FACE TO FACE WITH TRUTH

The day at the Spirituality Conference was fulfilling and exhausting.  A lot of ideas to process; good ideas that I want to incorporate into my faith.  My plumb line always; do these ideas and tools bring me closer to God and the image of God that I reflect to share with others; do they help me be a faithful disciple of Jesus; do they strengthen the work and the Presence of the Holy Spirit within me?  Then, as the Bereans, I go and search the Scriptures to see if these things are so; then I will study them as true.

Truth is difficult to find.  People search for Truth because it is the only real thing, stable thing to stand on, or build on.  We continually search for Truth, but too often we are searching in all the wrong places.  “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” (John 18; 37).  After Jesus said this Pilate asked the question humans have been asking for centuries.  “What is truth?”  But he never waited for an answer.  Here Truth was standing right in front of him, face to face, and he did not hear or see.  Or maybe he did but consciously did away with him for fear of the people.  He found no guilt in Jesus; he did what he thought he could do to release Jesus.  But in the end he handed him over to the people to be crucified.  In the end he declared the truth putting an inscription on the cross.  “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”  When asked to remove it he refused declaring, “What I have written I have written.”

I don’t know what Pilate’s outcome was; but I know he was face to face with Jesus, heard Jesus, and believed what he said.  I’d like to believe that at some point in his life he remembered that encounter and that remembrance transformed his life.  Who knows?