Many will argue that Jesus saying “I Am” as Jesus explicitly claiming that he is God despite going out of his way to never making this claim anywhere else. This was simply a response being asked if he was the messiah. Something that is true for that time and era as he was following the holy spirit’s guidance for his plan and purpose and teaching people to awaken from the darkness was his higher plan and purpose. In following the holy spirit and our father’s plan for him, he became a teacher and liberator of many from the darkness of our egos. However, acknowledging that his assigned task and role in life is being a messiah teaching people how to awaken is NOT the same as claiming he was God. He repeatedly avoided any labeling of him of God by followers, and he distinguished himself from God the father more than a few times. Jesus was a poetic, symbolic and metaphorical teacher as well. Which introduced other problems and misinterpretations in the texts.
One of the great derailments of Christianity, its slow drift away from the essence of Jesus’s teachings can be traced to a single problem of language. Jesus spoke in metaphor. He spoke in symbols. And in doing so, he left his words open to centuries of competing interpretations, some benign, others catastrophic.
Take one of the most quoted and misused lines in the New Testament: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” It’s a striking phrase, and precisely because of its vividness, it has been taken literally by generations of believers. In America, it has even been pressed into service by gun advocates as a kind of divine endorsement of armed resistance, an astonishing leap when one considers that the same man taught the virtue of turning the other cheek.
The sword in this context, of course, was never meant to be a literal weapon of steel. It was a metaphor for disruption of the status quo, a symbol of the upheaval Jesus knew he was going to provoke in the religious establishment of his day. Yet, by literally interpreting the statement, modern Christians have turned a call for moral awakening into an excuse for aggression. The result is a portrait of a militant messiah that stands in direct contradiction to everything else he preached about peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This inaccurate picture of an aggressive spiritual leader is also used by opponents of the faith to dismiss it entirely. It’s a dual edged sword with no benefits.
This is the problem of poetic language. Metaphor invites depth but risks distortion. Jesus was a master of it, and yet, in that mastery lay the seeds of misunderstanding. To speak symbolically is to depend on the listener’s discernment, a fragile hope in any age, let alone ours.
We inherit, then, a faith divided by its metaphors: a religion of peace that causes some to defend war; a gospel of love that can sound, in the wrong translation, like a threat. And at the center of it all is the eternal problem of words, their beauty, their power, and their inevitable betrayal of what they’re trying to describe.
Which leads us to another of his most famous declarations: “I AM the way, the truth, and the life.” Few sentences have been more celebrated in Christianity or more misconstrued.
To many, it reads as an assertion of exclusivity, a divine claim of self-deification by Jesus. But in a deeper, spiritual sense, Jesus was not pointing to himself as a person to be worshiped. He was describing a state of being, a pathway of consciousness aligned with truth and life itself.
Again, the challenge is language. The idiom of the ancient world struggles to carry the weight of timeless metaphysical insight. The “I” that Jesus invoked was not the individual ego of himself a man, but the universal self, the divine awareness present in all beings. Yet the phrasing, translated and re-translated through centuries of dogma, has left room for the tragic misunderstanding that salvation depends on a declaration of allegiance to a single person rather than awakening to a principle.
The unfortunate consequence of this statement as it is written in the King James version is that it has fueled the belief among some Christians that their faith is the only true path to salvation. This interpretation misses the intended meaning, which points not to religious exclusivity but to a specific way of living, a spiritual practice that can be found not only within Christianity but also in traditions like Buddhism. The notion that enlightenment can be achieved only through Jesus or within the confines of Christianity is a symptom of human tribalism, an expression of the ego’s impulse to claim superiority for its own group. In doing so, it betrays the very essence of Jesus’ teachings, which emphasized unity, humility, and the recognition that we are all, in truth, one.
A more accurate interpretation of that statement is when Jesus said in Aramaic, “I AM” (translated from Ena-na) is not the egoic “I” of the human personality; it is the Divine Self within all beings the same “I AM” that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. Jesus wasn’t pointing to his individual self, but to the Christ Consciousness the living awareness of God within.
So his statement means:
“The Divine I AM within you is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
No one realizes the Father (the Infinite Source) except through awakening to that I AM presence within themselves.” (The kingdom of God within you)
Jesus, the man, had merged completely with God consciousness. Thus “Christ” is the inner pathway through which every soul must ascend to the Father.
Thomas says:
“When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the Living Father.”
Here, knowing oneself means realizing that same I AM essence, the eternal life force and divine truth that Jesus embodied.
Jesus was saying:
“The only way to God is by awakening the Christ within the divine awareness that I have realized, and that you, too, can realize.”
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