What is Truth?

What is Truth?

“Pilate therefore said to Him, ‘Are You a king then?’
Jesus answered, ‘You say rightly that I am a king. For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.’”
(John 18:37)

Pontius Pilate looked at Jesus in the eye and asked “What is truth?” (John 18:38) He looked Truth in the eye, and couldn’t comprehend Who he was looking at. 

Pilate didn’t understand. Why didn’t he understand?
Because he did not live according to the truth.
Why was Jesus Christ crucified?
Because people did not live according to the truth.
Why did the crowd, the tumult, the crown of thorns, the sham trial, the false witnesses etc. happen?           
Because they all did not live according to the truth, and therefore they did not recognize (Him) the Truth.
The Orthodox Christian life is about truth, purity, goodness. The reason why we were created is to be good and true and pure. But we’re not good and true and pure. So we need guidance and help, and our Saviour came to give it to us. And this help was in Him becoming Man.

And yet when He came to His own, His own rejected Him.

The people greeted the Lord on Palm Sunday, and then only a few days later, there were people yelling, “Crucify Him, crucify Him, we have no king but Caesar, and His Blood be upon us and on our children.” (Matthew 27:22-25 & John 19:15)


~Truth

The Lord Jesus Christ said “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6) 

The message of the Lord Jesus contains simple truths. The most important commandments are to love God and love (our) neighbour. The followers of Jesus Christ are not working for an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly one. We are to love our enemies and turn the other cheek when we are attacked by them. We need to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, both now, and forever. 

These are simple truths. We are supposed to help those in need.
 
The message of Christ is actually pretty simple to articulate. But it is a little challenging to live. 

In many ways, society is like Pontius Pilate, demanding to know “what is truth?” and looking at the simple and beautiful truths of Orthodox Christianity as if they are the backbone for everything that ails society. Sadly, in many corners, Orthodox Christians are also like Pontius Pilate. We look at Christ and ask “What is truth?” as if hoping the answer will not only be simple in words but simple in actions, that it will conform to whatever we define as truth, rather than how He (the Lord) defines it. 


Truth is Christ; it is the Church which is His body and His bride. We ultimately find the Truth upheld in the people and places in which the experience of the God-Man in divine illumination occurs.


The truth — as both a principle and the very reality of the Person Truth (Our Lord) and His Church — is something that should be the basis of our Orthodox Christian life and conduct. Throughout the ages, the Orthodox Church has dealt with various factions, from both within and without her walls, which have attempted to dilute the truth with delusion, personal opinion, and in some cases, outright blasphemy and slander.


All these errors find a common source in (which is) intellectual pride.

The enemies of Truth care not for the consistency and loyalty to the truth, but are more interested in how they can reshape the truth in order to make it more appealing and comforting to them, and perhaps as a misguided attempt to draw others to what they believe to be true. The truth then becomes nothing more than a brand.

If there is one thing we must understand, it is that God is consistent; He is unchanging. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

When we start to depart from the truth as revealed in the Church through the Prophets, Holy Apostles and Holy Fathers, we risk falling into Atheism and/or Humanism, as one comes to believe in a counterfeit Christ, a non-existent God, a mere shadow of the reality of the Theanthropos (God-Man).

All of the Truths of our Faith emerge from one Truth and converge in one Truth, infinite and eternal. That Truth is the God-Man Christ.



As Orthodox Christians, our culture should be based on the Person of Christ, the Theanthropos (God-Man). God became (Man) human in order to lift man up to God.

Humanism is outside of the God-Man Christ, outside of God, and thus, outside of the Church. It isolates human beings from their spiritual dimension.

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