Truth

We have reached the end of another church year. The Last Sunday after Pentecost which is also called "Christ the King" Sunday. The readings we will be doing at St. John's are definitely geared toward emphasis on "The King" (that's Jesus, not Elvis).

The gospel reading is from John. Pilate, the Roman Governor, is questioning Jesus, the Jew. Jesus is confounding Pilate by answering questions with more questions:


Pilate: Are you the King of the Jews?

Jesus: Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?


Pilate goes on to talk about how the chief priests and the elders have turned Jesus in, and now Pilate wants to know why. Jesus doesn't give him a direct answer, but more of the "reasons behind" the current predicament:

"My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, then my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from here."

And Pilate, like others before him, takes only the plain-meaning of this statement and heads straight to "the rank":

"So you are a king?"

"You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

For reasons I don't really understand... the grand minds that create the lectionary stop the reading there. But the next line in that gospel is interesting and important:

Pilate asked him, "What is truth?"

Boy, that's the eternal question, isn't it? We've probably fought more wars, burned more people at the stake, bounced more people out of churches and synagogues, and erected more billboards over that question than anything I can imagine. In Florida, it's not uncommon to see the war playing out on car bumpers. There are those who have the Christian symbol of the fish, those who have the Christian symbol of the fish with legs and the name "Darwin" inside the fish, and those who have the Christian symbol of the fish that says "Truth" devouring a smaller fish with legs that says, "Darwin". This is not to exclude those who have made a total joke of this war by having fish symbols with words such as "Gefilte" and " 'n Chips" inside the fish!

Jesus never gives an answer to this because he, in a way, already answered: those who listen to his voice know 'the truth'. In other words: hint, hint: I'm God. This would be "the truth". At least, this is what works for those of us who are Christian. But is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? How do we know that this is truth?

Rationality and scientific testing won't prove God exists. We know this as "truth" because we believe and we have faith that it is truth. We get to that belief and faith in this truth through the testing that we do in our own lives and experiences. Each of us has our own story of how that happens and it quite often involves some extraordinary something that suddenly makes us stop and realize we are not alone. We come together in that truth as a community of believers who may be quite different people in lots of ways, but we have all reached the place of believing that there is something to this story about a God who reached out to us by entering the world as a baby, lived and taught among us, became popular and yet despised by the ones who had had a corner on popular belief, got killed, but overcame death through resurrection and ascended into Heaven where he has laid out a banquet table, prepared a room, and keeps entreating us to join him. And that call gets louder and more insistent during those times when we start to lose faith that this is the truth. And given these times in the world, I am surprised he's not going hoarse in the effort to get heard above the static!

As we enter Advent, the challenge, I think, will be to keep listening for this voice that calls to each of us. Keep our eyes focused, our ears alert, and our hearts open to the truth, the love and the light.