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When we started learning German in the ninth grade, Sister Felician of happy memory made a point of saying that just because you could use a word in English in two different senses, that didn’t mean you could use the comparable word in German in those same senses. You might say, in English, “I live on Old Ridge Road,” but you would not say, in German, “Ich lebe in der Altgebirgskettestraße.” It would be like saying that you are alive there. Instead you’d say, “Ich wohne in der Altgebirgskettestraße,” meaning, “I dwell there — that’s where my house is.” And yet, quite often the same set of ideas really is expressed by a single word in a variety of languages. That’s the case with our Word of the Week, way, and the Hebrew word that means the same thing, derek.
More on that in a moment, but by the way, — which means by the wayside, stepping apart from the road for a moment, pausing to linger at this nice place to stop — the boy’s name Derek is not related to the Hebrew word. It comes to us through medieval German, and ultimately from the ancient Germanic name Theuduriks or, in its more familiar Latinized form, Theodoric. It means People-King, Clan-Ruler, and it is not related to Greek Theodoros, Gift from God. Theodoric, Dietrich and Derek are related; Derek and derek (Hebrew) are not; Theodoric and Theodore are not. Whew!
Probably the most startling use of the word way in Scripture comes when Jesus is speaking to his apostles at the Last Supper, and is telling them that he is leaving them for a time, to prepare a place. Thomas, of course — who if he were an American might have been called Thomas of Missouri, because he was always saying, “Show me” — asks, “If we don’t know where you are going, how can we find the way?” Thomas is asking about the road, what you tread; it’s the Hebrew verb darak, to walk, to tread, turned into the noun derek, way, road, path. But in Hebrew as in English, the word way is used abstractly, to denote a manner of acting, a mode of life. Hence to follow the way of the Lord is to keep His commandments, as the Psalmist says: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.” So in responding, Jesus combines both meanings. He doesn’t just say that the apostles should walk in the way he is walking. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Even at that, in English we have to say, “I am,” and so forth, but in Hebrew or Aramaic the emphasis would have been much more powerful: “The way, the truth, and the life [am] I.” That is why the first Christians called themselves followers of The Way. They didn’t simply mean that they had a way of life, the figurative road to travel. They were followers of a Person — one who does more than show the way, as a Socrates or some other wise man might do. He himself is the way.
What did Thomas understand by that? We aren’t told. But what did the two disciples understand of that or of anything else, when they were overtaken by Jesus on the way from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and he had to explain the Scriptures to them, and who the Messiah was to be and what he was to come into the world to do, all while they did not recognize that the Way himself was walking beside them? But who at his birth wanted to find the way to Jesus? Not Herod and his advisors, apparently. We will leave that story for Epiphany, soon to come.
The Germanic word for way comes from a most prolific root in Indo-European, having to do with traveling, bringing, carrying, transporting. In our ancient parent, various consonants would “augment” the root, giving rise to variations in the meaning. So we have the bare root, not augmented, which is the parent of Latin vehere, to carry, by ox cart or some other vehicle; see the English phrase to weigh anchor, which means to lift the anchor up out of the water, so you can get going. Augmented with an n, it gives us the Germanic root for English wagon and its twin, wain: a wainwright is a man who makes wagons. There really are cousins all over the place, words for cars, horses, oars, carriages, roads, oxen, porters, pathways, and on and on. But through all that boisterous travel along the road of life, I hear again the words of Jesus: “I am the Way.” That’s what he says, and there is no second.
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