What Is Truth?

Public Domain - Nikolai Ge - http://www.picture.art-catalog.ru/picture.php?id_picture=7515

 

"So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, 'Are you the King of the Jews'”

 

Jesus answered, 'Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?'

 

Pilate answered, 'Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?'

 

Jesus answered, 'My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.'

 

Then Pilate said to him, 'So you are a king?'

 

Jesus answered, 'You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.'

 

Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?'

After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, 'I find no guilt in him.'"

(John 18:33-38 ESV)

 

If you were Pilate, and to some extent, we all are at some point, you just don't get it. We can't get it when we try to impose our own or society's definitions of power, might, prestige, and influence on a kingdom that is not of this world. We ask the same question he asked. With truth standing before us, staring us in the face, trying one angle after another to explain truth to us and to shake us out of our tired definitions, "What is truth?"

 

The truth is that truth is ....

 

And it is not what we think it is.

 

It never was and never can be.

 

Truth that transcends and transforms enters the world as a blinding contrast to our values and false passions. it challenges our insecurities and control mania. It challenges our notions that we must resort to violence to achieve non-violent ends or that we must coerce in order to convert.

 

It shouts in our ears and lives out before us the radical notion that sometimes it is enough, and more than enough, to stand and bear witness.

 

It leaves us dumbfounded with the uncomfortable feeling that we can find no fault in him, but that we cannot figure him out either.

 

And we, who would follow, hear his simple, "follow me," and his playful, Come and see."