What is Truth? Who is Truth? Who Knows and Who Cares?

Sermon for Christ the King. Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Chevy Chase on Nov. 24, 2024

One man is on trial for his life. Another man holds power and is in control. Which one is which?  Which one holds the real power over the other? 

Today, we in the Church proclaim that Christ is the king. We say that we bow only to Jesus, the Christ. Yet the scene before us in today’s gospel is more than a little ironic.

 One of Jesus’ disciples, Judas, has betrayed Jesus to the chief priests and the Pharisees, who run the institutional church in Jerusalem. Large and in charge, the people with religious power have sent a band of Temple police and Roman soldiers to seize Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he has gone to pray late at night.

 Judas has betrayed his Lord. Peter then denies his Lord. The rest of the terrified disciples scatter in the night as Jesus is taken away. Next, the soldiers bring Jesus to Caiaphas, the High Priest, for a formal religious trial.  They want to prove that Jesus has been secretly training his disciples to be revolutionaries. Yet Caiaphas wastes none of his precious time. He pawns Jesus off on Pilate—the Roman leader who is in charge of maintaining Roman rule in Judea.[1]

 Now Pilate doesn’t really care about Jesus at all. Pilate, who is “the local representative of the greatest world power of that time,”[2] gets his paycheck from the Roman Emperor. Jesus—an itinerate preacher from the backwaters of Galilee, is no threat to Pilate’s rule. And yet. And yet.

 This is said itinerate carpenter turned preacher—one rumored to do miraculous healings and powerful teachings, one who seems to have stirred up crowds all over Galilee, one who has sat down to supper with all sorts and kinds of folks. Church officials are nervous—especially with Passover here. So here Jesus stands for arraignment for trial. He stands in the Praetorium—a place near the Temple Mount where Pilate is staying with his troops. They are stationed here because of the hundreds of thousands of people in Jerusalem for Passover. Violence is always a possibility. If the people riot in the streets and rebel against the government, then the military must be on high alert. People in power must be protected.

 So here is the controlling representative of Rome facing a man who has no control of anything. Yet ironic, is it not, that Pilate, who knows full well that Jesus is really no political threat, who has asked the Jewish authorities to “take him yourselves and judge him according to your law” a few verses before this, now seems to be in charge of Jesus’ fate.

Pilate is in charge of one kind of truth. Yet the last verse of today’s gospel, verse 38 (yes, this verse added by the preacher), contains a very telling question—one that you and I are way too familiar with these days:  “Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” What is truth, indeed?  And to push a bit, what sort of truth are we talking about? What sort of truth really matters to you and me?

We can argue that Jesus is trapped—standing here, betrayed, denied, arrested on false charges. Jesus has no power to free himself. Yet Jesus knows who he is, and where his center of power is. Pilate represents an intellectual understanding of truth. And in Pilate’s handling of this arraignment of Jesus, we see an all too familiar and uneasy alliance between political power and religious power. The two have aligned to keep the peace. To keep the power and money where they think it belongs—with them. The rich stay rich. The poor stay poor.

 Whether in the first or the twenty first century, it seems that too often, political or human power align with institutional religious power, because power and control have assumed they know what real truth is. Human power has sold out.  As the poet William Butler Yeats phrased it in his poem “The Second Coming, “Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.” Indeed.

America has, in the past several years, and more intensely in the past few months, been in the throes of what is arguably the most divided and chaotic political election of our lifetimes. The preacher does not say that lightly.

Yet despite my own attempts to know what real truth is, I know that the echo chambers in which both political parties have lived make it difficult, if not impossible, to know the real truth.

Today, we see Truth, my friends. We see it in Jesus. You and I, as Christian believers, do not belong to one particular nation, or to one particular political reality. The kingdom to which we really belong is not political. It is not economic. It is not social. It is theological. We are children of God.

The powers of the nation or the world may as well proclaim, as the demanding crowds did of Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.” Yet when the shouts die away, we behold Truth—sometimes standing quietly in front of us.

God has sent Jesus to you and to me as a human being who holds divine truth in his being. Real truth begins, continues, and ends in God—   not in any human being or human institution. We are all just broken, imperfect vessels of God. Made in the image of God—the Imago Dei—yet not fully realized in that image. If we are awake and aware, we know this truth—and I wonder if Pilate, even in his political role, knew that it was not really Jesus who was trapped, but he, himself. It is Pilate who is caught between two versions of the truth, and yet in order to keep peace between the institutional powers of politics and religion, he must play his role.

 One wonders if Pilate asks so many questions of Jesus because he is trying to find a technicality upon which he can condemn the quiet man before him. One wonders if Pilate is unnerved by the quiet power before him, a man who understands fully who he is, from Whom his authority comes, and in Whom his Truth is centered.

Jesus is the way, the truth, the life. Pilate is not. Perhaps deep in his heart, Pilate knows this. He sees real Truth in the person and words of Jesus.

How do you and I, twenty-first century Christians, know truth when we see or hear it? How do we know what truth is, what it sounds like, what it looks like? Hint: we won’t find it in the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. We won’t find it on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or PBS or the BBC. We also won’t find it on YouTube.

We can only find Truth when we understand first that no earthly powers really hold Truth. The kingdom to which we belong does not look like earthly power, nor sound like it, or act like it. Christians must not blindly obey power in the world in such a way that we grow blind to the power of God.

Dorothee Sollee was a 20th century German theologian—a German Protestant Christian whose beliefs aligned with those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Sollee offered one model for how we look at the Truth embodied in Jesus—not just as something to admire or contemplate, but Truth to be lived out as a witness to God’s love. Sollee urged us to avoid blind, non-thinking obedience. Rather, she challenged us “to practice discerning obedience. . .in response to the proclamation of Jesus. . .[this kind of obedience] has its “eyes wide open [to] first discover God’s will in the situation.”[3]

How do we know that what we understand is God’s will and not our own? First, I would argue that we do not discover this on our own, or in solitude. God has created us to live in community. Together, we ask questions, challenge each other, accept and love each other, slowly make our way forward together in this journey of faith. In Sollee’s words, “we not only accept responsibility for the world around us but seek to be a part of God’s transformation of the world.”[4]

Second, in order to get to the heart of how to know Truth, we must look at the life of the Lord we follow. Jesus taught us that there are really only two “Great Commandments:” Love God. Love our neighbors the way we want to be loved. We must ask ourselves whether the words we speak and the way we live every day—in the office, at home, at the grocery store, in restaurants, on the roads—lives out these two Great Commandments.

You and I must call upon our God-given resources in ways that make Jesus’ love real—in our lives and in the lives of every person we see. To live in the Truth of Jesus’s love and grace will transform me. It will transform you. Then—only then–can we–together—transform the world, so that God’s world, God’s kingdom, is lived out on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.

[1] Pete Peery in “Homiletical Perspective” in Feasting on the Word: Year B, Vol. 4, David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 333.

[2] Lamar Williamson, Jr, Preaching the Gospel of John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 254. Quoted by Peery in “Homiletical Perspective” above.

[3] From Dorothee Sollee’s Beyond Mere Obedience, trans. Lawrence W. Denef (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 3-17. Quoted by Emilie M. Townes in “Theological Perspective” in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 4, David L. Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 336.

[4] Ibid, Feasting on the Word, 336.