What is Truth

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

Pontius Pilate was the Roman Procurator of Palestine during the reign of Tiberius. Though he commanded a Roman legion of 4500 soldiers, his was not a plush assignment. Saddled with governing one of the frontier provinces of the Roman Empire he spent most of his time in Caesarea Maritime where the weather was reasonably decent and where he was able to have minimal contact with the stubbornly unruly inhabitants of the region under his control. Only on high holy days did Pilate trouble himself to go into Jerusalem so as to be present should any sort of problem arise. Still, he was the face of the Roman Empire in that part of the world, and as such, he literally had the power of life or death over the people under his control. Yet, for all the trappings that went with his position, it is quite possible that Pontius Pilate would have lived and died utterly forgotten by history had it not been for one fateful day when he crossed paths with a Galilean Jew named Jesus of Nazareth.

Of the two men who came face to face that day, Pilate gave the appearance of being the more powerful, and indeed, given his position, he did wield great power. However, there’s a difference between wielding power and being powerful. Pilate was a man used to being treated as if he were powerful, so therefore in his own mind, he was. He was used to the people who came before him groveling, begging for mercy. Condemning people to death or setting them free didn’t require any inner or physical strength on his part. If anyone caused trouble, attempted to escape or to fight back, he had soldiers at hand to enforce whatever he decreed. But then this Galilean Jew showed up who didn’t behave at all like the others had. He didn’t beg for mercy, he didn’t try to flee. Indeed, quite the opposite, he seemed unnaturally calm. It had to have been confusing if not downright unnerving for Pilate to have this seemingly powerless peasant stand before him appearing to be not at all afraid of what Pilate might do to him. He didn’t even answer directly when Pilate asked if he was a king, but instead informed Pilate that he came into the world to testify to the truth, and then added for good measure, everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Pilate reacted to that rather perplexing response by asking Jesus, What is truth?

Now we don’t know what Pilate’s tone was at that point. Possibly quite frustrated by this upstart peasant passively challenging his power, Pilate may well have been responding rather sarcastically when he asked, What is truth? Or, for just an instant, maybe the part of Pilate that deep down suspected that Jesus was innocent, and therefore knew he really should let this nondescript peasant go, came close enough to the surface to wonder, almost fearfully, what is the truth and how many people know it? Do others suspect as I do, that this man is innocent? Will I be judged forever by how I handle this? Pilate could have let Jesus go, and then used his soldiers as needed to quell any sort of protest that action might have produced. Instead, he took the easy way out. In the name of doing his job of keeping the peace, he went along with what the Jewish authorities wanted and condemned Jesus to death. It’s possible that Pilate knew what was real, what the truth was in that situation, but he chose to pretend that he didn’t.

What is truth? I’m not sure there’s a more relevant question in the world today. The dictionary, yes, I do still own one, says that truth is the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality. There was a time when scientists determined what was real, what was true in a given situation with regard to the natural world based on what they could prove with experiments that they evaluated with their senses. With time and the development of ever more sophisticated equipment scientists have learned to interpret all manner of indirect evidence for explaining our world and what happens in it. Beyond this physical reality which I focused on throughout my teaching career, you’ve heard me speak of experiential reality; what we know is real not because we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell it, but because we’ve experienced it, we’ve lived it. Sadly, though, none of this seems to be good enough anymore.

First of all, more than in the past it seems to me, perceptions can be mistaken. The increasing prevalence of artificial Intelligence for example, can leave us wondering if what we thought we experienced actually happened. For that reason a line I read in a book decades ago seems particularly relevant today: Just because you experienced it, doesn't mean it happened that way. The author’s point was that one of the values of community is that those around us offer us the opportunity to check our perceptions, our memories, of a given event or interaction. Of course, for our community to be valuable to us in this way, we have to be willing to share our feelings, our perceptions about whatever it was that we experienced. Sadly though, even if we do withhold judgment in a given situation until we’ve talked with someone we trust to see if what we’re thinking or feeling is accurate, that only pertains to our personal experiences. How in the world do we know these days what is true, what is real in the world beyond the boundaries of our day to day activities?

The internet is rife with misinformation and disinformation. Social media sites have been programmed to lead the viewer to more and more sites that say exactly what the viewer wants to hear, leading people deeper and deeper into a world completely removed from reality. Sadly though, I’ve read in what I hope was a reliable source, that 55% of the US population relies solely on social media for their information. Even those of us who turn to more traditional news sources are left wondering how trusting we can be these days of the information we’re receiving. Gone are the days when Walter Cronkite broadcast the news and we all knew, we absolutely knew, that he was telling us the truth, because in those days both broadcast and print journalists dedicated their lives to conveying to their readers and listeners exactly what had occurred in a given situation. Nowadays it seems as though even the most traditional news sources are at least as concerned, if not more so, about maintaining their viewership as they are about what they report and how they report it. As a result I’m not sure there's a news anchor today, on any network, any news broadcast, who has earned the sort of respect some of us remember according Cronkite. So where does that leave us? It leaves us right here, in church, listening to the Gospel. Jesus answered Pilate’s question, So you are a king? by responding, You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. But when Pilate asked Jesus, What is truth? Jesus simply stood there.

We can only wonder if any part of Pilate knew as he spoke with Jesus that day that he was staring into the face of God. Odds are as a Roman procurator who had been taught that the emperor himself was a god, he probably did not. While there’s no way we can know one way or another about that, what we do know is that just as so many of us would have done, in the heat of the moment Pilate did what was expedient. We can only speculate if later, alone with his thoughts, or perhaps with his wife who had advised him earlier to have nothing to do with that innocent man for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him, Pilate came face to face with the answer to his question.

We live lives today besieged by a cacophony of sound bites. Whether they are literal thirty second snippets taken perhaps out of context to sway our opinion one way or another, or the visual headlines that show up on our watches and phones, unbidden but there nonetheless, they just never stop. We can however, choose to put our phones, watches, and all the other electronic devices that at once serve us and haunt us aside from time to time, in order to spend time as Pilate once had the chance to do, alone with Jesus. Rather than looking outside ourselves we can choose to pursue our search for truth by taking time to turn inward, imagining ourselves looking into the human face of God while listening in the silence for the answers to our questions. In the words of Paul Simon:

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

Because a vision softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision that was planted in my brain

Still remains

Within the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never shared

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made

And the sign flashed out its warning

In the words that it was forming

Then the sign said, “The words of the prophets are

written on the subway walls

In tenement halls”

And whispered in the sound of silence.