Truth (Fourth Sunday in Lent; John 18:28-40; March 11, 2018)

Truth

Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 18:28-40
March 11, 2018

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

"What is truth?" Pilate wants to know.

Jesus left the question unanswered. I wonder if he did that because it wasn't a question that could be answered, at least not usefully, or because he decided to leave it as homework for us to do. A couple of centuries-worth of theologians and philosophers of religion thought it was their job to repair Jesus’ omission so they set out to answer the question that Pilate asks. They don't do that so much these days. The question has become a complicated one.

Truth has fallen on hard times. Subjected to "alternative facts" on the one hand and "fake news" on the other, it's hard for truth to get a word in edgewise. It's harder still for those who are listening to what passes for civic conversation to sort through all the noise and hear something that, if it isn't quite truth, at least bears some resemblance to it.

Part of the problem has to do with language. Language itself has fallen on hard times. Oh, there is no shortage of words. There are more words than ever. Cable TV has sliced and diced the available watchers into smaller and smaller tribes. The social media allow for any crackpot with a smart phone to spew their poison where some poor hungry souls come along and mistake poison for food and drink. There is no shortage of words.

But the words themselves don't seem to carry as much as they did, or at least as much as we thought they did. If the money supply increases without an increase in the goods and services for sale, the result is inflation. It's the same money, but it's worth less and less. Maybe if there are too many words and no increase in truth, the result is a kind of linguistic inflation, and words are worth less and less.

One category of truth can stand for the whole: promises. We're all familiar with what happens to truth in the game of politics where campaign promises are not commitments to policy, but ways of gathering this or that tribe of voter. But playing fast and loose with truth is not confined to politics. It is the meat and potatoes of advertizing. We are promised eternal youth in a jar and all we have to do is to buy it and smear it on our faces. Men are promised that they will have to beat beautiful women away with a stick if only they buy the right kind of car. Frankly, I'm glad that a Toyota Yaris is not on the approved list of cars; one beautiful woman is quite enough for me!

It was against this sort of erosion of truth that Jesus warned when he taught us never to swear an oath. We shouldn't have two kinds of speech: one that has no obligation toward truth and another that does. In my quest to keep advancing my knowledge of Spanish, I have watched a telanovela--what we would call a soap opera--or two. I have learned that, regardless of the context, the phrase, te lo juro [I swear it], always either immediately follows or immediately precedes a lie. Oddly, the other person in the conversation rarely notices this. The phrase te lo juro is emptied of any truth value and is simply a request for trust which trust has been or will be immediately broken.

Truth has fallen on hard times.

Most people outside of the academy have not really taken much notice of this, but language has taken a beating in the last three or four decades. We used to have some confidence that language and reality were pretty close companions, that reality could be described adequately with the right words in the right order. In the middle of the last century people who study language noticed two things. First, words have more to do with each other than they have to do with reality. A word is defined by other words and those words are defined by still more words and there really is no end. To paraphrase an anonymous Hindu, it's words all the way down.

Second, language is a tool for managing the social and material world around us. That is, while words can be used in the service of beauty or caring or any of a hundred other things, words are always also about power. And this is never more true than when they claim that they are not interested in power at all. This discovery has taught me that, when someone tells me that they want to be my representative in Washington that they will be in Washington and I will not. "I want to be your voice in Washington" means that they will be in Washington talking and my voice will be here in Decorah. Truth has fallen on hard times.

The worst blow of all, though, may come from the neuroscientists. We like to believe that when we make decisions we consider the facts and we reason our way to wise outcomes. Neuroscience has learned that decision-making is a complex process involving various regions of the brain most of which have nothing to do with logic. This raises the possibility that at least some decisions are made before we are even aware of them and the logic of the choice comes afterward. Truth has fallen on hard times.

For fundamentalists--Christian and otherwise--the response to this is to double down on truth, but more than that. Their response is to double down on truth as something they can access and even possess. The Franklin Grahams of our world are sure that they are the arbiters of truth. They have not only decided on truth for themselves, but have decided on it for all of us as well. They mistake their own limited perspective for God's.

When someone believes that they know the truth, that their perspective is God's perspective, they--in the words of the Lord's Prayer about the worst thing that can happen to us humans, the one thing we pray to be spared--are easily led "into temptation." They own the truth. The rest of us, in so far as we disagree with them, are living in ignorance. But it's not just ignorance. It's willful ignorance. Our ignorance to them is a moral failure that must be corrected. Thinking this is the first temptation.

The second temptation--even more awful than the first--is for them to decide that it is up to them to fix us with any means they have at their disposal. This is the moral justification that lies at the heart of abuse. It is because of this kind of thinking on the part of the leaders of their synagogue that John's community is going through their grief and pain. Someone has tried to "fix" them when they didn't need fixing. Pontius Pilate was a procurator sent by Rome to Jerusalem to fix the Jews, to turn them from superstition to embrace Roman truth and Roman law.

These ancient figures have their counterparts today. I suppose that Franklin Graham would like to fix me. I know that he wants to fix Muslims or, failing that, to destroy them. There are churches that want to fix gay kids and invite their parents to submit their gay children to "conversion" therapy--a kind of Stockholm-syndrome brain-washing--to turn them straight. There are men who believe that women need fixing so they will respond gratefully to their unwanted advances. There are parents who want to fix their children so that they no longer explore and question the world or speak out against injustice. These are the bullies that worry me the most, because they have the greatest power to do damage, but most of all because they sincerely believe that the damage they are doing is in the service of truth.

What they have all failed to notice is that we humans are finite, limited, and--in the grand scale of things--small. We only have 80 billion brain cells apiece. And that's not enough to grasp truth in anything like a comprehensive way even if we used all of our brain cells to do it, including the brain cells we now use to remember our favorite foods and how to scratch where it itches. Still less will truth fit into language in anything like a comprehensive way.

Agent Mulder of X-Files was right, but not quite in the way that he thought. The truth is indeed out there, but only in the sense that it is always beyond us and our power to comprehend it.

Comprehending the truth is harder than it looks. I've noticed this when people want to discredit faith as a way of living in the world. Here is what I hear them doing. They start with a notion that there is this big ball of stuff we don't know. Their claim against God is that God is merely a "God of the gaps", a figure invented to represent that big ball of stuff we don't know. But, they say, as science advances, we learn more and more about that big ball of stuff. We learn where babies come from. We learn how the solar system works. We learn about germs and how to fight them. The big ball of stuff we don't know gets a little smaller. We learn more and the ball shrinks. And, of course, the "God of the gaps" gets smaller right along with the ball. Eventually, they tell us, the ball will disappear. We'll know everything about everything and God's reason for being will disappear. And God will disappear right along with it. Then with ignorance defeated forever, humans will control their own destiny. This is the myth of the Enlightenment. It is the modernist dream.

But it all rests on a single metaphor: the big ball of stuff we don't know. But what if we start from the other end? What if we start with the little ball of stuff we know something about? Then our sciences, as they push into the unknown, as they answer questions, make the ball of stuff we know about bigger. It's like blowing up a balloon. The bigger the balloon gets, the bigger its surface area becomes. The bigger the ball of stuff we know about gets, the more questions emerge about what we don't know.

If we start from this end, the ball gets bigger and bigger. The more we know, the more we know how little we know. And there is no reason to suppose that this will ever change. Already it won't fit into 80 billion brain cells. So there is no possibility of our possessing the truth.

We might have taken a clue from the word "comprehension." The word has Latin roots. The prefix "com" comes from cum, "with," that usually functions as an intensifier when it's stuck on the front of a verb. The rest of it comes from the word prehendere, "to lay hold up, seize, grasp." When we claim that we comprehend something, the root idea is that we have "grasped" something, that now we have it, now we can use it, now we own it. But we may have that precisely backwards.

When I was appointed to my first charge in Iowa, the Vinton, Stewart Memorial and Urbana change, I often visited church members in St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids. In those days they actually had printouts of patients listed by denomination in the chaplain's office. There was a small sign with plain lettering on the wall where I could not help but see it when I went in to review the printout before I went to visit my church members. It said simply, "Humility is truth."

Jesus is not reported ever to have said, "Humility is truth" in so many words, but I think he would have agreed. A humble relationship with truth may have been in the back of Jesus' mind when he said, "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." That's when Pilate asked his question.

Jesus testifies. Jesus doesn’t own the truth; he testifies. Jesus tells what he has seen and heard and he tells what believes about it. We, we who listen to his voice, we who pay attention to his testimony, we do not have the truth. Truth has us. We do not comprehend. We have been comprehended. We don’t need to fix anyone. All we have to do is testify.

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