THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
April 24, 2005
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
The Very Rev. M. Anthony Seel, Jr.
John 14:1-14
“Jesus the Truth”
On Tuesday, white smoke billowed out of the chimney above the Sistine Chapel, bells tolled and the Latin words "Habermus Papam" were spoken into St. Peter’s Square to announce the good news that a new Pope was elected by the Conclave of Cardinals. Except that the news wasn’t universally received as good. On The Early Show on CBS, John Roberts called Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI “the man who was seen as too controversial to head up the Church,” adding “Many Catholics… found nothing to celebrate.” Words like “rigorous fundamentalism, and strict traditions,” were used to describe Pope Benedict XVI.
The descriptions on NBC’s Today show included “hardline, doctrinal hardliner, hard line ideology, hard edge, instinctive conservative, staunch conservative,” ‘The Enforcer,’ and God’s Rottweiler.” ABC’s Good Morning America was no better. The ABC line on Pope Benedict XVI included pejoratives like “absolute values, against relativism, and ‘papal enforcer.’ CNN’s American Morning contributed “the Vatican’s chief watchdog for doctrine,” and “a fierce opponent of liberalism.” NPR’s Morning Edition chipped in with comments on “his fierce stands supporting Church traditions and against religious pluralism.”
I could go on, but you get the point; the end of the world has moved dangerously closer because of the election of Pope Benedict XVI. Why are the major media players in America so upset? It is because the new Pope believes in truth and believes that the Roman Catholic Church knows the truth. According to Pope Benedict XVI, “everything falls apart without truth.” To hold to a confident view of truth and faith cannot be countenanced by the American media elites.
Yet, if we look at our gospel lesson this morning, we see where this kind of faith in knowing truth comes from. I need to caution you up front that I am asking you to put on your thinking cap today. We are not and will not be a church where you park your brain at the door.
Our gospel today is taken from John’s account of the Last Supper. Judas has left the table and the assembly to do his dirty work, and Jesus is giving some last words to His followers before His arrest later that evening. Jesus continues His Last Supper discourse, saying,
vv. 1-4 Let not your hears be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be going."
These words of Jesus are often read at burial services in the Episcopal Church. Picturing heaven as a mansion with many rooms where Jesus has gone to prepare a place for all His loyal followers is an engaging image. His promise to return to take us with Him to heaven is a comforting and reassuring message. Trust in God the Father and Jesus the Christ are essential for the disciples as Jesus prepares them for all the difficult events of that evening and the next day.
vv. 5-7 Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on, you do know him and have seen him."
One of the features of the Gospel of John that I like is its forthrightness. Unlike Mark, there is no “messianic secret” in John. Jesus’ true identity is seen from the very first chapter. His true identity is made especially clear in the seven “I Am” statements that dot the Gospel of John. Raymond Brown, the greatest contemporary scholar on the writings of John, has this to say about the “I Am” statement in Jesus’ answer to Thomas:
[Jesus] is the way because he is the truth or revelation of the Father
on how to interpret the three nouns [the way, the truth, and the life],
so that when men know him they know the Father (7) and when men
see him they see the Father (8). He is the way because he is the life -
since he lives in the Father and the Father lives in him (10-11), he is
the channel through which the Father’s life comes to men. [The
Gospel According to John, XIII-XXI, p.628]
Jesus doesn’t present Himself as a truth. He presents Himself as the truth, and this kind of universal claim doesn’t sit well in sophisticated societies like our own that place a high value on diversity and inclusivity. But, if the diversity and inclusivity of our society is based on ignoring differences that really matter, how is it actually helpful to anyone? There must be a way that we can say in love and without rancor or violence that there is a better way than just suspending all thinking and never coming to any conclusion about what is or is not true.
This is where Christians must part company with the relativists and the secularists. You see, if all truth is relative, then there really is no truth at all. We live in a time and place where there is widespread skepticism about truth claims. I believe that theologian Clark Pinnock nails it when he says, "Skepticism in knowledge may be a nice game to play, but there is no way one can live on the basis of it" (Reason Enough, p. 16). No one can live a good and decent life based on skepticism. It just doesn’t work. Pinnock continues,
Of course, our perceptual knowledge is not flawless or complete.
Nevertheless, there is no other comparable avenue for obtaining
information about the external world… In fact, the glory of the
Christian message is that it fits with the relevant facts of our
experience and can be verified in an empirical way. [ibid., pp.
16-17]
What Pinnock is saying is that Christianity can withstand the honest, sternest tests for truth and not be found wanting. Christians will not always understand the truth of their faith perfectly, but this does not relieve us of our responsibility before God to wrestle with and engage the truth that God has revealed to us. That truth is found in Jesus.
Professor Allen Bloom created quite a stir nearly twenty years ago when his book The Closing of the American Mind was published. It was a national bestseller, and the former Cornell and Yale professor, who finished his teaching career at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, ignited a national debate about values and virtue. He began the introduction to his book with these words:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of:
almost every student entering the university believes, or says
he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the
test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be
uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition
as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling
into question 2 + 2 = 4.
We shouldn’t be surprised at this. After all, our children have relativism drummed into their heads by our public schools, beginning at a fairly early age. While the schools try to stay away from religion, they can’t help themselves from presenting religion and when they do so it is in a superficial way designed to show that all religions are equal. All religions, like all ideas, are presented as relative, except for the accepted truths of science and mathematics.
Even the church has bought into this kind of thinking. Listen to the words of Oxford Professor Alister McGrath:
Much radical theological writing of the 1960s seems to have been
based on the assumption that the new cultural trends of the period
were actually permanent changes in Western culture. Yet, looking
back, it can be seen that this period merely witnessed a temporary
change of cultural mood, which some were foolish enough to treat as
a fixed and lasting change in the condition of humanity."
(Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity, 1994, page 90).
McGrath places this trend in the 1960s, but we can see this kind of thinking still operating in the Episcopal Church and other mainline denominations. Jesus subverts this kind of approach with one bold assertion. He flatly says that He is the truth and that His truth is the only truth that will get you or anyone to God His Father.
In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we are told that Jesus is "full of grace and truth (1:14). Chapter 14, tells us that Jesus is the truth. But, to take an eternal question that is asked by Pontius Pilate later in the Gospel of John, "What is truth?" [18:38] Theologian Edward John Carnell gives a good definition of truth. Carnell says, "Truth… in its simplest dimension, is a judgement which corresponds to things as they actually are" [An Introduction to Christian Apologetics, p. 46]. Truth is about reality, and as Carnell says,
For the Christian, God is truth because He is the author of all facts and
all meaning. There is no reality apart from the eternal nature of God
Himself and the universe which He has created to display His glory.
[Ibid.]
This brings us back to Jesus. As the Apostle Paul says to the Church in Colossae,
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by
him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were
created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him
all things hold together. [Colossians 1:15-17]
Jesus as the truth is not something that the church today contemplates often. Truth seems too impersonal and cold. Yet, in Christ, truth takes bodily form. Jesus the truth is, in the wonderful phrase of Lesslie Newbigen, the “radiating center of light and love.” [Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 53] Returning to the words of St. Paul, "All things were "created through him and for him," and "in him all things hold together." Jesus is the center that holds everything together. If this is true, it is true universally, not just for Christians.
Truth comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ, so that truth becomes very concrete and personal. If you want to know what truth looks like, you look at Jesus. Because this is so, Karl Barth, the greatest theologian of the 20th century; can say, "Everything that deserves to be called knowledge in the Christian sense lives from the knowledge of Jesus Christ" (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 67). Barth continues,
In pronouncing the name of Jesus Christ we are on a way. ’I am the
way, the truth and the life.’ That is the way through time, the centre
of which He is; and this way has an origin that lies not in darkness.
This way does not proceed out of darkness; its origin corresponds
with this way. And it leads to a goal, which once more is not dark;
the very future bears His name, Jesus Christ. [Ibid., p. 70]
Because Jesus is the truth, He is the way. Jesus is the truth that lights the darkness of this world, and shows us the way to His Father. Because Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, the future leads to Him. In another place Barth says,
The inner way, the way of simple faith, is the way of Christ. A
greater than Moses and a greater than John the Baptist is here. He
is the love of God, glorified before the world was and forever
glorified. Can one say that humanity has exhausted the possibilities
of his way? We have received from Jesus many different truths.
But the simplest of them all we have the least comprehended - that
he was the Son of God and that we, if we will, may go with him the
way wherein one simply believes that the Father’s will is truth and
must be done. [The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 26]
You can confidently follow Jesus because His way is the way of truth. Because Jesus is the truth, He is the life. You can live your life as Jesus teaches you to do so with full confidence that the way and truth of Jesus corresponds to reality. His way is the way that we were intended by our Creator to live. Jesus says there is no other Way, there is no other alternative route that really works. Jesus says that there is no other alternative truth. His way of life is the right way of life and no other alternative way of life ultimately works. If this is true, then the whole world needs to be let in on this truth. It is of utmost importance.
Our world desperately needs truth, and as followers of the way, the truth and the live, we have it. Truth is to be lived and shared. If we are a people of Jesus Christ, then we are a people of truth. One follows from the other. It is through Jesus that we discover not only the truth about God, but also the truth about ourselves and the truth about the universe that we live in. According to Jesus Christ, there is no other way. Access to God and true life is only through Jesus.
This is why so many scientists today see no incompatibility between their belief in God and their work in their fields. It is why longtime atheist Antony Flew looked at the complexity of biochemistry and recently concluded that there is a God. Truth is out there to be discovered, and if you want the best starting place, start with Jesus.
Start in prayer. Start with Scripture; but start with Jesus. He is the way, the truth and the life.
Let us pray.
O Lord, our inspiration and teacher, who is the truth that we seek: Send out you light and illumine us. Give us a deep and clear knowledge of ourselves and a growing knowledge of the world that you have created. Confirm is us the holiness of true reason. Strengthen in us the aspiration towards noble and spacious thinking, and above the clouds of prejudice and the mists of passion we shall think thine own thoughts after thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [based on a prayer by H.S. Nash]
