The God Who Is True

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
February 15, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

I John 5:6-12
John 3:22-36

“Whoever has accepted his testimony has set a seal to this, that God is true.”

Truth, true, and real are words from the same root that appear frequently in the Gospel of John. To be specific, the word for truth in Greek—aletheia—is found 7 times in the Synoptic gospels and a whopping 25 times in John. We would do well, therefore, at the beginning of our reading of John to ask what Pilate asks of Jesus in the end: “What is truth?”

In Hebrew the comparable word for truth has a moral dimension and means “that which makes something trustworthy and reliable.” The Old Testament’s rock solid definition of truth, says Johannine scholar Raymond Brown, assures us that “God is absolutely true in the sense of being worthy of confidence and of being faithful to his promises.” The Greek word for truth, on the other hand, describes what is unveiled…what is not concealed …what is revealed. In Greek truth involves contemplation rather than moral action.

Now it happens that John was primarily influenced by Judaism and so there is a nuance to his use of the Greek word aletheia. For John the meaning of truth has to do with a mystery and a wisdom revealed by one who is trustworthy and reliable. A whole cast of characters seeking the truth populate John’s gospel, characters whose encounter with the mystery and wisdom of God revealed by the only One who is trustworthy and reliable brings them to an encounter with the God who is true.

Like John’s characters, we also seek what is true in the context of our sickness, our blindness, our grief and our guilt. But there is a difference. Consider the disciples of John in our text this morning who must decide between two teachers who both would turn their lives toward the God who is true. We rather do our seeking 200 years after the birth of Darwin and in a world whose purveyors of wisdom more and more presume the truth revealed by God in Christ to be anything but trustworthy and reliable. In fact, since the collapse of what was known as the “medieval synthesis in which a coherent, unified system of meaning and power was everywhere pervasive,” says Walter Brueggemann, human beings have sought truth outside the church. From the Enlightenment on and contrary to the Hebrew or Greek or Johannine meaning of the word, truth has been “rational and logically coherent…experiential, empirical and factual.” Suddenly a completely different kind of truth was knowable: a truth that was universal and timeless because it could be verified.

Yet something even more unsettling has happened to our understanding of truth since Darwin. Not biologists but physicists have led the way. “Not to exaggerate,” says Nils Bohr to Werner Heisenburg, the physicists who were the primary minds behind the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and characters in Michael Frayne’s remarkable play Copenhagen, “but we turned the world inside out! Yes, listen, now it comes, now it comes….We put man back at the center of the universe. Throughout history,” says Bohr, “we keep finding ourselves displaced. We keep exiling ourselves to the periphery of things. First we turn ourselves into a mere adjunct of God’s unknowable purposes, tiny figures kneeling in the great cathedral of creation. And no sooner have we recovered ourselves in the Renaissance, no sooner has man become…the measure of all things than we’re pushed aside again by the products of our own reasoning! We’re dwarfed again as physicists build the great new cathedrals for us to wonder at—the laws of classical mechanics that predate us from the beginning of eternity, that will survive us to eternity’s end, that exist whether we exist or not. Until we come to the beginning of the twentieth century, and we’re suddenly forced to rise from our knees again.”

“It starts with Einstein,” interrupts Heisenburg. “It starts with Einstein,” confirms Bohr. “He shows that measurement—measurement on which the whole possibility of science depends—measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality. It’s a human act, carried out from the one particular viewpoint of a possible observer. Then, here in Copenhagen in those three years in the mid-twenties we discover that there is no precisely determinable objective universe. That the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head.”

You and I live in an age profoundly shaped by what happened in Copenhagen in the mid-twenties of the last century. Just as the church was toppled from power and authority by the Enlightenment, so the kind of objective certitude that had reigned as truth since the 16th century fell prey to what is now called “personal knowledge.” Put another way, there is no longer a “grand story”—be it religious, scientific or political—which is able to claim universal assent. Therefore we inhabit a world in which all of our knowing is contextual. Furthermore, our contexts—even with the pervasive influence of the internet—are more and more local. “Localism, says Brueggemann, “means that it is impossible to voice a large truth. All one can do is voice local truth and propose that it pertains elsewhere…even when we say it in a loud voice.” Finally we live in a world whose truths are “inherently pluralistic, a cacophony of claims, each of which rings true to its own advocates.”

True as far as it goes! But if pluralistic, personal and contextual truth is all the truth there is, then why are the followers of Einstein still searching the stars for a unified field theory; and why do seekers after God continue to beseech the Spirit for an unveiling of the mystery that will make common sense of this one brief and precious life we have been given together? Both suppose that there is a greater truth to be known, a truth into which all the facts will fit one day say the scientists; a truth, say theologians, which when revealed will not dispel the mystery but deepen it. One is a truth we may possess; the other is a truth that takes hold of us in all of our sickness and blindness, in all of our grief and our guilt until, as the old hymn goes, we know in him the silence of eternity interpreted by love. While I believe we may one day know the former, I have bet my life on the latter, on the mystery and meaning of life deepened by God’s Word made flesh, whose testimony sets a seal to this: that God is true. Here, in part, is why.

In the first place, knowing the truth means belonging to him…living in relation to him. Personal knowledge and yet here the significant human act carried out from a specific point of view in time and space is not first our human act from our point of view, but God’s human act in Jesus Christ. This is the sort of claim which cannot simply be pronounced true over us even by the institution created to make such pronouncements, nor is it a claim which can be proven by a zealous band of believers. Rather we must stand singly before him who has come to stand before us.

And what we know in his presence is that we do not know so much as we are known: known in all of our brokenness and need, with our pants down, our knees trembling, our hearts breaking. The truth of being known, of living in relation to him through whom the Mystery at the center of the universe is love: this truth is the truth for which we were made. “It’s to do with knowing and being known,” says another character in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. “I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in Biblical Greek [actually it is Biblical Hebrew] knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so and so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped form the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy…we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around….But in pairs we insist on giving ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there than hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing and being known.”

We glimpse this, perhaps, with each other. But in Christ the incredible paradox of human existence is revealed: that the only one who really knows us…truly loves us. So the first thing to say about the God who is true is that the truth is a person in whom we are known and by whom we are loved: personal, final, uncompromised.

In the second place, the truth unveiled in him is a truth that calls into question every other claimant—including ourselves--to the center of the universe. Truth’s test, says Scottish theologian John Baillie, “is the resistance it offers to the otherwise uninhibited course of my own thinking, desiring and acting. [It] is what I ‘come up against’ and what takes me by surprise, the other-than-myself which pulls me up and obliges me to reckon with it and adjust myself to it because it will not consent simply to adjust itself to me.” Since Copenhagen you and I have learned to adjust ourselves to most every other claim to truth that comes down the pike because we live in a time when truth is contextual, local and pluralistic. The gospel resists this and makes a scandalous claim: God is true, John writes. Human beings know this not by way of an abstract and speculative principle but because in Christ we come face to face with a self-emptying love at the center of the universe. There are no rivals. Hence our seeking for a greater truth comes to an end in the truth of the God who is love.

Then finally I have bet my life on the God who is true because the mystery revealed on the cross is that God has bet his life, once for all, on us. This does not change the fact that we may freely decide, moment by moment, whether he is the truth we were born to follow or not. Unlike the Baptist, the others truths that would lay claim to our days are not likely to decrease that Christ might increase. And chances are good that many of us may go to the grave unable to decide, once and for all, to follow him. But at the heart of the gospel set down by John is the astounding revelation that the God who is true decided long ago—in the beginning—to be with you and for you in Jesus Christ. “Whoever has accepted his testimony,” says John, “has set a seal to this, that God is true.”

Because we have seen God’s hand in the hand that healed the official’s son, that cured the paralytic, that fed the five thousand, gave sight to the blind, raised Lazarus from the dead and turned water into wine, because we have seen God’s hand in him who was handed over to death for us, we may live in a great trust that the end in our every beginning will not finally be death but the love that was from the beginning whose glory we have beheld in the face of Jesus Christ.

    “Lord, Your presence is so real” prays poet Czeslaw Milosz,
    that it weighs more than any argument.
    On my neck and my shoulders I feel Your warm breath.

    I pronounce the words of Your book, which are human,
    Just as your love and hate are human.
    You yourself created us in your image and semblance.

    I want to forget the subtle palaces created by theologians,
    You do not deal in metaphysics.

    Save me from the images of pain I have gathered wandering on earth,
    Lead me where only Your light abides.

    Thanks be to God!

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