The reign of christ 22 November 2009
Revelation 1. 4b-8
John 18. 33-37

The gospel reading for this final day in the church year places us in the midst of Jesus’ trial before his execution. We are in Pilate’s headquarters. Jesus has been arrested and then taken to the houses of the religious leaders Annas and then Caiaphas. According to John they are not willing to execute Jesus themselves and so take him to Pilate to have him do the dirty work. As you know Pilate’s not really interested in this trumped up charge against Jesus but he succumbs to the temptation to mutual back scratching that happens when state and church get into bed together.

One commentator I was reading the other day suggests that Pilate’s offhand question “What is truth”, at the end of this reading, is just that; a meaningless bit tacked on the end. A sort of banal retort to the unfortunate and compromising position he finds himself in.

For the writer of John though this is not a meaningless question at all. It is a sort of “watch this space” comment in the unfolding drama of the passion; it’s John’s way of saying: see what happens now. For the gospel of John truth is part of the essence of what this Jesus comes to exhibit; a sort of divine integrity. Truth is at the heart of who Jesus is and will be at the heart of the identity of those who follow him. But what is this truth about? What is the nature of it?

In the prologue to John we hear: And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

As Jesus talks with the Samaritan woman at the well he says to her: But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’

As he talks with the disciples about the spirit which will come in his stead once he is no longer with them, he says: This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth;

And as he stands before Pilate at this early morning kangaroo court he says: Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’

In this test of legitimacy Jesus, representative of God, stands before Pilate, representative of the divine Augustus, and we observers of this life and death drama are presented with the question: What is truth? As the passion unfolds over the next chapters we see this question resolved

For much of the life of the church there has been a preoccupation with truth as knowledge with power. That somehow possessing knowledge about Jesus is to be in possession of the truth about God. Truth was and in many ways is still seen as a body of knowledge, a right way of thinking about God. And this knowledge with power has been seen as some sort of permission to exact control in the name of God. It’s the fatal trap of the religious life and of course it’s not just Christians who fall into it. And it has been seen by some as cause to consider church as possessor of the truth and therefore always in the right. Especially resorting to the words of Jesus’ in the gospel of John we have used the verse I am the way, the truth and the life as some sort of weapon against non-believers. Or a salve in the face of our existential anxieties.

The potential confusion for us as we read John and what he has to say about truth is that we tend to read the word with post-enlightenment, post- scientific revolution, legalistic eyes. Truth has so often been construed as correctness of thought or agreement with the facts. When we ask: is something true or not, we want to know whether something can be verified in some way or we might want to know whether someone is telling us the truth or a lie. Truth is often construed as right thinking and this has so infected the church to the extent that we have in many times and places allowed this to drive the way we have behaved.

But this right thinking is not what John is on about here. Jesus will soon stand semi naked and tortured before Pilate; no-one to protect or rescue him; where no philosophy or idea will be able to withstand the brute force of the empire vested in Pilate. And we are invited to contemplate what truth is. As Jesus has lived, so he dies. Proclaiming that truth is made manifest in the spirit with which he has lived. It is the same truth with which the disciples are called to live; as are we who follow in their tradition.

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

This is not truth as knowledge but truth as spirit. For John the test of what truth is is the integrity with which Jesus has lived and will now die. As he has proclaimed peace and an ethic of turning the other cheek in God’s name so he will now die by it. The writer of John invites those for whom he wrote his gospel to judge – might they too make the same choice, not knowing where that choice might lead them; maybe to a martyrdom like this too. Might they too courageously walk the same path as this one standing before Pilate and exhibit the same faithful integrity toward God.

This is the nature of this truth. We know about this truth; we know about people who live with a true spirit; a spirit of integrity and love; and we know when we come in contact with such a person that we are close to God. Holiness is present.

In our scriptures the words holy spirit are always captialised; capital H; capital S – Holy Spirit. They don’t appear like this in the Greek text and the assigning the spirit a proper name by giving her a capital H and a capital S is an accommodation to the dogma of the Trinity. To my mind, though, this capilatisation objectifies the spirit; doing just what is so anti-spirit; trying to pin down that spirit which blows where it will and rather somehow turning her into an object; a finite thing.

I find it much more helpful to instead use the expression spirit of holiness when reflecting on the presence of God with us – blowing where it will and luring us into life.

One of the results of an understanding that we can possess the truth about God is
that we can be tempted to live as though we possess God rather than God possessing us. When it gets to this God is no longer God – at least in our minds – but becomes a sort of divinity on a leash; no God at all really. One of the things that the church is going to need to do if it is to be renewed is for us to allow ourselves to be recaptured by the sense of holiness and total otherness of God and how this God intersects with our own human being – in all our light and dark, joy and pain.

I have become very aware over the last few years of the poverty of much of our evangelism. Jesus has been promoted – marketed you would say – as an existential salve. To save us from the problems of life. But this is not so. We know this to not be so. The call to take up our own cross is no invitation to a life of plain sailing. But nevertheless, that “Jesus saves us” is the line that has been fed out and has become the basis of much of the life of the reformed church. So many churches shout this at us in a variety of ways – I passed one in Elsternwick the other night which proclaimed this message to the tens of thousands who pass there every day. But embracing an ethic that Jesus saves us from all that’s painful and difficult and morally ambiguous or just plain confusing is an invitation to disappointment and living on the surface. In this way Christian living becomes no different to the many lives in our society soothed by manifold addictions.

But if we embrace the way of truth of this one who stands naked and alone before the power of another to have him executed we find that even here God will be present working mysteriously to bring life through death.
Here there is joy to be know which surpasses that which the world cannot give; in this place God brings into being the things which do not exist;
here we can know and be known that we are possessed by that spirit which infuses and enlivens all things;
here we can know that the one, who the writer of Revelation calls the Alpha and Omega, encompasses all that life brings to us.
And so we can be possessed by this same spirit of truth which was in Christ Jesus, and this truth become evident in our own being. Maybe on this day the hymn which Paul writes to the Philippians can be reinder of this one we follow and the life in his pattern we are called to:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Therefore, my beloved, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Andrew Boyle