March 08, 2026
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
March 8, 2025
Lent 3
Words from the Suffering
“What is Truth?”
John 18:33-38a
We are at the midway point of our Lenten series thinking about words spoken in the Passion story of Jesus. We started on Ash Wednesday with Pilate who said, “Behold the man!” Today we return to Pilate and his question to Jesus, “What is truth?”
Let us prayer: O God, send now your Holy Spirit, whom Jesus said would lead us into all Truth, to help us live in ways that reflect what is true about you. Amen.
The wife of CS Lewis, Joy Davidman, who died at the age of just 45, was a theologian in her own right. In one of her books, she reflects on the question of Pilate to Jesus, “What is truth?” She writes, “We must understand Pilate to understand ourselves, for he may have represented the very modern view that truth is after all a relative and subjective affair, an agreed-upon convention, a matter of expediency — and that therefore we are justified in doing anything that seems expedient, even as Pilate." (Smoke on the Mountain, p108)
Joy Davidman makes the point that Pilate wasn’t sincerely seeking truth in his question. He was asking the question sarcastically as if truth isn’t clear. You have your truth. I have mine. And so truth gets made out to be something very foggy, so that we can do expedient things. In other words, so that we can live by the truths we want. “We must understand Pilate, if we are to understand ourselves.”
Well, Pilate is not an easy person to understand. In some ways he’s presented as a weak leader who really doesn’t want to see Jesus crucified but doesn’t know how to get out of it. You get the feeling that some of the Gospels defend Pilate! Matthew even brings his wife into the matter. It says, “While (Pilate) was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.” (Matthew 27:19) And then a few verses it says, “Pilate saw that he could do nothing.” (27:24) Now isn’t that a sad commentary for the Governor of Judea!
Yet the first creed of the church said, “Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” They laid the blame squarely at his feet. They knew he had power to act. Luke 13 even tells of the time Pilate executed a group of Galileans who had gone to the temple to offer their sacrifices so that you could even tell the difference between their blood and that of their sacrifices. They want us to remember that Pilate was no helpless leader. He was standing there the day Jesus was sentenced to death and he could have done something.
So which is the truth?
John’s Gospel describes the trial of Jesus with the most detail, especially the interaction between Jesus and Pilate. Pilate doesn’t want to condemn Jesus to death but we can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t want to give in to the religious leaders or because he’s afraid of what they might report to Rome about the way he handled things. In other words, he’s protecting himself. So Pilate interrogates Jesus to find out the truth.
Upon his first meeting, he asks Jesus, “Are you the king of the Jews?” (John 18:33) Jesus responds, “Do you ask on your own or did others tell you about me?” (v.34) Pilate answers, “I’m not a Jew!” (v.35) Notice how things turned. Pilate is the one in power interrogating Jesus, but now Jesus is questioning Pilate!
Jesus acknowledged that his kingdom is not of this world, and Pilate jumps on this, “So you are a king!”Jesus answered, “For this reason I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth, listens to my voice.” (v.37) At this point, Pilate scoffs, “What is truth?” (v.38)
What a time in history for us to read this story. Can you remember a time when there was more debate over truth itself? We debate the truth of everything from climate change, to the efficacy of vaccines, to critical race theory, to UFO’s, and the 2020 election.
A recent Gallup poll found that 69% of Americans said you can’t trust the truthfulness of news reports. Nearly 2/3s said you can’t distinguish truth from falsehood coming from elected officials. And 2/3s of adults believe truth is relative to each person and the situation. I might actually agree with that last one. We each have to decide what we think about truth.
Maybe we’ve learned to become skeptical when it comes to truth.
There’s an old saying that “water flows downhill.” That’s helpful to remember when you discover dripping water in your house and want to find the source. The leak must come from a higher point, because water runs downhill. But did you know that in 1812 there was an earthquake that caused the Mississippi River to reverse its flow for 10 days! Maybe water doesn’t always flow downhill. What is truth?
There was a time we were told that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. People were arrested and some even condemned to death for disagreeing with that idea. What is truth?
In more recent history, from the 1930’s to 1950’s, we were told that doctors declared there is no harm in cigarette smoking. In more recent years we were told that opioids were non-addictive pain relievers. Even before that, heroin was introduced to this country as a safe alternative to morphine. After all, 9 out of 10 doctors agree. What is truth?
We make truth a pretty flat, static thing. It’s either this or this. But what if rather than making things true or untrue, we focus on what we believe is most true? Could that open us to see and understand better?
Sometimes we do this with the Bible. We make it have to be either-or. True or untrue. Take the creation story. We ask if God really created the universe in 6 days? Is it true. Some say yes, it’s right there in the Bible. But then others bring in their pesky science with carbon dating and truths about the earth being hundreds of millions of years old and evolution. And back and forth we go, and we miss the most important sentence in the story, the one that gets repeated with each day that says, “And God saw that it was good.” What is most true?
Did Jonah get swallowed by a great fish and survive? Is it true? Is it not true? And back and forth we go believing that this is the key to the story and we miss the way the story ends where God said, “Should I not be concerned about Ninevah and its 120,000 inhabitants?” What is most true?
And on and on it goes. Did Moses part the Red Sea? Was Jesus born of a virgin? Did he rise from the dead? We can get so hard-pressed to determine the truth that we can miss what’s true.
I attended a gathering of pastors in Dallas this past week. One morning I sat next a Methodist pastor from New Lennox, IL. I asked where he went to seminary and he said Dubuque, which is Presbyterian. Since he’s a United Methodist pastor I asked why he chose Dubuque. He said “Well, you can’t turn down full tuition.” I said, “How did that happen?”
He told me about his call to ministry. He and his wife were just out of college. He was working in a church and felt a call to ministry. He knew this would mean having to go to seminary but they couldn’t afford it. So they prayed and felt led to pursue seminary and trust that things would work out. He learned that Dubuque had a program for people working in churches where they provided for the full tuition.
I said, “That sounds like God’s grace.” He said, “oh, was it ever!”
Now, was that God’s grace? Or was it just coincidence? What is truth? All I know is that young pastor believes it is most true. And I could tell by the way he talked that he helps his congregation believe that too.
What do you know to be true? What is most true to you?
Pilate said to Jesus, “What is truth?” Oh, he was jaded for sure. That sounds just like a man who has watched powerful people spin truth the way they want. He has probably witnessed it his whole life. He’s probably seen crimes done in the name of the empire and learned to shrug his shoulders and say to himself, “They always get away with it.” And if he values his job, he’s learned to keep quiet.
“What is truth?” he asks. Oh yes, he’s become cynical. So how do you not become like Pilate? Especially in a world like ours where it seems impossible any more to know what is truth? When you become cynical about every news story you read and wonder, “Is that real? Did that really happen?” How do you keep from going through life scoffing and being jaded about everything?
Simone Weil was a French Jewish activist and philosopher in the first half of the 20th century. Through some mystical experiences she became a believer in Jesus. I don’t call her a Christian, only because her faith seemed to be deeper than a religious label. But Christ became real to her. One time she said, "Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."
That’s a profound statement. Make truth your goal and you will always find Christ. In Christ we see truth.
Jesus said, “I am the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life.” (John 14:6) He is Truth because of his Way of Life. Not doctrines. Not what some churches or preachers say about Jesus, but Jesus himself. His life. His values. His compassion for people. All people. The foreigner, the widow, children, people of different beliefs and races, the suffering and bereaved. His life shows that these are the ones God is concerned about.
We also see a commitment to justice in Jesus’ life. This was why he sometimes expressed anger at religious authorities. It wasn’t over their beliefs or rituals. It was because they used religious laws to confiscate widows’ possessions for the temple leaving them penniless. His outrage was about justice.
And Jesus’ life teaches us about the power of forgiveness and sacrificial love. That you can be wronged terribly, but if you don’t allow it to make you wrong, and trust the outcomes to God, just as Jesus had to do, you find that that has much greater power. Grace triumphs.
We often get caught up in our search for truth, but what about the Truth that searches for us? What about the truth of ourselves?
Raul Rodiguez was a US Navy veteran who served as a US Customs and Border Protection officer at the border of Mexico. Before that he worked with the federal immigration and naturalization service. He estimates that he helped deport thousands of people. He fully believed in US policies and was proud to carry them out. He said, “I was willing to die for this country.” This all came to a crashing halt the day he found out his life was built on a lie.
When helping his brother file a visa application, officials ran a check on Rodriguez, and found a Mexican birth certificate with his name on it. He had never seen it before. He confronted his father, who after years of silence, confessed that Raul had been born just across the border. His parents paid a midwife to falsify a U.S. birth
certificate so he could have a better life in Texas. He had lived with that lie, unknowingly, for nearly fifty years.
He immediately lost his job, his friends, and his sense of self. As a military veteran and Mexican-American who supported our policies, he was quite popular. In 2006 he was recognized in Washington for his contribution in a smuggling bust. But now people turned against him. "They'd say, 'This is what you get for going against your own people.'"
He now faces being deported even though his wife is an American citizen who works for immigration services herself. He has been allowed to apply for US citizenship, but only a certain number are approved. He got depressed. His wife said some days she didn’t know what she would find when she came home from work.
Then an organization called Repatriate our Patriots reached out to him. They help people just like himself, veterans in the US military who for whatever reasons face being deported. He started working for them. He still believes Immigration laws must be obeyed, but he has discovered that sometimes the laws get in the way of doing what’s right. He said he spent so much of his life getting people out of this country, now he’s trying to help people get back into the country. And he feels like this has been life-saving to him, that its like a call to do what he’s meant to do.
And it all started when he learned the truth about himself.
Sometimes we get hung up on this question, “What is truth?” What is the truth we seek? But what if we asked a different question, what is the Truth that seeks us? What if we make Christ our source of truth? Somewhere in this matter of truth is our truth. What is true about us? Because when we recognize that none of us sees the world completely true. We see it through all kinds of filters? The way we were raised. What our parents told us was true. What the news media tells us is true. And even what we tell ourselves is true.
We all need a higher source of truth? Why not make Christ that source? To see the world through his eyes? It means we must learn about his life. We must study the Gospels and understand his life better. And we must pray and listen. We spent six weeks starting this year learning about discernment, but it does no good if we don’t spend the time in prayer, in listening, in fellowship with others who do the same with us. We must let go of the truths we want to hold onto, and look at the world through His eyes.
Maybe we will come to some new ideas as to what truth is.
Remember the words of the theologians, “We must understand Pilate if we are to understand ourselves.” And seek Truth and you will fall into the arms of Christ.
“The stranger you fear is often closer to you than you know. Truth that changes us is usually the truth that finds us, not the one we go looking for.”