"What is the Truth?"    San Williams

John 18:33-37

Look closely at the Nikolai Nikolaevich painting featured on the front of today’s order of worship.   Standing in a shaft of light we see the commanding presence of Pilate.  He is basking in the glow of the Roman Empire, resplendent in the colorful robes of nobility.  He exudes confidence.  He stands erect, as a man who has authority over who lives and who dies. An army is his to command.  Servants attend to his every need.  Everything about this man communicates power and influence. 

Now move your gaze to the Galilean peasant standing in the shadows. His clothes are ragged, and he appears windblown and dusty. He’s obviously been roughed up by Pilate’s soldiers. His jaw is set with determination despite the fact that he has no power to wield, no army to command or servants to summon.  He looks for all the world like a lamb about to be led to the slaughter.  Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you a King?”  But Jesus doesn’t answer. Instead, he says that he has come into the world to testify to the truth.

And the question that then echoes off the praetorium walls—indeed reverberates in our sanctuary today—is the one put forth by Pilate:  What is truth?

Do you suppose Pilate was being sarcastic when he asked that question?  It’s possible that Pilate had become embittered at the way his own life had turned out. As a young man, he likely imagined himself moving up the Roman pecking order until he was at the very center of Rome’s intellectual, cultural and military renaissance. But things hadn’t turned out that way for Pilate.  Assigned to an insignificant Roman outpost far from the center of power, Pilate’s work was mostly routine—collecting and reporting taxes, carrying out policy, enforcing regulations, meting out punishment for inebriated soldiers, petty criminals and would-be revolutionaries. Jaded by disappointment, Pilate may have scoffed when Jesus spoke of testifying to the truth. 

Of course, Pilate knew all about the truth proposed by the Greek and Roman philosophers. “All human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, therefore Socrates is mortal”—Aristotle had taught him that.  “The interior angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles”—Euclid had taught him that.  “A body displaces its own weight of any liquid in which it floats”—Archimedes had taught him that.  Pilate knew as much about these truths as anyone, but what did such propositions really matter?  So when Jesus uttered his statement about being a witness to the truth, Pilate’s response may have had a tone of embittered sarcasm, “What is truth?”

If that was the case, Pilate’ skepticism has a contemporary ring.  Like Pilate, people in our society, our culture and our academies have become increasingly dubious about truth.  Some have called ours a post-truth society.  Post-modernists tell us that truth is subjective, biased, and suspect.  What is true for you may not be true for someone else, say the relativists.  Truth is whatever works for you, declare the pragmatists. There are many truths, announce the pluralists. Words etched in stone around the University of Texas tower say, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  But my hunch is that conversations in the university classrooms will challenge whether or not such knowledge is possible. 

Furthermore, Pilate’s not the only one with reasons to be cynical.  Didn’t the president and his administration promise us that they wouldn’t allow the companies the tax payers had bailed out to keep doling out huge bonuses to their executives?  Yet according to a Maureen Dowd editorial, the very banks that took government bailout money will dish out $30 billion in bonuses this year—up 60 percent from last year.   As one former Goldman Sachs banker admitted, “The culture is completely money-obsessed…There’s always need for more.  If you are not getting a bigger house or a bigger boat, you’re falling behind. It’s an addiction.”

Remember a few decades ago, we were going to eliminate poverty and the so-called green revolution was going to feed the world.  Yet just this week data came out revealing that hunger is on the rise in our country. In the wealthiest nation on earth, more than 49 million people now live in households that have trouble putting food on the table.  Almost one child in four lives on the brink of hunger.  Thirty-six million people, about half of them children, received food stamp benefits two months ago, in August. Given all these broken promises, the country's inability to control greed, the world's entrenched poverty and ever deepening global conflicts, it would be easy to become embittered and skeptical.  With Pilate we’re tempted to scoff:  What is truth?

But maybe we’ve misjudged the inflection in Pilate’s question. It’s possible that his question about truth arose from a genuine hunger for something worthwhile to believe in. His extended arm shown in the painting may not be a dismissive gesture but rather a pleading one. It’s easy to imagine that Pilate was tired of the pettiness, the meanness, the vanity of his life.  He may have recognized that, in the words of the hymn, he was rich in things but poor in soul.  Perhaps he’d been worn down by having to write so many condolence letters to families back to Rome, informing them that their son had been killed in a far off land.  Pilate was an official of Pax Romana, but did he understand, in his private moments, that real peace would never come through an occupying army?  The threat of torture and crucifixion might subdue rebellion for a while, but it was powerless to win over a population. So maybe Pilate genuinely longed to make sense of what seemed like a nonsensical world.  Pilate’s question may have come from a place of genuine longing:  "What is truth?" he asked Jesus.

If he was hungry for an answer, his is a hunger we can share.  We probably wouldn’t have bothered to come to worship if, on some level, we were not longing for truth.  Young adults are here because you seek a truth that gives meaning and purpose to life, a truth worth giving your life for.  Or some of us who are struggling with the pressures of family, career, or employment seek a truth that will anchor us in times of uncertainty.  Older congregants may long for an abiding truth that can sustain us through loss and provide good hope for the future.  So in spite of all the suspicion and skepticism that surround the idea of truth today, the question is still alive in us.  We are, all of us, Pilate in our asking after truth.

And—let’s face it—Jesus doesn’t give an answer perhaps because he is the answer.  He is not the kind of truth that can be reduced to propositions or contained in simplistic slogans.  Jesus embodies truth by taking the form of a suffering servant who is despised, rejected, beaten and soon to be crucified, because the world is that cruel. Sadly, that’s the truth.  Yet this suffering servant endures the world’s violence and injustice without so much as lifting a finger against his enemies, because God is that good—and that, too, is the truth.   If the reign of the Crucified  King has not yet succeeded in whipping the world into shape, it may be because suffering love has no whip, and therefore transforming the world though love is a slow business.