The Circumstances Aren't the Same Thing as the Truth

I.

We are in what is, for Christians, maybe the most frightening moment of the whole church year.

It’s about an awful death that comes only after humiliation and torture. And it’s not just anyone – it’s the one we believe loves us and guides us as no one else ever can. Our greatest lover, so to speak, is dying.

And all that is plenty to make it frightening.

But I think the scariness goes even deeper. Because it’s not just scary that this is happening. It’s scary how it could have happened.

Up till now in the story, everything we know about Jesus, all the stories and teachings and healings, it all has to do with his changing the situation he’s in, having an impact on it. Every time from birth on – he was born, and things started changing – there’s a situation: a person in need, or confused disciples, or confused religious types. And by the time Jesus walks away from the whole thing, it’s different. Not through the usual human-management techniques, but through the very inversion of life.

And it’s not that people ended up more comfortable in those situations. In fact, Jesus usually made things uncomfortable. It’s not comfortable to be challenged; it’s not even comfortable to be healed. But he was always able to shift the power play, to show a love that was bigger and more surprising than what people thought – in other words, to show a God who was bigger and more surprising.

Whether it was debate, or a sick person who was in front of him, or a woman who was shunned for one reason or another, Jesus never let circumstances – what was going on around him – define him, or define God. He always changed the circumstances to show we humans had too low an opinion of God.

And then we get to today, the one moment we need to see that God is better than what it seems. We need for things to be better by the time Jesus has “left the building.” And this is the one time we don’t get it.

This time, of all times, we get human reality run amok. We get human efforts to compromise, to negotiate, to be reasonable, to be safe – and for once, Jesus doesn’t do a damn thing to reshape those efforts. He doesn’t do any teaching or healing or turning religious snobbery into humility. It’s as if he withdraws from the world, and as he does, Jesus let all the so-called human wisdom speak for itself. And as he pulled himself back and gave people more and more space, it became clearer and clearer the difference between God and people. For so long, Jesus seemed to close up that space. But today, he reminds us – it’s huge.

And that’s what I mean about today being so scary. Not just scary that it happened, but how it happened.

And you can see it throughout the story from John. There’s all kinds of human exchanges going on. The religious dudes are in a power exchange with Pilate, the governor who really just wants to get the job done and go home for cocktails. The crowd of police – we’re really not sure who they are, they’re definitely not the tons of Jewish folk who followed Jesus, loved him and were healed by him. These are the workers in the religious capital who are worried about the threat to the establishment. So they’re in a negotiation with Pilate, too.

But the one place where we see the gap between all the human stuff and Jesus is the little exchange between Jesus and Pilate – and it totally knocks me out every time. It seems like they share the same interests – neither one of them wants Jesus to die. This should be simple enough to work out, right? But when we really listen to what they were saying, we see that the space between them is huge – and by this time, unbridgeable.

They’re in Pilate’s headquarters, and I imagine it’s warm and muggy in the room. Maybe there are shouts from the outside, but inside, there’s a hushed heaviness. Pilate looks well-fed, maybe tired. But Jesus is already showing the ravages of the past twenty-four hours. Two very different power positions.

Pilate leads off by asking Jesus about being a king – a power word, right? Jesus takes that and turns it into the idea of the kingdom – the kingdom that is about something other than the paranoia and self-interest that’s gotten so out of control. Once more, Pilate tries to call him a king. Once more, Jesus answers with something other than a yes or a no. He takes that word – king – and he gives it back. He doesn’t accept Pilate’s terms but like a hot potato puts it back in Pilate’s hands. Ironically, Pilate will end up using it in the inscription over Jesus’ head.

And then we get to a real clincher here – to me, maybe the real gap between people and Jesus. He says he came into the world to testify to the truth – to testify, meaning, like in a courtroom, to bear witness to something that lies outside of that room. He bears witness to Pilate – by how Jesus is, really, because at this point he’s not saying much – of something that lies outside of all this power grasping and negotiation.

And then Jesus says – whoever belongs to the truth … listens to my voice….

Which has always bugged me. Shouldn’t it be the reverse? Shouldn’t it be that whoever can hear his voice belongs to the truth? Like belonging to a club, right?, you can choose to get in, do the right things, to listen to the right people, and then you’re in.

But for Jesus, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not about listening for instructions, then following them – that’s more like the world that Pilate is talking about. Jesus is about a different kind of belonging and a different way of hearing. First, you need to belong to the truth – to exist for it, to live by means of it, to have that be your calibration – and then, Jesus says, you’ll understand what I’m saying. Then, you’ll get it.

Then, Pilate, this odd conversation wherein I seem to be speaking one language and you seem to be speaking another, will run totally differently. So live into the truth. And then my words, my language, will begin to make sense to you.

So, Pilate asks … what is truth?

Oh man – don’t we all want to know?! Except – notice the path Pilate took with it. It was a very human path – most of us would do the same. Pilate asked what truth was, like a concept, an idea – a noun. What is a riddle, what is a debate, what is a fact. But Jesus hadn’t said anything like that. He didn’t talk about truth, like a philosophy subject. Jesus talked about the truth. And that’s a whole different thing.

And in this moment of exhaustion, fear, body fluids, Jesus isn’t interested in concepts. He never had been – it’s why he never got caught up in the debates. He was always interested in relationship – with each other and, above all, with the living God. And I think that’s where he’s going with the ‘truth’ thing. He’s not talking about an answer. He’s talking about an experienced reality. A living, breathing reality. Which explains his answer to Pilate’s question of what is truth.

Jesus’ answer is: absolute silence.

The next thing we hear about is Pilate going back to the crowd to say he’s found no case against Jesus. And that’s a true fact. It’s the kind of factual life that Pilate has always had to live.

But what’s left hanging in the air, back in Pilate’s stuffy interview room – and Pilate knows it – is Jesus’ silence. It is screaming. Because even if it’s silence, it’s not absence. It’s alive and it’s fierce.

It’s fierce because it’s the moment in which the relative truth of humans meets the truth of relationship with God.

That was the truth that Jesus knew, and it was what he was clinging to, at this moment when circumstances seemed to contradict everything God was supposed to be, when circumstances wouldn’t tell us that God was more than what we saw. At this dark moment, Jesus could have believed the human circumstances. Or he could believe in the truth. He chose the latter. He knew that the circumstances were not the same thing as the truth.

How often do we feel in that exact place in our lives? A place where we know something lies beyond what we can see, or where we at least hope against hope that something is there that loves us in a way that will surprise us.

In other words, how often have we been in Pilate’s headquarters? How often have we felt – or do we feel right now – like there’s a massive gap between what’s going on around us, and who we are with God.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life” – that’s from John, too. We hear a lot about truth in John, and it’s never about an answer people can arrive at through debate or negotiation.

The truth is a relationship that is right there for us, whispering to us that circumstances are never the end of the story. So look beyond them, in the cross, in your own life. Look to that relationship. It may look for all the world that, at this moment, it is breathing its last breath. But hang in there. Don’t believe what you see. Believe what you hope lies beyond it.

II.

This is the one moment in the whole Christian year when, at least for me, time seems to stop. And the thing about timelessness, is that it lets you wander around inside yourself with no particular itinerary. Just wandering the territory inside for the sake of the territory itself.

And on Good Friday, that can involve a lot of pain. It’s a painful story. And then there’s the fact that, even though the pain is supposed to be that of someone else – Jesus, mainly, though they’re all pretty much in pain – clearly the story of the cross starts to go way beyond its nice outlines and begins to live and breathe inside of us. This story starts wandering around in our territory.

And as it does, all kinds of things can happen. This story can find the stuff in us that seems similar, like the memory of another person’s death. But this wily story doesn’t stop there. It also starts to move into those places in us that at first might not seem to be about the cross at all. An old grief, or maybe a new echo of an old one, that seems like it’s too everyday, or too messy, or unheroic to include in Good Friday meditations. Some pain that we might send outside to wait for us while we do lofty things, and later we’ll pick it up at the door, like an umbrella or a coat.

But that’s what I hope we won’t do. This story from the Gospel of John is deep, and it’s supposed to start clicking on the live links of our lives, even if it’s a link we hadn’t realized was there. It might remind us of a loss we’ve had. Or a change where all we know is what we’re losing, and we can’t yet see what we are gaining. Maybe it calls up some way our self-awareness has suddenly been cracked open, and while we know it’s a good thing, at this moment all kinds of beasts seem to be streaming up through that hole.

What this story does in us is important. So in this last hour, let’s let it have its way.

The cross is a powerful thing – it’s alive. It’s about a love that can take in our worst wounds, our worst moments, but not become us. A love that can take in our pain yet still be enough apart from us to always be taking us somewhere new. And that’s huge.

The bigness of our feelings, which we often fear, whether they’re good or bad feelings. And, on the other hand, the fact that there is something that can still hold that bigness.

There’s a poem by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke that’s been with me lately – sent it around to the Bridge this week. It goes this way:

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.”

I think the poem catches both the wildness of Holy Week, the greatest and the worst – the extremes of emotion, the extremes of memory, if we let it happen – and – that God frames it all.

Which I know sounds like a neat little churchy thing to say. But believe me, I’m not glib about it. We’ve all been places where we really don’t think God frames anything, that God isn’t all God’s cracked up to be – or where we swear there is no God at all. “My God, why have you forsaken me.”

I’ve been there, and while I don’t want to go there again, I know that I will. Because life happens.

So I’m not saying that we won’t to go extreme places in ourselves.

But – what if even in those moments – God is still holding us?

I don’t say it easily. But I have to say it. Because it’s what this hour is about. And to me, it takes us back to Pilate’s office.

We meditated on that in the first hour, but in case you weren’t here, it’s about going back into Pilate’s headquarters for those few moments that Pilate and Jesus talked and hearing Pilate try to use the idea of power, or of a king, and or of truth. All these human negotiations.

And Jesus’ refusal to become entangled in it, and his pointing to a reality that lay beyond it all.

Isn’t that kind of like the poem? The human extremes of this holy week. And Jesus’ awareness – as only Jesus could have, here’s where we need Jesus to be divine – of something that surrounds it all.

And the space between those two things is something we have to remember.

It’s not saying we don’t have to deal with the negotiations of the world – we do, no question. But the only way we can come to those negotiations is if we know first that that’s not what defines us. Those circumstances, whether they’re going well or badly, do not define us, because God defines us. And we need that space to remember who we are, and then to find out all over again who we are.

It’s a space that we can carry inside ourselves between all the human noise that we all have to deal with every day, and the wordlessness of God. It’s a space where we can hear the gap between the realities we have to adapt to, all the time – and the fullness of who we are as God’s children. And it’s a space in which we can feel joy, as we claim that fullness, or where we can feel grief, as we see a part of it that’s been silent too long – all the edges of our longing that Rilke talks about in his poem.

It’s a powerful space, this space in Pilate’s office. Go into the room and let Jesus be your advocate. Let Jesus’ silence be your advocate. Let his silence be a way of saying ‘no’ to the things you feel compromise away the integrity that God wants for you.

The circumstances aren’t the same thing as the truth.

In the next short while, we’ll do some beautiful things together. We’ll sit in silence, giving God space to work in the temple of ourselves. In the confession, we’ll say to the greatest Lover of all, the things that are causing us pain. Those who would like to will come forward for human touch as a way of embodying Jesus’ own.

As all this happens, let the cross come into you however it is coming in, whether it seems correct or not. Go to the limits of your longing, as Rilke so beautifully says. Think about the shadows you’ve cast in your life, where God has had space to move. Think about the beauty you have known, and the terror.

Let yourself feel how Jesus’ wounds, the very places his flesh is torn open, become a vortex for all of this – and how Jesus still stays Jesus. And then, after you feel that feeling, look and see what’s underneath.