John 18:28-38a

09/12/10
John 18:28-38a
Hudson UMC

There are some very interesting statements made in this passage. For instance, it is very interesting that the Jewish authorities take Jesus to Pilate, the Gentile authority to be condemned but Pilate, at this point, does not do so. This is an amazing instance of the people who we would think should understand and support Jesus don’t and those that we wouldn’t think should do so, do exactly that. It is also very interesting that the various gospel writers, John included, consider it necessary in order to fulfill prophecy, that Jesus be executed by the Romans instead of the Jews because the Romans would crucify Him as a political criminal while the Jews would stone him to death. It is also interesting that Pilate calls Jesus the king of the Jews and that Jesus responds in such a way as to make it clear that, although he was about to die the death of a political rebel, He was, in reality, instituting a kingdom of a far different nature.

In spite of the fact that all these things are very interesting and we could spend some time talking about them, there is one moment, at the very end of the passage, that I think is so incredibly contemporary and relevant to our culture and lives today that I would be failing my responsibility to connect the Scripture to our modern world if I did not spend the majority of my sermon this morning speaking about it. Jesus finished up his statement to Pilate by saying, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate’s response is made up of three simple words. “What is truth?”

The quest for truth, which has been so popular, both in modern thinking and in the post-modern thinking that is so very common in our culture today, is nothing new. As far back as we have records, it is clear that people have been obsessed with finding and knowing the truth, at least in the Western world. What is amazing to me is that, in spite of the many ways that people have tended to look for truth, it has almost always been looking where truth cannot be found. I want to give something of an overview of the history of the search for truth.

First, let us consider the thought of the very most ancient philosophers in Greece. These early thinkers looked to the universe for truth and argued with one another where truth was most fully to be found. They spoke of four basic elements from which everything else was composed, but they argued back and forth about which element was the very most basic, hoping that they could reduce the world into different manifestations of fire, or earth, or water, or air.

Equally ancient were the Pythagoreans, who formed a secret society, that was almost like a secret religion, where they explored mathematical and geometrical relationships as the purest example of truth. To them, these relationships seemed to be so necessary that they were almost divine.

Moving forward just a little bit, we find Socrates, who said that the truth that people were seeking in nature could not be found there but resides inside the human person. He is famous for saying, “Know yourself.” He did not just mean that we need to be in touch with who we are, or that we need to have clarity in our knowing of ourselves before we can really know anything else, but that we should know ourselves because, at the end of the day, that is where truth is to be found and where alone truth really can be said to exist. This inward turning of thinking has marked the search for truth ever since.

Plato, who was a student of Socrates, held that what we can see, hear and touch is not really real and so not really true, because things are always changing and passing away. In order to maintain some sense of reality, he spoke of an ideal plane, where forms, ideas and images existed eternally, never changing and never passing away, which are impressed in some inexpressible way, on the human mind. When this was given a religious spin, this eternal plane ended up being seen as generated from the mind of God. In our daily life, we see things that are shadows and dim reflections of what is really real, but we ourselves live only in a transient world. What we must do is transcend this world of space and time, get out of our bodies, as it were, and begin to commune with the real that is independent of everything we know and have seen.

Plato had a famous student, Aristotle, who agreed that what is real is not what we can see or touch, but thought that we cannot have any kind of knowledge of those things except by abstracting from what we experience. Aristotle coined the influential phrase, “There is nothing in the mind which is not first in the senses.” Truth was not what you could see, hear and touch, but what you could deduce from those things.

If we leave the ancient world behind and step into the high middle ages, we find a completely different way of knowing truth. In the middle ages, the institutional church gained tremendous power over the lives of people. Truth was not something that was lodged in anything as reliable as the natural world or mathematics, or even in some ideal plane, but truth was what the church told you was the truth. Now, it needs to be said that this is not the same thing as saying that truth is what the Bible says, because the church believed that, left to our own devices, we could never really understand what the Bible says and so we need to be told what the Bible says.

Eventually, this whole way of thinking so upset educated people that, in the aftermath of the Renaissance, people began to question whether God had a role in our knowing of the truth at all. More and more, people turned to science as a way to know the truth. At first, this was done by people of faith, because of their faith in the one God of Christian faith, who, as the one Creator of heaven and earth, imparted to it a distinct order of its own that shows up everywhere. Again, this emphasis on science was first pursued by people of Christian faith, but quickly, it became a form of Deism which said that God created the world but left it to itself, like a watchmaker creates the watch and, after winding it up, leaves it alone. Eventually, scientists began to feel that including God in their considerations was a hindrance to their knowing the truth, so they abandoned Him.

At the same time this was happening, there was a quest in Europe to find foundations on which absolutely certain knowledge could be built. This was the goal of Rene Descartes in his famous experiment where he climbed into his oven and systematically doubted everything he could doubt. Finally, he got to the point where he realized that, in order for him to doubt, he must exist, for it was he who was doubting, so he found he could not doubt his own existence. “I think (or doubt), therefore I am.”

This trend continued on, trying to build this foundation. Every time someone thought they had found a basis for real knowledge, someone else would come along and point out that it is wasn’t as good as they thought it was. A thinker named Immanuel Kant came along and suggested that, instead of trying to try to find truth in the world, and make our thoughts and lives conform to what exists in the universe, perhaps we should try to approach nature as if it has to conform to our thinking. Hopefully, by building on our experience, we could find some foundation for our knowledge.

You could almost predict it, but it didn’t work. Thinker after thinker came along, only to find that they were not able to find the foundations they were looking for. It became overwhelmingly clear that there are no foundations on which we can build our absolutely certain knowledge, and that whole project collapsed to the ground. No longer could people claim to have any kind of knowledge that did not depend on their upbringing, their gender, their race, their socio-economic status, and their community. What can we do if that is the case? The conclusion of the mainstream of philosophers was that we can no longer know anything for sure and we can only do what seems best to us. A whole school of thought called “deconstructionism” arose, where the goal was not to put forward any clear and authoritative position, but to show how other people, who did claim that, really were nothing more than the product of their environment.

What happened in the church during this time? Well, starting in the eighteenth century, the concept of history went through a major transformation. For the first time, people began to operate with what we could now call a “tape recorder” view of history, where, if it could not have been videotaped or audio recorded, it cannot be “historical.” This had not ever been the view of history throughout the history of the world. However, once you do that, all kinds of tensions start to show up in the Bible. What were people of faith to do?

Those who came to be known as “liberals” took the challenges seriously; so seriously, in fact, that they tended to run away from history into their own world of religious experience. After all, if I have encountered God, nobody else can change that, even if the Bible ends up being historically unreliable. Those who came to be known as “conservatives” tended to respond by ramping up their understanding of Biblical inspiration. Now, the Bible was understood to be inspired in such a way as to claim that it cannot be untrue in any sense of the word, regardless of whether the topic at hand is theological, scientific, historical, or anything else. What is ironic is that, just like the liberals, the conservatives tended to run away from history. It does not matter what archaeologists and historians discover; everything in tension with the Bible is wiped away as if it did not exist.

When I think about this whole history, I am amazed, not so much with what people have tried to do to find truth, but by what people, in general, haven’t tried to do. Throughout history, people have said that truth is finally in the natural world around us, in the purity of mathematics, in an ideal plane that is cut off from us, except in shadows and images, in the human ability to think abstractly and deduce from experience, in a rigidly hierarchical institution, in scientific exploration, in firm foundations of knowledge, in our own experience, in an inspired text as a text, and finally in our own will to power. Notably absent is the answer that John’s Gospel presents for us.

Pilate asks, “What is truth,” but John does not tell us his answer here. The reason he does not provide an answer at this point is because he has already told us the answer a few chapters before, or rather, Jesus has told us the answer. Back in chapter fourteen, when Jesus was comforting His disciples, he told them to believe in God and also to believe in Him. He was going away to prepare a place for them, but He would come back. They shouldn’t lose hope because they knew where He was going. Thomas responds, saying, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how do we know the way?” Jesus’ response is incredibly important, and we so seldom take it with all the seriousness it deserves. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me.” Most of the time, when we hear this verse in our modern context, it is made to cut down other religions, but that is not primarily what Jesus is saying here.

One of the important things to understand about this statement, I have said many times in the last few months. That is that, if we are searching for truth as a what, that is, as something, we have missed it and have started on the wrong foot altogether. Truth is not a thing that we can possess or exercise any kind of authority over. Truth is a person, it is a who. Truth is not something that can be collapsed into a series of statements. We can’t reduce anything to nothing more than statements, how much less can we do so to the very Truth of God?

The other thing I want to emphasize is that God has given Himself to us. The gift that we have received from God is not just something about God, but it is God Himself. This means that God has actually moved and decisively revealed Himself among us as the man Jesus. Since this is what God has actually done, we are not free to live as if He has not done it. If we are searching for a truth that somehow bypasses God’s actual self-revelation in Jesus Christ, we are searching for the truth by avoiding the Truth.

In a society where both the modern idea of absolutely certain knowledge and the post-modern idea of no absolutely certain knowledge live side by side and pull our world in a game of tug-of-war, this bold assertion by the Gospel is something we need to hear. The Gospel reveals that any way to search for Truth that does not lean on Jesus as the self-revelation of God, is confused and completely mistaken. This says to those who want to find foundations for truth that you can’t treat truth as if it were something you could control and assert dominance over. There are no foundations of truth outside of Christ. The one on whom all our understanding of truth relies is not a logical foundation but a living and active person.

The response that the Gospel makes to post-modern relativism is just as pointed. It says, “In spite of the fact that we cannot bring to explicit articulation how we come to know the Truth, there is indeed Truth and we do indeed come to know it. This knowing is not something that we can reduce to words, but something that transcends us and comes to bear upon us in power and glory in Christ and through the Holy Spirit.”

Pilate is unwilling to ruffle feathers. He stands at the meeting of two significant and very different cultures. He wants to let them both go their own way, but is forced to decide between the Jews who are convinced that Jesus is a criminal and his own government that can find nothing wrong with Him. If he makes a stand one way or another, he could be criticized, removed from his office, or even rebelled against. It is convenient to stand back from truth, because truth causes too many problems. Truth demands that we live in a way appropriate to the truth, that we cannot be the lords of our own lives. Pilate wants nothing to do with that; he just wants to keep doing his own thing and it just seems easier to let the Jewish leaders have their way.

Brothers and sisters, this does not have to be our conclusion! We do not, we ought not, we must not, fall into either error, either thinking that truth can be found outside of Christ or that there is no truth. The very Truth of God has become incarnate in our midst, breaking into our human condition and transforming our lives. The truth has come, the truth is alive, and the truth has invited us to renounce ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. Let us do so with joy, because to suffer for the Truth is far better than to live in ease in opposition to the Truth. Let us pray. AMEN