What is Truth?

Introduction

We continue today a series on Questions, the kind of questions that folks asked of Jesus and the kinds of questions that Jesus asked them back.

I hope you’re coming to see that questions are not at all a threat to our faith, but that they are vital to who we are as Christians.

In the first week, we asked the question who is our neighbor, only to discover that the better question is who can we be a neighbor to?

Last week, we looked at the topic of money, asking what really belongs to us, only to discover that the better question is to whom do we belong?

This week’s passage has a lot of questions, but it’s the one that goes completely unanswered that has captured my attention here.

Two Truths and a Lie

Coming from a youth ministry background, one of my favorite games to play with kids is called two truths and a lie.

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

You make three statements about yourself, two of which are true, and one of which is a lie, and those you’re playing with try to guess which one is false.

The more outrageous that the truths are, the better the chances are that you will sell people on the lie.

So for example:

I used to be on the ground crew for a hot air balloon company.

I accidentally set my last church on fire once.

I have broken 13 bones in my lifetime.

Everyone write down on the back of the bulletin your guess, and I’ll tell you after the service!

Deep Dive on John 18

Lots and lots of questions

The pattern in the last few stories we’ve looked at has been that someone asks Jesus a question, and then Jesus responds with a different question.

This story doesn’t quite fit that mold.

There was a show a while ago called Whose Line is It, Anyway? which might betray my age a little bit.

One of the bits they used to do was “Questions only,” where the improv comics would only be allowed to ask each other questions.

That’s kind of how this story feels to me!

Everyone has a question!

“They”

The story starts with this nameless “they,” which it turns out are the high priests and the religious leaders.

“They” are interesting characters.

They show up at Pilate’s headquarters in the wee dawn hours, like they’re waiting for the latest iPhone to drop.

They don’t want to go in, because they’re very near to their passover celebration, and they need to keep themselves from wrong doing, which would include entering the house of a Gentile like Pilate.

Interesting what we choose to care about, isn’t it?

Charges

Pilate shows up and asks an incredibly reasonable and expected question: Hey, what did this guy do?

The Jewish leaders come back with some of the best circular logic I’ve ever heard.

“Well, we would only bother you this early if we were bringing you a criminal, and here we are bothering you this early with this man, so therefore he must be a criminal...”

Pilate comes back with a statement, that’s really more of a question:

Why don’t you guys deal with him? Judge him the way your law states!

Which would mean to judge Jesus against the Old Testament law.

This is where the Jewish leaders tip their hand.

We would, but we’re not allowed to kill anyone.

Interesting that a guy they can’t even bring charges against is someone they want to have killed, but can’t manage to do it themselves.

Essentially, they say to the Roman governor, who is occupying the nation of Israel, would you mind taking out our garbage for us?

“Trial”

From here, Pilate decides to bring Jesus in and ask a few questions. The first one is interesting:

Are you the King of the Jews?

This is not a theological question.

Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a political threat to Rome, someone that actually might deserve to be put to death.

He couldn’t care less whether Jesus is bothering the Jewish leaders, that would be a petty crime at best.

What he wants to know is whether this incredibly popular Rabbi and his following have the ability to lead a revolt against him.

Jesus does what he so often does, and answers the question with a question.

“Did you come up with that all by yourself, or is that what they’re saying about me?”

Jesus does this A LOT!

When Peter makes his declaration that Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus is pumped because Peter didn’t steal the answer from someone else’s homework. God gave him the answer.

When Jesus asks the disciple who people say that he is, he is actually way more interested in what they have to say about him.

The implication here is that what you really think about Jesus is way more important than what other people can tell you about Jesus.

It’s not enough to get the right answer on the theological test, you need to know Jesus on your own terms.

More on that later.

That doesn’t really satisfy Pilate, so Jesus eventually comes right out with the answer.

I am a king, but not the kind of king you’re thinking about.

I’ve got a kingdom, but it’s not from around here.

There’s also this kind of back-handed smack talk, as Jesus says “If I really were the kind of King you were worried about, my followers would already have kicked your butt!”

And then essentially, Jesus gives his whole mission, at least as we get it in the Gospel of John.

I am here to testify to the truth.

Cliffhanger

John is an absolutely brilliant writer!

After 9 verses of back and forth questions, including so very few answers, where each player in the scene has another question and another question and another question, this story just kind of ends on a question:

What is truth?

No one wants to answer this question!

Pilate doesn’t answer this.

The Jewish leaders don’t answer this.

Jesus doesn’t answer this.

John doesn’t answer it in the margins.

The question just gets thrown out there, and then John moves on to other things.

In fact, this question is rather jarring in this story, because it’s supposed to be.

John knows that we are asking the same question a whole bunch ourselves.

What is Truth?

Some Greek

The Greek word here for truth is Alethea.

It’s used 109 times in the New Testament (someone counted).

Roughly a quarter of the uses of the word Alethiea come from the Gospel of John.

It is easily one of the most central questions in John’s Gospel.

What Truth Isn’t.

Truth is not the same thing as fact.

Of the 109 times that the word Alethea is used, only once in the entirety of Scripture is it translated as “fact,” and in that instance it’s actually translated as “in fact.”

To be the bearer of facts is not to be in possession of truth.

Facts are just too small to stand in for truth.

I have twin boys.

They are 4 years old.

They are in the 96th and 65% for height and weight.

These are facts, they are indeed true, but they can hardly contain the whole story of me and my sons, can they?

Interesting enough that we as a culture can’t even seem to agree on the facts these days.

If facts are too small for truth, and we can’t get our act together on facts, we’re in trouble.

Truth is not crowd sourced.

As we saw, Jesus isn’t interested in what other people think the truth is.

Jesus doesn’t take opinion polls about what truth may or may not be.

Any time Jesus gets the chance, he is asking people “Did you get that from other people, or did you get that from God?”

I joked with a friend, because of the way I was ordained, the only candidacy sermon I ever gave was the one I gave here a few months ago.

I said that I really appreciated that it was the only time in my life that I was going to be graded on a sermon immediately after I was done!

Truth is not majority rule.

Truth is not convenient.

As I read this story over and over again in preparation for this week, I kept wishing Jesus would have given a different answer.

When Pilate asks “Are you the King of the Jews?” all Jesus would have had to do to avoid untold pain and suffering was say no.

We might have even given him a pass, because is Jesus the kind of King Pilate is asking about? No! So let’s move on.

But Jesus understands that truth is truth, even if it’s going to cost him something.

Even though it’s not the kind of King Pilate is imagining, even though it’s going to wind up getting him killed and he knows it, Jesus has an allegiance to tell the truth.

One of the fastest ways to tell if we’re being truthful, either with the world around us, or with ourselves, is to ask what the truth costs us.

If the truth never costs you anything, you might not be telling the whole truth!

If we’ve never been in an uncomfortable position regarding the truth, if the truth has never hurt our side of the argument before, it’s time for a bit of self-reflection.

What Truth Is.

John has been telling us what the truth is the whole way through his Gospel, to the point that when Pilate asks this question, John’s readers would have been dumbfounded at how someone could make it this far without realizing it!

Truth is a Spiritual Matter

John 4:23 says that we will “worship God in Spirit and Truth.”

There is something about the very nature of truth that is Spiritual.

This is why when we are kids, and lie (because grown adults don’t lie any more, right?) we feel this ache and hurt inside. Something in our spirit is out of whack because we weren’t faithful to the truth.

Some of us get really good at ignoring this feeling.

C.S. Lewis imagined that when people give in to their sin, when they let it run rampant in their lives, they just become the sin.

He said it best like this, people who grumble too much become merely a grumble, those who are greedy become merely a desire, and those who lie too much become a lie.

This is why the confession is such a critical element in our worship service.

I once had a member of a previous congregation tell me that we should take the confession out of the service, because it was such a bummer.

That dude missed the point!

The confession is for some of us the most acute time in our weeks where we live with integrity to the truth of our situation.

It’s where the inside finally has a chance to catch up to the outside, and in a moment of silence we can get right with God.

And, thanks be to God, there always follows an assurance of pardon, which becomes sweeter and sweeter the more truthful we can be during the confession.

Truth is Liberating.

Jesus says to his disciples in John 8:32 You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

The disciples in question choose this moment to be extremely literal, and say “Woah buddy. We’re way past that Egypt exodus thing. We’ve never ever been slaves. What kind of freedom are you talking about?”

Which brings up an excellent point.

To those of us who celebrate freedom, (as we should)

To those of us who write songs about our freedom, (as we should)

To those of us who have holidays the sole purpose of which is to enjoy our freedom (as we should),

To us, Jesus might say what he says to these disciples: You aren’t as free as you think you are.

Jesus says that as long as we are caught in our sin, we are enslaved.

Also worthy of note, Jesus is clear to say our sin.

We are not called to go out and point out the “truth” of other people’s sins.

This is inward work, first and foremost.

And then Jesus ends up this teaching with an interesting phrase which leads us to our last point: “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Truth is a Person

John 14, Jesus is trying his best to reassure his disciples about the future.

Thomas, one of my favorite and most misunderstood people in the scriptures, says “Ok, where are you going? We don’t know the way.”

And Jesus responds with one of the most misunderstood and wrongly used texts in the Bible: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

So many people want to make this sentence in to a “my religion can beat up your religion” motto, which

Isn’t very loving to our neighbors, and

Is far too small a thing for this extremely critical sentence.

Jesus Christ, the risen, reigning, and active Lord, is himself the truth.

Truth is not something we can possess, truth is something that possesses us!

Truth is not a static set of facts we keep on our index cards, truth is active, alive, and always in motion.

Truth is not limited to our worldviews, our ideologies, our partisan viewpoints, or our nation, but Truth is creator and Lord over each of those pieces of our lives.

Truth is not something that sits still in our lives, but truth is a person we are always chasing, always pursuing, always pouring in to.

Truth, maybe the most simple way to put it, does not fit on a bumper sticker.

Challenge and Test the Truth

What this leads us to is one big practical application for us today:

We test truth, because truth will reveal itself.

Paul puts it this way in 1 Thessalonians: Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good.

We as Christians are not called to test truth against

Our preferred cable news channel.

Our one cousin on Facebook who knows a whole lot.

Our gut intuitions in any given situation

The latest book we got from our favorite author

The pastor in our pulpit

We instead hold all of that up against the Truth Himself, Jesus Christ.

You can tell what truth is when you take it to Jesus.

You can tell what truth is when you ask honest and piercing questions, about your own side of the argument as well as anyone else’s.

You can (and absolutely should) test every single word, illustration, assertion, and painfully not funny dad joke that your pastor says from this pulpit against the truth of Jesus Christ as revealed in Scripture.

We don’t have to be afraid of truth.

Pilate in his question is afraid of the truth.

Truth might be a threat to his power.

Truth might go against his better judgement.

Truth might upset the crowds.

Truth is dangerous.

When we understand that Jesus Christ is the Truth Himself, we don’t have to be afraid.

We recognize that while the truth may challenge us, He ultimately loves us.

We recognize that while the truth may point out what’s at fault in us, the sin in our lives, He ultimately forgives us.

We recognize that while the truth may say that our worldview is incorrect, He ultimately shepherds us in to his glorious Kingdom.

We know the truth, and the truth has indeed set us free.

Which leads to another question: Why are we so afraid?