Jesus has just finished eating the Passover meal with his disciples. Passover remembers the exodus out of Egypt when God brought his people out of slavery to the Egyptians. John’s setting the stage to show how Jesus’ upcoming death will save us from our slavery to sin. Judas has left and Jesus tells the remaining disciples that his time with them is short. Jesus leaves them with a new command, John 13:34–35, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Jesus now encourages his disciples to believe in him as they believe in God. He reassures them that even though he’s leaving, that he’s going to make a place ready for them and will come back to take them home to his Father’s house when their place is ready. Now Thomas speaks up, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” My first thought is always, “Thomas, Jesus just said that he’s coming back to take us, all we need to do is trust in Jesus that he knows the way, we’re fine.”
Jesus is more reassuring, he tells Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” We’re so used to hearing these “I Am” statements from Jesus that we often miss the impact of what Jesus is saying. Each of the statements Jesus makes here is weighty enough to stagger the disciples by what he's claiming here. When talking to Martha at Lazarus’ death, Jesus calls himself “the life,” while to the Pharisees he refers to himself as “the door” and “the light of the world,” a way of saying he’s the way. In Mark 12:14, the Pharisees tell Jesus, “You teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.”
This morning we’re narrowing in on Jesus saying “I am the truth.” Truth is often seen as a slippery idea today. Some say that we each create our own truth. It wasn’t much different in Jesus’ time. There were different Jewish traditions, and it was hard for the Jewish person in Jesus’ time to determine which tradition, or truth, was really Yahweh’s will. For the Jews, truth is understood in terms of faithfulness and reliability, especially as it relates to Yahweh. The New Testament also picks up on the Greek idea of truth as reality, along with as the Jewish concepts of faithfulness and reliability. Jesus Christ is shown as “the Truth” and the apostles present the gospel as “truth.” In Scripture, truth is understood as part of God’s character: God is truth, truth is found in God.
Michael Goheen, a former professor at Redeemer University, writes, “In the Western story, ultimately reliable truth is found in eternal ideas that transcend history. In the Bible, ultimately reliable truth is found in God’s mighty acts in history, especially in Jesus Christ” …. “One of my university professors, a Jewish rabbi, said to me something like the following: “The difference between Jews and Christians is a different understanding of truth. We Jews believe truth resides in historical events that give meaning to a story and shape a community to live into that story. You Christians believe truth resides in theological ideas around which a community forms by believing those ideas.”
In many ways, Pilate’s question to Jesus at his trial is still being asked today, “What is truth?” Today, many people hunger to know what truth really is. In our church tradition, we tend to lean more towards the Greek and modern approach to understanding truth as reality, while under-valuing the Jewish approach of finding truth in relationship. Post-modernity leans towards creating our own truth, and the newest cultural movement is being called meta-modernism where people hold competing and even opposite truths together without seeing any tension in doing so.
The Bible reveals and teaches truth with both Jewish and Greek understanding. Truth is about facts and rationality, it’s about faithfulness, firmness, and reliability. Truth is about what’s real and genuine and opposite to falsehood, truth is about being complete rather than incomplete. In Jesus we get a very distinctive image of God; in Matthew 3 at Jesus’ baptism, we see God in heaven loving his Son Jesus who is God with us, and with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we experience God with us and in us. God is complete in himself. God often locates truth in himself, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Truth and mercy are often placed together in Scripture and shows God’s loyalty and love to his people, creating trust in God.
John writes in his first letter, 1 John 5:20, “We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” John tells us the Holy Spirit shows us what truth is, John 14:16–17, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” The Holy Spirit points us to Jesus as the truth found in the center of the Biblical story. Jesus is God and the Son of God, part of the Trinity, a relationship. We are children of God in a relationship with God creating a deeper trust in God and his words of wisdom and truth about the world around us and our place in it.
Most of us, when we’re looking for truth, are looking for facts. Scripture calls us to look to a person, to Jesus for truth, to listen to what he teaches about how the world’s supposed to be. Jesus is truth; he’s trustworthy and reliable, teaching and showing us the reality of life: that we’re sinners and need forgiveness, and this forgiveness is found in him. Our true identity is rooted in Jesus. Jesus reveals that the world belongs to the Father and so do we and that he alone can give us a full life; that the world’s promises to fill us with all our desires is a lie and false.
We know truth through our relationship with Jesus. Truth is knowledge of who Jesus is, and a faith filled relationship with Jesus. In John 8:31–32, we’re reminded of this, “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” When we look for truth, we’re looking for God; Jesus tells Phillip, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” If we want to see the truth of all things, the reality of what life is, where meaning and purpose are found, we look to God, and we find God in Jesus. Jesus reveals to us that God loves us so much he comes into a world broken by sin and shaped by lies because of Adam. God’s truth in Scripture is that we are sinners, redeemed sinners when we accept Jesus as our Lord. As the second Adam, Jesus takes our sin on himself, washes it away through his sacrificial death, bringing renewed life and the promise of a renewed creation again; filling us with hope and excitement as we join in Jesus’ work of sharing the gospel of truth found in Jesus and giving our communities a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven through our lives together.
Knowing truth leads to acting on that truth and living that truth out in our lives: John writes in 1 John 3:18, “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” John’s likely remembering Jesus’ words at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into action is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” That rock is Jesus and the truth of his teaching. We see how Jesus interprets the law in terms of relationship; lust is adultery, anger is murder, both breaking our relationships with God and others.
When we accept Jesus as truth, this empowers us to recognize and stand up against evil and wrong by evaluating the structures, cultural values, and idolatries prevalent today to Jesus’ teachings and life so we can shape our lives, values, and actions on Jesus; critiquing wisely the cultural influences impacting each of us. This helps us to be free from the falsehoods our culture has embraced, and living in the truth that is Jesus, which sets us free to lead others into the truth and kingdom of heaven as we build on the rock of truth that is Jesus.
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