The Journey, the Real, the Quickening

I’ve received a new calling at church. They’ve asked me to teach a stake religion course on Jesus. To say that I’m thrilled would be an understatement. I can’t wait to collaborate and learn more about Jesus with my neighbors. What this means for this newsletter is, I’m afraid, a bit more content based on my class prep.

I’m contemplating how to introduce the course and have been concentrating on three words in the Greek New Testament: ὁδὸς [hodos], ἀλήθεια [alētheia], and ζωή [zōē].

Among the poetic beauties of languages are the many shades of meaning any single word may take. When we apply a word like “blue” to a scene, it can conjure so many feelings, moods, concepts, or ideas. The potential expressions behind the concept/notion of blue may be limitless, and yet we must define it somehow if we wish to learn and communicate via English. I have a five-year-old and a one-year-old, and when reading stories with them, I’m often in this definitional mode—“blue means the color of the sky.” But we will certainly graduate to those finer uses of blue in poetry and literature, as with my sixteen-year-old who is studying for college entrance exams.

As I have inquired more deeply into ancient and late-antique uses of hodos, alētheia, and zōē, I’ve become deeply intrigued by what expressive qualities they convey.

Hodos

In the Cambridge Lexicon entry for hodos (ho-DOSE), there are 12 definitions—clearly a word with a variety of uses across the language. The first is “fact or instance of traveling (on land or water); journey (frequently with measurement in time or distance); (with focus on purpose) mission, foray, march, race; (with focus on the beginning, end or duration) setting out, going, coming, progress, being on the road, roaming.” That’s just the first definition—hodos can also connote the direction or route of travel; way; path; road; means of access; way in; way out; way through; way to leave; path; track; public road; road; street; passage; course; course of change or development; process; path of justice; path of silence; path of truth; path of wisdom; path of moderation; means; way through a difficulty; right way; manner; system; procedure; system of thought; version; well on (a journey).

In Greek classical literature, we see hodos often used to describe a quest, like that of Odysseus, which has become in English its own word: odyssey, a long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience. Cicero translated hodos into the Latin via, which Jerome followed in his Latin Vulgate translation of the New Testament. It becomes “way” in Latin/Western Christianity. But Greek/Eastern Christianity retained more of the questing/journeying/odyssey of hodos—seeing hodos as striving toward godliness.

Alētheia

Lexicon entries for alētheia (ah-LAY-thay-uh) offer as the most frequent meaning “absence of concealment (of the facts); truth; truth (about someone or something); reality (as in the opposite of what is only apparent, imagined, or simulated); truthfulness; sincerity; honesty; say what is true in reality; speak truly; be right in saying; (of things) proved true; hold a true opinion.” The classical philosophers went to town with alētheia, making this a centerpiece in their entire endeavor, always seeking toward the truth, reality, uncorrupted/unsimulated/undeceitful realism of what is. So much of this philosophical context surrounds Greek usage of alētheia that we could make this a university course in its own right. Regardless of what various thinkers ascertained constituted alētheia, it’s rather clear they invoked the term to get at the real and expose the unreal, the deceptive, the illusory things we ourselves bring to our views, opinions, discourse, and self-concepts. Especially in ethical philosophy, ancient Greeks used alētheia as deep moral reckoning, the truth that demands ethical integrity, the center that is real and that should guide right behavior and reasoning. Justice was understood as alētheia being observed and social order being aligned to it.

Zōē

The simple lexicon answer to zōē (zo-AY) in English is “condition of being alive (opposite of dead), life; period from birth to death, lifetime; way or manner of life; means for supporting one’s life, as in livelihood, living; that on which one lives, substance, resources, means.” Aristotle wrote extensively about bios and zōē, drawing a distinction between merely being alive (as an organism) and being ensouled, as in, animated with soul. A plant is bios, but a human is zōē. Part of my doctoral exams covered the history of embryology—(you may be puzzled by this, but it had to do with some research into bloodline lineage theology and missionaries)—and I was fascinated in my readings how often West European and American understandings of the beginnings of life retained Aristotelian philosophy of the quickening: life began, or was quickened, when the embryo was ensouled and gained its psyche apart from its material being. Enpsychon, the ensoulment or animation of the bios, transformed the bios into zōē.1

We could go on. But at a fundamental level, the late-antique use of zōē invoked more than a simple translation of “life.” In this pre-scientific, or perhaps pre-microscope/microbiological understanding of human life, the zōē force was the quickening, the spark of motion that signaled a mother’s embryonic unborn child was in fact imbued with humanity and soul.

Why These Three Words

I’ve concentrated on these three Greek words because they are the ones in the earliest texts of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples:

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How are we able to know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the hodos, and the alētheia, and the zōē.”

This packs a punch when we consider the conceptual frame of hodos, alētheia, and zōē. The whole Journey, the complete Odyssey, the Via, the Striving: Jesus is these. The whole Truth, the Real, the Never-Deceptive, the Honesty: Jesus is these. The whole Quickening, the Anima, the Soul-force, the Aliveness, the Life: Jesus is these.

I was struck by hearing someone confess to self-deception: she remarked how she had been caught in thought-loops and self-narratives that maintained an idea of herself that she was better than she actually was; that she really wasn’t immature and afraid of various things in her relationships. When she simply accepted the truth, the reality that was always there as she put it, it was quite scary and quite intense and quite painful. We seem to know the fear and pain that often come with truth—and we do pretty well at crafting defense mechanisms mentally, emotionally, and interpersonally to avoid discomfort and fear. It’s so natural, it’s so embedded in our survival instincts.

And here’s Jesus offering himself as the Truth, the Real—to be with him will, perhaps, twist our gut, that is, if we face the reality. But he didn’t only offer himself as Truth, the painful and happy truth before us—he also offered himself as the Journey, the Striving, the Way. Nothing that might frighten us passed by him. They can do no more to us than what they did to him. We press on in his journey. And he also offered himself as the Enlivening, the Soul-force, the Ensoulment, the New-life-spark. When we die, whether in soul or in body, he enlivens us and reanimates us. The living, the life he lived, that is the life offered to us.

So, some questions I wonder about as guiding principles for a study of Jesus (and they are not new at all; Christians have asked these for centuries): for any episode or teaching, we might consider How is Jesus the Journey/Way/Course? How is Jesus the Real/Morality/Truth? How is Jesus the Quickening/Aliveness/Life?

What in my journey might align with Jesus-as-Journey? What in my reality and moral universe might align with Jesus-as-Truth? What in my choices and behavior might align with Jesus-as-Vivacity?