Acts 1: What is Truth? Reflections on the Resurrection.
What is truth? That was Pilate’s response to Jesus. His was a rhetorical question, not an open and honest inquiry. Let’s take a look at the exchange between the two of them as recorded in John 18:
Pilate went back into the Praetorium, summoned Jesus, and asked Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” “Are you saying this on your own,” Jesus asked, “or did others tell you about Me?” “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed You over to me. What have You done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world; if it were, My servants would fight to prevent My arrest by the Jews. But now, My kingdom is not of this realm.” “Then You are a king!” Pilate said. “You say that I am a king,” Jesus answered. “For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice.” “What is truth?” Pilate asked.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ exposes the fallacy of that question: what is truth? Truth is not as Pilate suggests subservient to the person asking—as if the individual could define his or her own truth, or be his or her own truth, as if your truth could be the same as mine, or instead markedly different, but nevertheless equally valid, as if truth is a construction of our choosing or our making.
That is not what Jesus presents. Truth as he proclaims it is neither subjective (at the discretion of its human creator) not objective (something to be reasoned out and adjudged and generally acknowledged as something other than a falsehood or a lie).
As people struggle with a working definition of truth, and some wonder if truth, as a recognized standard or absolute, is relevant anymore, truth actually has never changed, and cannot change. Truth, as it actually is, is immutable.
Whatever wranglings we have had with the definition or relevance of truth, altogether misses the point. These are arguments and contentions over a subject that has nothing, not even a little, to do with truth. And quite candidly its deceitful and distracting—in light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
His resurrection cleared up once and for all what truth is. That there remains a tremendous amount of confusion about this is unfortunate.
Jesus made a bold, public proclamation: I am the truth. See John 14:6. I am the truth, he said. Not this is the way to truth and enlightenment, not learn these things, study these things, or think in these things and you will have the truth, not look within yourself—you are the truth. He swept all past, present, and future conceptions and definitions of truth away with his declaration to be truth itself.
If that were true, nothing else could be truth. At best, any truth you could hope to possess apart from him would be derivative or relative, but never rising to truth as he declared himself to be. His declaration excludes all other possible definitions of truth, if what he said is in fact true.
Do you understand that about Jesus? He is making an exclusive claim—excluding every and any other claim and claimant to the truth. Do you understand the implications of that claim he has made? Everything outside of him, and everyone outside of him is not the truth. What is it then—a lie? Paul addresses this human dilemma in Romans 1.
It is important to see that his claim leaves no room for nuance or explaining what he said away. In declaring “I am the truth,” he either is or he isn’t. By declaring it, he is forcing us to make a choice. By cavilling over truth’s proper definition and relevance, we avoid this confrontation—but to our detriment and loss.
His resurrection makes escaping this public proclamation of being the truth impossible. We must deal with the empty tomb and the witness testimony about seeing Jesus risen from the dead and the ensuing signs and wonders when he ascended, as Luke documents for us. In other words, he must be dealt with. Any other pursuit of truth is simply a Disney-land fantasy, no matter how many books, articles, and papers are written on truth, no matter how earnest someone is who declares himself to have found truth in himself or in someone or in something else. That is all utter nonsense if Jesus rose from the dead.
After Jesus made that proclamation, Pilate could dismiss any notion of truth coming from Jesus. Subject to the Jewish authorities who delivered him to Pilate, and now subject to Rome and its judgments, Jesus was no authority on truth as far as Pilate was concerned. Whatever corner Jesus claimed to have on truth he had none of the power Pilate expected because for him truth is power. Jesus’ response that his power would be expressed in another manner was equally unimpressive to a truth governed by utility and pragmatism.
On the cross, Jesus seems to be no truth at all. “Come down from there,” they said. “You are a phony, a fraud, a pretender—not the truth. Look at you; you are pathetic” is what they meant. The truth did not include the cross as far as they were concerned. The cross was anathema, not truth. But it was truth nevertheless because man does not have the authority to define truth either in its scope or application.
I will grant you that the cross and the grave undercut his claim to be the truth. He seemed to have told a bunch of stories at that point, but his claim to being the truth was rebutted by his apparent weakness. Truth, it seems, should have inherent strength to stand up against falsity. But Jesus’ dead body is taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb. His claim dead with him.
His subsequent resurrection should arrest our attention. No one lives after being crucified and buried. But the claim is he did do so, and as encapsulated in the early creed, which Paul repeats in 1 Corinthians 15, “he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom were still living, though some have fallen asleep [when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians (approx. 54-55 AD)] . Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. And last of all he appeared to Paul also, as to one untimely born.” See 1 Cor. 15:5-8.
So, let’s set aside the Twelve, and the 500—we don’t know them—and focus on James and Paul. James, who along with the rest of his family, thought Jesus was crazy, a madman, and Saul, an if not the enemy of the church declaring Jesus had risen, both testified to Jesus’ resurrection.
That is an incredible turn of events for these two personally; but it also presents us with a possible turn of events for us personally. That is, to leave off all other pretenders to the throne, and finally to exchange the lie for the truth—Jesus, whom God has declared by the resurrection to be both Christ and Lord.
is what Pilate asked Jesus. It would be a mistake to leap out from that question in order to attempt to answer it. The question—what is truth—issues out of a reaction to God, or Gods, our own existence, or our own end. Here, Pilate has the blessing of being confronted directly with truth—not many of us are so directly challenged as he was—but he missed his opportunity to see and believe. His is a catastrophic failure in the face of almost certain salvation if he had bowed to the truth. As we know, Pilate bowed to other things: personal position, external pressure, and cynicism to name a few. He wouldn’t be the first scoffer (see Psalm 1:1), nor is he the last.
But let’s look at the exchange between Pilate—man of the world—and Jesus—in the world, but not of it. Jesus has been brought before Pilate by the Jewish leadership so that Jesus can be executed by Rome. It is a dilemma for everyone, Jew and Gentile, by their respective representatives. Had they only known how great a dilemma it was maybe they would have chosen differently. But we too rarely see God anywhere and make our fair share of wrong choices as a result.
The dilemma is not limited to these actors. It extends to each one of us, and that is: what to do with Jesus. We can just as clearly tell him what we think of him today as those bad actors did back then. The Scriptures have been set down for us to permit us to render our own judgment about Jesus. Of course, disregarding Scripture altogether, living our own lives, agnostic or atheistic, are all choices as well, not so much for ourselves, as we might proudly think. Rather, it is the age-old question: what to do about Jesus? Crucify him or not?
There are two very divergent ways we can participate in his death, two different ways we can assent to it—even in the 21st Century, 2000 years after this confrontation between Pilate and Jesus. FIrst, we can reject him, for as many individual reasons as there are people, and therefore conclude (implicitly or explicitly, it doesn’t matter) Jesus was worthy of death. We have no real objection to raise against his death, and push come to shove we wouldn’t do so. We have made a judgment about him. He was not all the things said of him, or said by him, or done by him. In rejecting him this way, we agree with his death. We assent to it. We have a hand in his death.
Think of it this way. Take any historical and controversial figure—and for clarity’s sake, let’s take a despicable human being, like Hitler. Even though he took his own life, and we cannot kill him, we nevertheless either agree or disagree with what he did. Even today, there are some who admire him, and look to rekindle the hatred and death he fathered, while there are others who consistently reject who he was, and what he did. Shockingly, there are deniers of what he did, but that is just tantamount to an acceptance of him stated in a dishonest manner.
What I can hope you see is we are confronted by so great a historical figure, and that confrontation demands a choice. We either side with him; or we reject him. We either admire him, or we are repulsed by him. His very life demands a choice; and the choice we make says a great deal about who we are, both individually and as a part of the humanity we belong to. With Hitler, there is no avoiding it. We must choose.
And yet, Hitler cannot bring life or death. Our choice for or against him says something about us, but that choice would not be expected to represent the defining moment of our lives. That choice may speak to some semblance of a moral compass within us, but in the end there are no outright, eternal consequences of accepting or rejecting Adolph Hitler. He has become the chief epithet; the trump card when one man seeks to quiet the other. That is an accusation—you are like Hitler—that has no retort.
Let’s take another historical and controversial figure that has recently generated physical violence and death in the typically, quiet college town of Charlottesville, Virginia—Robert E. Lee. He has been dead for quite some time; his home was confiscated and his front yard became a cemetery for Union soldiers during the Civil War while Lee was still alive; and yet, people in this country are compelled to make choices about Lee, the South, slavery, the Confederate battle flag. The names of schools are being changed, statues are being covered up or toppled—and to my horror, and the horror of many, people were willing to come to blows and hurt each other terribly over issues that have long been decided by this nation, by bloodshed and extreme hardship.
The point with this second example is Robert E. Lee stands for something (whether he bears that burden rightly or wrongly is not for me to say)—and people are having to decide for or against him and the ideals he is said to represent because his name has been reduced to an emblem of enslaving black people—a crime Americans will never finish paying for. I am not sure of the wisdom of these recent events, but you could argue this is a contest for the soul of the country—who are we, what do we stand for, should we make penance for ourselves?
We shouldn’t be shocked that Jesus requires a decision. That we do not see Jesus anywhere near as controversial as either of these two historical figures places us right where Pilate is standing. I find that indifference alarming.
What did Pilate know about Jesus? Did he care who he was? How long do you think this all took in John 18—an hour at most? What would you do with your hour with Jesus?
So too the fence-sitter. Abstaining from judgment is to judge him unworthy of obedience, and therefore is also a judgment against him, and an assent to his death. He doesn’t matter quite enough to require a decision. The fence-sitter, like the person in open rejection, has taken the position that he is greater than Jesus. He has elevated his own choosing over and above God’s. In other words, Jesus is not Son of Man, Son of God.
The outright denier and the fence-sitter may look different on the outside; but they both have denied Jesus is the Christ of God.
Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
Jesus answered the question before Pilate asked it. In John 18, verses
