“So if you make my word your home, you will truly be my
disciples. You will know the truth…”
Now that’s an interesting question which Pilate asks in the
Gospel of John. But actually he asks “what is truth?”, where most of
us ask “what is the truth?” How do we usually answer it? We
look for the facts – what exactly is the truth of this matter. You
want information that corresponds to objective reality, which is also somewhat
of a delusion. But what we want are the facts, or we want ideas that
corresponds to objective reality.
But in fact in the Gospel of John the truth is a
person. Jesus says at the last supper, “I am the way, and the truth
and the life”. Now what does that mean? What do you think
of when you think of him being the truth? The truth has two meanings
in the scriptures. All through the Psalms you’ll hear “God is true”. What
that means is faithful, true in the sense of being faithful. So
Jesus can say “I am the way and the truth and the life”, partly because he
makes present the fidelity of God. And it’s a very long fidelity;
there are centuries behind that verse.
I found myself saying one day in a moment of some youthful
discouragement, “My life is the story of a long fidelity, but not
mine.” Because God is always faithful. We don’t have to act a
certain way to make God love us. That is built so deep within most
of us, that we live that way without even thinking about it. If I
don’t say these prayers, God won’t be pleased. If I don’t act this
way, God won’t be pleased, and God won’t like me. And the lower our
self image the more apt we are to think I’m not very likeable, and so why would
God like me. Why would God want me to pray, or want me to hang
around with him. There are a lot more interesting people to hang
around with – like St. Teresa of Avila. She’d be a lot more
fun.
But in fact that’s not the point. God is faithful
no matter how we are. God is there, no matter if we are being our
very worst selves, God is still there. Unless we turn around and say
(and really mean it) “I want you to go away!” and we slam the door in his
face. Now he’s still there in the background, but he’s not so closely
linked. Even when you do that kind of in a fit of temper; “I don’t
like you very much because I don’t like what you are asking me to do. It’s
hard and I wish you’d go away!” I just think God backs off a step
and laughs, and says “I’m still here, no matter what.”
So all those images of God in the Old Testament as the rock
– the rock is just there. You walk outside here, or look outside the
windows, and the rock is just there. The mountains of Colorado have
come to mean to me to be like a visual statement of strength and there-ness,
that make them a really good image of God. Now I know the mountains
change over time, but I don’t see it happening. So God is always
there. God is always kind of whispering in the background “I’ve got
your back.” Which is extremely consoling. That’s not
written down in the Bible anywhere but I think I should be so I use it
sometimes when I am praying against fear or whatever. God is always
just there. That’s the nature of God’s fidelity, He’s
always there, and because God is love, that means love is always there. We
can be having temper tantrums, we can be stamping our feet, we can be saying I
don’t like this very much, we can forget all about him, but he’s there.
And Jesus says that in John’s gospel – I am with you
always. And that wasn’t just a message for them. There’s
a beautiful passage by St. John Chrysostom who was, I think, a 4th century
Bishop, who spent a good bit of his life in exile. It is in the
office of Readings on September 13, which is his feast day. He
starts out with saying that His promise is what keeps me. And as the
passage unfolds the promise is “I am with you always”. So here he is
being shipped hither and yon in all kinds of difficult circumstances, and
Christ says “I am with you always.” I don’t have to come back
because I never go away. You may, but I don’t.
So in that sense truth is fidelity, being there.
The other sense is a little bit more difficult to
express. Christ is the truth, because in his humanity, Christ is
humanity as it is meant to be. We haven’t been ourselves as we are
meant to be since way back, millennia ago, ever since that nasty little episode
in the garden of Eden. But Christ is humanity made true. In
the incarnation the Word of God takes on humanity and makes it true. Returns
it to what it is supposed to be. And so if we know Christ, who is
the truth, then we get a glimmer of what we are supposed to be. He
is the truth that we are meant to be.
Now, it takes a lifetime to grow into that. We
are pretty distorted, by our experience of sin, by being in a far less than a
perfect world. We have all kinds of things that would pull us away
from being true in that sense. But Christ keeps pulling us back,
saying “no, the truth is, the truth is. So as you read the gospels
and the other New Testament reflections on Christ, keep thinking – this is the
truth. This is humanity in its truth.
Now, what does it mean to know the truth; You will know the
truth. Today that means getting factual information, doesn’t
it. Means looking it up on the internet and believing what you
find! I know perfectly well that Wikipedia is not always
accurate. That does not stop me from looking things up on
Wikipedia. And I have found lots of accurate information on there,
so some of it is. But in the scriptures it means more than
that. And you probably know this already. To know, in
Hebrew, is to be in profound communion with. Not just with your
head, but with your whole being. It is the word that was used for
sexual union in the Old Testament. But it meant even by that
something much more than the mechanical joining of two bodies. It
meant two people being in profound communion with one another. And
no matter how close we human beings get doing that, our communion with Christ,
knowing the truth in Christ is an intimacy much more profound even than
that.
So you will know the truth; if you will become my disciples,
you will really get to know me, but what that really means is that you will
grow in such a closeness to me, that you will know without being told who I am
and what I am for everybody else.
Copyright 2014, Abbey of St. Walburga
No comments:
Post a Comment
You are welcome to send a comment. All comments are reviewed by the Oblate Director before being published. If your comment includes confidential information, it will be read but not published.