Then Pilate said to him, ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world – to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’ After he had said this, he went back outside . . . .” – John 18:37-38
In A Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire states, “It is a pity for mankind that Pilate went out, without hearing the reply: we should then have known what truth is.” I beg to differ with Monsieur Voltaire in that, just because Pilate didn’t wait for an answer to the question doesn’t mean that Jesus hadn’t already given the answer, less than a day earlier, at the Last Supper, to the apostle Thomas: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’” (John 14:6).
Perhaps the reason that Jesus didn’t answer Pilate was because of the form of the question posed to Him; had Pilate used a different interrogative pronoun and asked, “Who is truth?,” maybe Jesus would have given him the same answer he gave to Thomas the night before. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, Jesus could have responded, “Who is truth? This is truth speaking.”
The Christian belief that Jesus is “the truth” is a profound one, suggestive that all truth is to be found in Him alone. As a self-defined theistic rationalist (but one who also believes in the Divinity of Christ), I accept as truth the words that Jesus spoke to Thomas. But there is also a part of me who sees truth much like Hemingway’s mortally wounded character, Robert Jordan, at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls, who observed: “There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”
What (or Who) is Truth? I am on the road of life to find out, ever listening to His voice along the way, as He guides me toward the truth.
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What you have just read is something I wrote in July, 2011, on my blog entitled My Road To Truth. Back then, I wrote under the pseudonym “homoviator” (i.e. man on a journey). Like many other spiritual pilgrims, I wasted many years looking for truth somewhere “out there” in the world. The supreme irony is that, whatever spiritual insight I discovered “out there” – while traveling the globe studying world religions, mystical practices, and spirituality books – ultimately led me to the inner sanctum where all truth resides – within my True Self. In other words: THE TRUTH IS NOT OUT THERE.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting for a moment that there aren’t a multitude of constant solicitations, everywhere you go, directing people to join “the one true religion,” or to vote for the “only truthful politician” on the ballot. We seem to go through life believing that truth is to be found in university libraries, or in a particular poet’s verses. We quote the Holy Bible and the Quran when we want to reference truth, and some are even willing to die in support of the words they are referencing.
Unfortunately, many of today’s “truth seekers” are unconscious of the fact that many of their sources are merely propaganda mills, pumping out biased views that have absolutely nothing to do with truth. Of course, the art of propaganda is in the dissemination of false information that connects with the visceral fears and emotions of a populace. During the final year of World War II, on the island of Saipan, Japanese propaganda declared that the attacking American forces would “rape and devour” Japanese women and children, and mutilate the bodies of Japanese soldiers. Believing this information to be the truth, over a thousand Japanese civilians and soldiers committed suicide by jumping to their deaths from Suicide Cliff and Banzai Cliff. Sadly, the Japanese propaganda could not have been further from the truth, and those poor innocents died as a result of that contrived falsehood.
The major problem with seeking truth “out there” is that you have to rely on what other people believe to be the truth. For five centuries, every encyclopedia and history book in the world stated, as fact, that Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World on the island of San Salvador in 1492. But in 1986, the National Geographic Society announced that – after a exhaustive five-year investigation conducted by noted historians, archeologists, navigators, cartographers and other experts – Samana Cay, a narrow, nine-mile-long island, located 65 miles southeast of San Salvador, was the most probable landing site. Oh well, it’s not exactly like Columbus knew where he was in the first place – he believed he had landed on the outlying islands of Asia, or the Indies, as they were known then.
In 2008, my wife and I traveled to the Holy Land and visited the town of Bethlehem. Naturally, the most famous site – what is believed to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ over 2,000 years ago – is the Church of the Nativity. The main entrance to the church is through the small Door of Humility which is only four feet tall and two feet wide. The Grotto of the Nativity, the place where Jesus is said to have been born, is an underground space which forms the crypt of the Church of the Nativity. After descending a flight of steps to enter the cave, one finds on the floor a 14-pointed silver star with an inscription around it which reads: “Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary.” Everyday, pilgrims visiting this site will get down on all fours and kiss the spot where Jesus was born.
Naturally, a rational person might question whether this silver star truly marks the exact location of Jesus’ birth. I’m sure that, for many, the uncertainty of that one question could possibly cause them to question the validity of the entire Jesus “story” as told in the Holy Bible. For me, personally, the silver star is merely a symbol of the birth of Jesus in the town of Bethlehem. Whether he was born in that exact spot, or 200 meters to the northeast, is completely unimportant to me. What is important to me are the words that Jesus spoke to Thomas at the Last Supper, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
And that Truth resides – not in some grotto beneath a church in Bethlehem – but in the very depths of my inner being.
