1

“What is truth?” Pilate’s question to Jesus is so contemporary—so relevant to our time and place—that it is hardly Pilate’s query, but our own. This is the question we ask whenever we hear conflicting versions of events. It is what we ask whenopinion is reported as fact and fact as fiction. When we scroll through our social media feed to find our friends viciously arguing the veracity of their views, we ask, “What is truth?” It is what we inquire when people conjure up stories to scare us, it is what we question when “alternative” evidence is offered, and it is what we wonder when people dismiss hard facts because they don’t fit with their understanding of the world. This question once asked in a Herodian palace in 1st century Jerusalem, is frequently asked at breakfast over the news, in the car, in academic halls, at dinner tables, and in front of the TV. Though so ancient, Pilate’s question to Jesus is thoroughly modern.

Perhaps this is why the Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner chose to picture Pilate sitting at a desk, eating a chicken salad sandwich, and lighting up a filter tip cigarette as Jesus comes before him.[1] You can imagine Pilate with a stack of newspapers on his desk. The Journal leads with the headline: GALILEAN MAN INCITES POLITICAL UNREST. The Gazette includes an editorial by a Jewish writer arguing the five reasons why Jesus of Nazareth is “King of Israel.” And Pilate’s phone flashes with this buzzworthy line: 10 WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT JESUS’ ROMAN REBELLION.

It’s easy to imagine Pilate’s confusion when considering the truth about the man Jesus. When Jesus comes before Pilate’s desk, I cansympathize with Pilate’s puzzlement when Jesus refuses to answer Pilate on his terms. Confronted with many truth claims about Jesus, it is no wonder that when Jesus says he testifies to the truth, Pilate responds in exasperation: “What is truth?”

Many of us, if not all of us, I assume, can identify with Pilate’s confusion and frustration. What is truth, after all? For a long time, philosophers have argued that truth is relative, that it differs according to context. A person’s truth, so the argument goes, depends on how a person experiences life. Maybe so. But what has been more controversial, as of late, is how people come to believe something is true. What has become newsworthy is whether “the news” can be believed at all. For example, a fake news site reported last December that former president Barack Obama signed an executive order banning the pledge of allegiance in schools. According to a news site I assume is not fake, there were over 2 million shares, likes, or reactions to this story on Facebook. The thing is, people believed this story was true because it confirmed their own personal beliefs about the president—good or bad. And then there are the many, many examples of when the claims of suffering people are ignored and dismissed as exaggerated. The trouble is we often only believe what we want to believe is true.

This troubling truth about ourselves was highlighted at the end of last year when the Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the international word of the year. The editors chose this word because it named something experienced in cultures across the globe. (Apparently, “adulting” was on the shortlist. Since I bought a house and found out I am going to be a father in 2016, I choose “adulting” as my word of the year.) Anyway, post-truth is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”[2]The editors of the Oxford Dictionaries have diagnosed us well. No matter who we are, we often take for truth what we want to be true, regardless of the evidence. Wanting to confirm our personal beliefs, we sometimes block our ears to that which contradicts what we already know. We are creatures of habit, prone to self-concern and self-interest. Discerning the truth in a post-truth time means that we have to be aware of our self-centered biases and those of others. We must be ever aware of how we view the world.

Now, several educators and organizations have developed strategies and lesson plans for teaching life-long-learners how to determine fact from fiction and truth from fallacy. An online organization like Newseum helps us discern the bias of a news story and discover the truth by asking critical questions like:

1) Who made this story? 2) How was this made? 3) Why was this made? 4) When was this made? 5) What is this missing? and 6) Where do I go from here?[3]And educators like Katherine Schulten help us to examine our own biases of belief by asking questions like: Who do you trust for the truth? Who do you rarely trust? Why?[4]And while these questions help us get to the facts, they do not yet get us to the truth. For that, we must ask yet another question whenever we are seeking to understand our world: Where is God? We must go deeper than the data to the reality of things. As people of faith, our homework is harder when attempting to get to the truth in the happenings of the world.Believing God is with us in this world, we must discern where and how. When we wonder about the truth we must go deeper.

You see, when Pilate is trying to get to the facts about Jesus—that is, whether Jesus in fact claims to be the“King of the Jews”—Jesus points him to a deeper reality—a more profound truth. “King? You say so,” Jesus says. “But there is a whole other kingdom you’re not considering. That’s the truth if you’ll hear it.” Bewildered, Pilate wonders aloud, “What is truth?” But his question is not answered by a statement. Pilate’s question is met with silence because the answer is the very life that stands before him. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard said it this way, “Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is.”[5]

This is what we often miss when we talk about truth. Truth is not raw data, objective fact, a definition, or doctrine. Truth is lived—it is a way of being. As the prophet Isaiah says, the Lord speaks the truth, but the Lord speaks the truth in a life. In Jesus, God spoke the truth about human life. He declared the dignity of life by attending to the leprous, the sinner, the Samaritan, and the poor. He demonstrated the value of life by lifting up the vulnerable. In the life and death of Jesus, God spoke the truth about love—that it has neither boundary nor limit. And in Jesus, God spoke the truth about the world—that everything—climate and creature alike—is meant to thrive. Jesus discerned the world through the divine perspective and lived accordingly. His life is truth.

And if the Lord speaks the truth in the life of Jesus, then it is spoken in our lives too. Because Jesus gave the Spirit of truth to us. The same divine perspective is given to us that we too might be truth in this world. The life of Christ is given for us to imitate—that we too might declare God’s truth about life, love, and the goodness of God’s creation not just with our words but with our lives. So what could it mean to live truth in a so-called post-truth world? I think it means that we need to be honest about the fact that we often choose to believe what we want. Let’s be real: when our pride is at stake, we like to ignore the truth. We can be quite stubborn in preserving and protecting our comfort and convenience. But when we divest of our self-interest, we allow room for the Spirit to breathe in us. With the Spirit of truth to guide us, I think we can read the events of the world with the lens of God’s intention. With the Spirit of truth, we can discern false news from the truth. Because false news intends only to divide and demean. The truth unites and affirms. And so we live the truth as peacemakers and advocates.

This is precisely how we preserve the truth in the Church. When the Presbyterian Church says in its constitution that the Church is charged with the preservation of the truth, I don’t take that to mean the preservation of a set of right statements. We preserve the truth by living it. While we do maintain what is right through the generations by the proclamation of the Word of God and by the guidance of creeds and confessions, we only uphold truth by how we live it. If we are honest about our past, we must confront the fact that the Church has often maintained false doctrines regarding gender, class, race, sexuality, salvation, and more. And it has done so to preserve the comforts and conveniences of some over others. But thank God the Church has preserved the truth by people who have lived it in such a way that those doctrines have been recognized as false. I think of the confessing churches in Nazi Germany and in apartheid South Africa. And I think of the many women, who were once not permitted to the pulpit, that have unrolled the scrolls of Scripture like Jesus and powerfully proclaimed the gospel. As a Church, we’ve found that sometimes we have to let go of beliefs to uphold the truth.

The funny thing about confessing the truth is that we often have to confess we don’t have the whole of it. The truth belongs to God.

I saw a graph a few weeks ago that tried to map all of the news sources, in print and online, according to objectivity toward the truth. Ironically, the map only betrayed the bias of its maker. I tell you this because there is no easy way to the truth. We have to ask the who, what, where, when, why and how to whatever we read, hear, or see about the events of today. This is not skepticism or cynicism, it is just the sober recognition that we each only have the truth in part. And we have to confront difficult truths about ourselves, our nation, and the world with humility. Still, for people of faith, as I said earlier, there is more to the task. We are accountable for a deeper reality about the world than what is reported. We have to be mindful of the Spirit in discerning the truth. We have to attend to the spiritual disciplines of sacred reading, prayer, and communion in order to know and live by the truth. Our task is to be ever aware of the Spirit of truth who breathes in and through us. This kind of awareness requires incredible openness to God and others. Thankfully, we have a community committed to being so open to the truth. When the church is faithful in reading Scripture, in prayer and contemplation, in respectful dialogue, in small group study, and in worship—then the Church preserves the truth. We preserve the truth.So as the world rages with the question, “What is truth?” maybe it is time we do as Jesus and respond with our lives.

[1] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, p.8ff.

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5] Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, p. 205.