The Way as Metaphor

Eugene Peterson wants followers of Jesus to live the Christian life with integrity and with passion. Before I knew about him and read my first Peterson book, I didn't really know what the jacket cover meant when it said that he was professor of Spiritual Theology. After ten years of reading his books, I have a much better sense of what that means, and I think his latest book, The Jesus Way, captures this passion.

There is a way in which the metaphor of Jesus as "the Way" captures this desire he has to communicate the depth and breadth of Jesus and following him. In the first chapter of the book, he argues that you cannot adequately define or inform the life of following Jesus. Metaphor is the only linguistic mode that can carry the freight. He writes,

A metaphor is a word that carries us across the abyss separating the invisible from the visible. The contradiction involved in what the word denotes and what it connotes sets up a tension in our minds, and we are stimulated to an act of imagination in which we become participants in what is being spoken. Metaphor is our lexical witness to transcendence--to the more, the beyond, the within--to all that cannot be accounted for by our microscopes and telescopes, by our algebra and geometry, by pulse rate and blood pressure, by weights and measures...a witness to all the operations of the Trinity (25).

To say that Jesus is The Way is to exceed what we can possibly define or describe. This metaphor draws us imaginatively into it to discover meaning and behaviors and attitudes and dimensions that description could never include. There is always a surplus of meaning in this metaphor, and that is why metaphors are so important and occur so regularly in the Bible.

What does this metaphor mean to you, and how have you incorporated into your own life? How is Jesus the Way for you? How is Jesus not the Way for you?