♦ SERMON GIVEN November 22, 2015 ♦
The Feast of Christ the King
The Church of the Holy Spirit
Lake Forest, Illinois
♦ John 18:33-37 ♦
I once was a candidate for rector in an Episcopal parish in Berkeley, California, sometimes known as the People’s Republic of Berkeley. I was scheduled to preach a trial sermon on the Feast of Christ the King. At this parish, they told me, only half in jest I think, that they didn’t much like the phrase “Christ the King.” It felt too hierarchical, too patriarchal. They would much rather I referred to something more politically correct, like “Christ in Charge.”
Welcome to the Feast of Christ in Charge.
Of course, worrying about the language here is a bit silly. When the gospels talk of Jesus as King, they undercut every notion of what kingship is, every assumption we make about what it is to be “in charge.” To call Jesus a King was as counterintuitive then as it is now. The Jesus who stands before Pilate today, “testifying to the truth,” is nowhere near in charge, at least not in the way that people like Pilate would understand what that phrase means.
This morning’s reading, in fact, is incomplete. “Everyone who belongs to the truth,” Jesus says, “listens to my voice.” That’s how this morning’s reading ends. But that’s not the last word in the episode. For some reason the lectionary writers left off the last line. The last word belongs to Pilate:
“So Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’”
I’m not sure why the lectionary writers omitted that line. Perhaps they were trying to protect us. Perhaps they were afraid that those of us listening might suddenly feel some sympathy for Pilate.
“What is truth?” is a question I find myself asking a lot these days. I don’t think I am alone in this. We live in violent times, when one person’s truth is another person’s lie, in times when a fanatic’s conviction of what God’s truth demands becomes the rationale for the slaughter of innocent people gathered in a concert hall or sitting at a restaurant.
And here in this country, in reaction to such wanton violence, all kinds of people who should know better claim now to be speaking “home truths”—asserting that they and only they are in a position “to tell it like it is.” What an ignorant thing to say. The phrase is not only grammatically incorrect. It’s also ethically deplorable. When someone insists that they are “telling it like it is,” my instinct is to believe just the opposite, to grab for my wallet and head for the exit. Again, I don’t think I am alone in this. It’s not just lately in American history that “telling it like it is” all too often amounts to telling it as you want it to be, telling it in a way that serves your own personal or tribal interests. Telling it like it is often amounts to nothing more than mouthing the most vulgar and hateful racial or ethnic prejudices—home truths that are not truths at all.
So how, in these perilous times, do we really tell it as it is? Or, as Pilate might have put it, in times as confusing as these, What is truth?
You can’t really blame Pilate for asking. For a Roman governor, all religious truth is relative. Truth is what’s necessary to believe in order to get by. That was the irony of Rome’s imperial policy toward the variety of religious beliefs and customs in its occupied territories. It was a policy at once oddly tolerant and utterly brutal. As far as people like Pilate were concerned, you could practice whatever religion you wanted, as long as you worshipped the Emperor first, which meant, in effect, as long as you recognized the Emperor’s absolute power. Power determines what is truth and what is not. Power creates its own truth. That’s how Pilate might have answered his own question. It was an oppressive kind of tolerance the Romans practiced. One person’s religious truth was as absurd as the next person’s, but the only truth that really mattered was the fact of Roman power. Only if you understood that, would you ever get by. The alternative was crucifixion. What Jesus was saying must have left Pilate completely flummoxed. No wonder Jesus insisted—at cost of his life—that his kingdom could never be from that world.
So then, what is truth—truth as Jesus saw it?
I counted it up. The word “truth” occurs twenty times in John’s gospel, at least twice as often as it occurs in the other three gospels combined. It’s the one word, along with the word “light,” that he most closely associates with Jesus. Truth and light. But as with so many words in John’s gospel, our translation of the word “truth” is for the most part inadequate.
Ancient Greek can be a much more nuanced language than modern English. The word that John uses for “truth” might better be translated not simply as “truth” but as “uncovering,” as “disclosure,” an “unforgetting,” an “opening,” a “coming into light.” It announces less an abstract concept or a provable proposition than a divine unveiling, the disclosure of a divine openness, a divine availability that gathers all humanity, indeed all creation, into a loving embrace.
No wonder Pilate was flummoxed. Truth in John’s gospel, the truth to which Jesus testifies before Pilate, the truth that brings us here to this altar week by week, is not a proposition to be proved or disproved like quantum theory or a Euclidian postulate.
Even less is Jesus’ truth a form of ideology, a claim to truth that trumps all other claims, an absolutist claim that entertains no alternative viewpoints, that assumes that anyone who doubts or dissents or insists on nuance is not just wrong but to be shamed or shunned or worse. How many times have otherwise decent religious-minded people fallen into that trap? Ideology is the worst form of idolatry. No wonder so many millennials distrust religious people. As Christians we need to make clear that Jesus’ truth uncovers idolatry—exposes idolatry for the coercive sham that it is. That absolute claim to the truth that trumps any evidence to the contrary lies at the root of the bigotry and demagoguery that has become all too evident in our public life—bigotry and demagoguery amplified in the vicious anonymity that social media makes all too available. The toxicity of our public rhetoric has much to answer for. Like Jesus, truth is the victim.
What’s more, we now know all too well that, at its worst, the idolatrous claim to absolute truth finds its most toxic expression in that distortion of religious belief that reduces non-believers to non-persons, to be mowed down by indiscriminate gunfire—the violence of word and deed that we witnessed these past few weeks in Paris, Beirut, Mali and the Sinai desert; violence that innocent people in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are fleeing by the hundreds of thousands.
And Pilate said, “What is truth?”
I have a suggestion to make the next time you listen to or reread this gospel, or the next time you find yourself having to answer to some tinhorn Pilate who wants to tell you like it is. When you hear or say the word “truth,” hear it or pronounce it as “troth.” “Troth.” It’s an old-fashioned word, a word you might remember from the traditional Anglican wedding ceremony, when the couple publicly pledge each other their troth. Troth is not a concept. Troth is not a proposition. Troth is not an abstraction. Troth is an action, an act of trust, an open-ended promise of commitment, a promise to be true, a promise based upon the intention fully to disclose each other’s lives one to another—to be for each other as God has been and continues to be for us in Jesus Christ. That is why we call Holy Matrimony “holy.” Troth is the unveiling of divine mystery in the mystery of human love. It is that kind of trusting disclosure—that kind of risk-taking for the sake of another—that the Pilates of this world could never be made to understand.
In these coming difficult days, may we find the strength and courage to plight our troth to each other and to all God’s creation, to plight our troth to all who are in danger, to asylum seekers and refugees, to the victims of war and violence, whether in the desert of Sinai or the borderlands of Europe or the streets of Chicago’s South Side, to plight our troth to the victims of prejudice and oppression whatever religion they profess or whatever language they speak.
And equally important, may we find the courage to set aside false fear; to act publicly as if we meant what we say about Jesus; to act publicly for the relief of refugees and neighborhoods oppressed by violence and hatred, especially the relief of children, and to do so because we are religious people, because we are Christians; to do so not hiding in fear or shame but in full voice, in the full light of day.
May we find the strength to testify boldly before the fearful and brutal Pilates of this world; to testify to our faith in Christ our King, our faith in Christ in Charge: to Christ as the Way, the Truth—the Troth—and the Life, to Christ as Love Uncovered, Christ as Love Disclosed.