of religious and ethnic conflict in the Bible (two separate but intermingled categories) should not be lightly set aside — historically, Christianity has misused these texts to justify our own violence, from pogroms to crusades to slavery.

Nor can we engage in the heresy Marcionism which (inaccurately) claims,  ‘Oh, that was the Old Testament.’

I don’t think these stories can be readily reconciled. They are the dark icons of our human journey with God, to be ignored at our peril. They show us the very real risks of the human inclination to tribalism.

Nor can we turn to Jethro, Machezadek, Naaman, and the Good Samaritan,  using them as a free pass to fuzzy universalism.

Each of these positive encounters has their own unique message and none of those encounters result in the elimination of either the universal or the particular claims of our Christian faith.

Instead, can we have the Centurion in our south window sit in conversation with those dark icons of religious chauvinism and violence, to discomfort us and draw our attention to the complicated limens of our Christian faith?

What do we mean when we state that it is only by the name of Jesus that we are saved, that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ?

Whether one is particularist or not, soteriology — the theology of salvation — has to be addressed when looking at other faiths from a Christian perspective.

But I’m inclined to ask: do we run the risk of treating our faith as a favourite football team?

We can fall into football-fandom Christianity from either two extremes:  

The first is a weak universalist understanding of salvation which treats all faiths as members of the same sport, interchangeable players simply wearing different uniforms.

The second football-fandom approach to Christianity sees the world as a zero-sum territory, reducing our faith of many dwelling-places into mere identity, simply another man-made idol like nation and race, the powers and principalities of the world, the ideologies and idols of this present age. 

As Rowan Williams wrote:

“There is a difference between seeing the world as…a territory…where rivalry is inescapable and seeing the world as a territory where being in a particular place makes it possible for you to see, to say and to do certain things that aren't possible elsewhere.…

Standing in the place of Christ, it is possible to live in such intimacy with Godthat no fear or failure can ever break God's commitment to us and to live in such a degree of mutual gift and understanding that no human conflict or division need bring us to uncontrollable violence and mutual damage.

From here, you can see what you need to see to be at peace with God and with God's creation; and also what you need to be at peace with yourself, acknowledging your need of mercy and re-creation.”[1]

Location, location, location, realtors tell us.

What would it mean to know that our fathers house of many dwelling places is not built on an island but a holy mountain, the rising son the rising sun of the OS map, allowing us to see the whole world as Christ sees us — with love.

The very particular nature of our Christian faith is that the view from the cross reconciles us to all creation. Because Christ loves us so dearly, we cannot help but to love and welcome the outcast and the stranger, not from smugness, but because we too are strangers, pilgrims on the Way, welcomed into the Father’s house where the bridegroom has built dwelling places for us all. ‍

[1]  ‘Christian Identity and Religious Plurality’, Archbishop Rowan Williams The Ecumenical Review, Jan-Apr 2006, Vol.58(1/2), pp.69-75