John 18:33-38 * March 18, 2009 * Lent 4 * Rev. Dr. Paul Lehninger

Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, "Are you the king of the Jews?” "Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, "or did others talk to you about me?” "Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. "It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?” Jesus said, "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 from another place.” "You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” "What is truth?” Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, "I find no basis for a charge against him.”

In the name of the Father, and of the ] Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Most of you are aware that yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. You won’t find St. Patrick’s Day on the church year calendar in the front of Christian Worship—A Lutheran Hymnal. Nevertheless, it’s edifying for members of St. John’s to be familiar with the story of St. Patrick, so we don’t merely associate St. Patrick’s Day with leprechauns, “Too ra loo ra loo ra,” and green beer, but with a man so committed to telling the truth about Jesus that he was willing to die for it.

Patricius, or Patrick, was a Briton from a Christian family who was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, about 405 A.D. After working as a slave in Ireland for six years, he managed to escape and hitch a ride on a boat headed back to Britain. His years of slavery led him to take his Christian faith more seriously and gave him a love for the Irish people and pity for them, since most of them were still heathen. So he trained to be a priest, was later made a bishop, and then he did something extraordinary: he went right back to the land where he had been a slave.

There were Christians already in Ireland, but St. Patrick conducted vigorous mission outreaches to the areas of Ireland that were still largely pagan. The heathen Irish were led in their worship by the Druids, an order of Magi or savants who filled the roles of philosophers, scientists, academicians, and pagan priests. As he conducted his mission work, St. Patrick observed the ancient Christian custom of baptizing converts who had been instructed in the faith on Easter Eve during the great Vigil of Easter. During this service, a large fire is lighted and the presiding minister sings, “The light of Christ,” or “Christ is our light,” after which the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” The Druids also had a custom that, on a certain night of the year, no one could light a fire until the fire had been lit in the royal palace for a Druidic festival. Anyone who lit a fire before that would instantly be put to death. It just so happened that one year, the Druid fire ceremony and Easter Vigil fell on the same night. St. Patrick, never batting an eyelash, climbed the hill of Slane and lit a huge bonfire, calling out “Christ is our light” for all the Irish to hear. The king refused to put St. Patrick to death, and the power of the pagan Druids was effectively broken. St. Patrick risked his life for the sake of the truth about Christ, and God blessed his confession of the truth with many conversions to the Christian faith.

It wasn’t easy for St. Patrick to tell the truth—not with the threat of death hanging over him. But Patrick knew that to confess Christ meant to walk in his footsteps, and Christ confessed the truth to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, even though he knew that telling the truth was pronouncing his own sentence of death. You see, for Jesus to say that he was a king immediately threatened the authority of Caesar, who had certified a king he approved of, Herod, as the king of the Jews. It also was a direct threat to Caesar himself, who claimed to be both emperor and a god. And the sentence for that was death.

Jesus certainly knew this. He had just had experience with it when Caiaphas, the high priest of the Jews, had said, “I charge you under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.” “Yes, it is as you say,” Jesus replied. “But I say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Caiaphas then declared him worthy of death. Notice that Jesus didn’t run around volunteering this information. He knew that when more and more people believed him to be the Messiah and the Son of God, the leaders of his own people, and then the Roman authorities, would have him killed. So earlier in his ministry, when “his time had not yet come,” he kept a somewhat lower profile so he could accomplish the work he came to do before his suffering, death, and resurrection. But when questioned outright, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. The truth he confessed is the central truth of the universe: Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of the world. And what was Pilate’s cynical response? “What is truth?”

Well, what is truth? It’s an important question. We all know that there are things we or others have assumed to be true, that later turned out not to be true at all. The earth is not flat. The earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa. Things we believed to be true about other ethnic groups or races turned out to be prejudice, not truth. A year ago many people believed the Dow Jones Industrial Average would never again fall below 10,000 points. But I don’t think investigating commonly accepted truths to see if a whiff of falsehood clings to them is the most important challenge we face today.

We live in a culture that has been questioning truth claims for decades, and that has concluded that truth is subjective and relative. What’s true is what’s true for me, what I believe to be true. I don’t have to make any appeal to objective standards; what I’m claiming to be true simply has to “feel right” to me. People are perfectly comfortable with phrases that would have been considered sheer nonsense a generation or two ago, like “perception is reality.” According to this philosophy, since Pilate perceived that Jesus was a rather pathetic, misguided man, and only a man, then he didn’t have to worry about Jesus’ truth claim that he was a king—in fact, the king. What is truth?

Losing touch with objective standards for truth and with real reality is dangerous enough in the culture at large, but especially insidious in the Christian church. In theologically liberal churches, it has opened the door to questioning the inspiration of Scripture and whether we really can say anything with certainty about what Scripture teaches. One example is that what God has clearly stated about his will for marriage and the family is first questioned, and then gradually discarded: adultery becomes a fling; justification for divorce expands until it’s all inclusive; children—one of the greatest blessings of marriage—become expendable; and the privilege of marriage reflecting the relationship between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his Church, the Bride, is mocked by opening the door to same-sex unions and calling them marriage. All of this is done in the name of truth. After all, our perceptions have changed.

Equally dangerous, but perhaps more insidious, is what is occurring in theologically conservative churches. In the past, some of these churches provided a corrective to the impression given by other churches that God was infinitely distant and the Christian faith was a set of concepts and propositions. They provided this corrective by correctly emphasizing that the Christian faith is also relational. The Holy Spirit dwells in us as his temple, and as Jesus promised, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” Unfortunately, post-modern times have led these churches to emphasize the individual Christian’s personal relationship with God at the expense of clear, objective truth statements made about God in Scripture. They talk and sing about my Jesus, who certainly is superior to your Jesus—or at least, we can have different ideas of who Jesus was and what he was like, but in the end just look at each other and shrug and say, “So what?” In the early church, bishop Arius said his Jesus was like God, but was not really God in the same sense that the Father is God; rather, he was the first creation of the Father, who alone is God in the strict sense. Athanasius challenged this view not by saying that his Jesus was different; he said, “that’s not what Scripture teaches; it’s not what Christ himself claimed; it’s not what the apostles taught.” The upshot of this was not a gentlemen’s disagreement, but the Nicene Creed, in which we make statements about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and claim that those statements are the truth. Why is this so important? Because it’s not my Jesus who takes away my sins, or your Jesus, or the WELS Jesus, or the Pentecostal Jesus—it’s the Jesus, who reveals himself to us clearly, and reveals the truth about himself clearly, in Scripture.

This is why it’s so ironic that Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” A few hours earlier when Jesus was with his disciples in the upper room where he instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion, Jesus had said to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Especially in light of Jesus’ impending false arrest, mock trial, spiteful beating, rejection by the people he wanted to gather together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, the crown of thorns, the nails, the thirst, the torments of hell, the death—wages for sins he didn’t commit—these words are extraordinary. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Keeping in mind what would happen to Jesus in the next twenty-four hours, on what basis can he say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled”?

“You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” But more immediately, the place to which he was going was the cross. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” These words of course remind us that faith in Jesus as our Savior is the only way to come to the Father and enjoy eternity with him. But they also remind us of other words of Jesus, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” For all of Jesus’ disciples assembled in the upper room that night, the way to the Father would be precisely through Jesus. They would be rejected as he was, persecuted as he was, arrested, beaten, and mocked as he was, and most of them would be put to death as he was. Why were they willing to do this? Because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

For us, too, the way to the Father is through Jesus. This has been vividly brought home to many of us recently because of the difficult financial situation our nation is facing. Friends, neighbors, and relatives have lost their jobs and seen their savings dwindle. And of course there are the losses, the hurts, the trials we don’t know about, but that always lie under the surface of people we encounter every day. Christian brothers and sisters who are suffering don’t need a bandaid, they need healing. Jesus doesn’t tell us to glibly gloss over the harsh realities of life; he tells us that he’s the way, the truth, and the life. The road he traveled is the only way to heaven; only by acknowledging the truth about ourselves, our sin, and the devastating results of sin in our world can we appreciate the truth that in him we enjoy the forgiveness of sins; and only he—not financial security, power, personal accomplishment, playing the game with savvy, political clout—makes this life worth living, and the life to come worth anticipating. Knowing the truth about Jesus gives us the courage to say with the author of Hebrews, “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”

Amen.