As I write this, there are many people, on the news and among my friends, who are searching for the truth about what we are seeing on TV at our Capitol. They want the truth about the elections; they want the truth about what they saw happen on the news. There are things that people do want to believe and things they don’t want to believe are true. We have been chased into our separate camps of separate truths or alternate truths, my truth and your truth. This dilemma is part of what has put us in this place: the inability to agree on the truth.
And some of us have become so cynical, like Pontius Pilate, that we scoff and sneer and say, “What is truth?” as though there is no way to lay hold of the truth at all. We are too cool and smart to believe there is such a thing as truth. But into our cynical world comes the One who said He was the way, the truth, and the life. How is Jesus the truth, and how is knowing the truth of Jesus the gateway to knowing the truth about everything else?
To know Jesus is to know that in Him God’s power came not in force but invitingly, compassionately, and authoritatively. It came in servant leadership. Jesus did not come to lord it over us but to teach, to invite, to request, to confront in love. He came to present us with the still more excellent way of love: not violence, not anger, not hate. The only things He violently overthrew were the tables of the moneychangers who were cheating and profiting off the faithfulness of the poor. He used the weapon of the Word, which is sharper than a two-edged sword. He used the value of His own life to shield us from evil, death, and sin.
For those of us who are Christians, any other “truth” must be subordinate to Jesus and His way, His truth, His Life. We are asked to see everything through His mind.