By Reverend Laurie DeMott

“You will know the truth and the truth will make you free”: these are some of the most encouraging and powerful words in the Bible, words that have been a promise for the falsely accused, words that have strengthened the weary hands of those fighting for justice in their communities.
“You will know the truth and the truth will make you free”. These words have been so historically inspiring that it is very disturbing to us to discover that these healing words in John 8:32 are followed by the divisive and hateful words we hear in the rest of this chapter. In John 8:33-47, Jesus uses that uplifting opening about truth to turn around and condemn the Jews who have joined the listening crowd. “You are from your father the devil,” the Jesus of John’s gospel says, “and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.... He is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.... Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God."

As wonderfully uplifting as the first part of this passage is, the second part is equally disturbingly destructive, and after some study on this chapter, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t believe that Jesus actually said any of these words that John puts in his mouth. Jesus did speak often about the freedom and salvation we would know if we accepted the gospel that he preached but he never uses the word “truth” to describe his teachings in the other three gospels. Only in the gospel of John is Jesus concerned about truth claims; in fact in the fourth gospel of John, the word truth appears 21 times in a book that is only 21 chapters long. Whereas in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is primarily concerned with right action – how does a Christian behave? – in the gospel of John, Jesus seems consumed with a concern for right belief – who has the true doctrine?

Why is John so obsessed with truth, and if Matthew, Mark, and Luke were less concerned about it, what is the proper stance that we as Christians should take toward truth claims? How do we understand this chapter in John, and does it, in spite of or even because of its troubling tone have anything to teach us about the nature of truth, power, and our faith as we practice it?

In the eighth chapter of John, Jesus confronts some opponents that John broadly describes as “the Jews”. The Sadducees, the Pharisees, the high priests, and the scribes – all different groups within first century Judaism who in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, sometimes argued and sometimes supported Jesus, have in the gospel of John now been lumped together in this all-inclusive category of “the Jews” as if any person born to a Jewish mother or father was automatically an enemy of Jesus. You’d think from reading this that John must have been some lily white Gentile suspicious of anyone who ate gifilte fish but, in fact, strangely enough, John’s community had originally considered itself to be Jewish-Christians. They had probably even started out worshiping in the synagogue alongside of Jewish brothers and sisters who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, both sides agreeing to disagree on their beliefs about Jesus. That peace, however, turned out to be a fragile one, and when persecution by the Roman Empire began to threaten the survival of Judaism, many synagogues became less tolerant of the diversity of beliefs among their congregants and Jewish-Christians were driven out of the fellowship. By the time John sat down to write his gospel, his community had been thrown out of the synagogue and his people were still feeling the hurt and fear of that rejection.

John was determined to bolster the now-shaky faith of the people and so, using Jesus as a mouthpiece for some of his own frustrations, John assured his church that though the synagogue had cast them out, had ridiculed them, and rejected them, it was the younger Christians who had the real truth and those Jews of their parents could literally just “go to the devil.” John’s invective was the hot-tempered accusation of an angry disenfranchised minority slinging mud at those who had hurt them. We see those same kinds of truth claims being made every day in our own society, often with the same bellicose certainty of the eighth chapter of John. Radio personalities slander politicians with glee; various groups angrily accuse other groups of bringing America to the edge of collapse; wild charges, defamation of character, and nasty innuendo is the fooder of internet blogs. The vitriol of this kind of debate arises from the assertions that I and my compatriots possess the truth while my opponent does not, could not, and will never be able to claim possession of the truth. Don’t lose any sleep over what they may say about you, John was telling his wounded people, because they are completely wrong and in the end, God will prove that it is we who are right. One day the truth will be known and at that time, the truth will set us free.... Free from them..... And their stupid wrong-headedness.

Most of the time, these raging battles over who has the truth and who does not never go beyond a war of words and ideas, which is what might have happened to the gospel of John as well if history had gone in a different direction. But about three hundred years after John was written, Constantine made the Christian church the official church of the Empire and when truth claims are combined with the power to impose those truth claims on others, debates become wars. Invective becomes inquisition. And two thousand years after John vented his frustration with his local synagogue by putting words in Jesus’ mouth, those words helped to justify the murder of 6 million Jews. We read John’s words from the other side of the Holocaust and it is hard to see how the “truth” promoted by John makes any of us free.

I told the Wednesday Book group about a prayer I had read once and at the time I read it, I thought it was cute and amusing, but as I think about this passage in John and the ramifications it has had on our history, I can only think now of this prayer as a lament. It says, “Lord, help me always to seek the truth, and spare me from those who have found it.”

The problem that we as Christians have in seeking truth is that while truth is of God, the ones doing the seeking are all too human. Reinhold Niebuhr once said that the most vexing problem humanity faces is humanity. Because we are human, we are imperfect and prone to sin which means that even the most beautiful, the most gracious, the most uplifting promises of God are bound to get sullied when they are placed in our mortal hands. Niebuhr suggests that much of the failure of Christian faith to change society for the better has been a result of our failure to take seriously the pervasiveness of our own sin. Christians seek power certain that once we are in positions of authority, we will be able to use our wisdom and faith to enact laws that will benefit all people, or send troops to save the nations, and then we are surprised to discover that the power we have gained in order to enact our good intentions has contaminated our good intentions. Power breeds pride, authority feeds ego, and the next thing you know, instead of speaking on behalf of the gospel, our word becomes the gospel; instead of believing in the truth, the truth becomes whatever we believe.

A few days ago, I listened to a program in which Brad Bird, the creator of the animated movie “The Incredibles”, talked about a revision that the animators had to make to one of the scenes in the movie. “The Incredibles” is about a family of superheroes and the father, Bob, is this bulky super strong guy married to Helen who in real life is Elasta-Girl who has the power to stretch like a rubber band. In one scene, Bob and Helen get into an argument just like any ordinary husband and wife might but as the animators watched their initial rendering of the scene, they became quite uncomfortable. There was the super muscular Bob yelling at the diminutive Helen and even though she wasn’t backing down, the fact that Bob towered over her made him look incredibly menacing. “Bob had too much power in the scene,” the director said, “so we decided to show Helen stretching herself up to Bob’s height so that she could look him right in the eyes. Once we made that change, the scene was no longer frightening. When we removed the unequal distribution of power, the scene went back to being a normal argument between spouses.”

Truth claims combined with power can become dangerous because whenever we claim to know the truth but fail to recognize the depth and persistence of our capacity for sin, we risk knocking God out of heaven and putting ourselves on the throne. Every promise we make, every truth we claim, every nugget of wisdom we purport to possess is necessarily filtered through the frailty of the mortal mind and heart and will never be more than limited and partial. Or, in the words of Paul, “ ...Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:12)

If truth claims are such a danger to human society, what then shall we as Christians do? Shall we hunker down in our easy chairs grumbling that there’s no point in even pursuing truth because we are only bound to fail? Is the beauty of John’s beautiful words in chapter 8:33, that the truth will make us free, completely wiped out by his own invective against Jews in the rest of the chapter?

I believe that here is what separates the faithful Christian from the unbeliever. For a person of no faith, human imperfection does doom us. If there is no God, there can be no absolute truth, and we are left to wallow in the depressing failures of humanity and every belief becomes only a matter of opinion, no more valid than arguing that vanilla ice cream is more true than Rocky Road. But we as Christians believe that while human beings will never be able to perceive or practice the gospel with purity, that does not mean that there is not an absolute truth. We believe in a God who continues to exist in spite of our human failings. We believe in a God whose perfect love still acts in spite of our imperfect care for others. We believe in a God whose vision for compassion and justice in the world continues to lure us in spite of our imperfect understanding of it. We believe in a God whose hope for peace continues to move us in spite of our imperfect practice of it. And we can believe all of this because we as Christians hold fast to the promise that God’s grace continues to forgive us in spite of our persistent irritating frustrating even discouraging sinful selves.

Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Civilization depends on the vigorous pursuit of the highest values by people who are intelligent enough to know that their values are qualified by their interests and corrupted by their prejudices.”

We continue to believe in the glory of God all the while remaining humbly aware that we fall woefully short of that glory, and it is that belief in the truth of God’s love and justice coupled with our acknowledgment that each of us sees that truth only in part that will make us free. We will be freed to listen to one another and learn from each other, even our opponents. We will be freed from our fear, and will find the courage to “sin boldly” as we try our best to practice the gospel comforted in the certainty that God will always leave room for us to make grand mistakes and still be forgiven. We will be freed from the tyranny of our selves so that we are able finally to serve a more gracious master.