Add a headingLENT EDITION: Lent 5
John 18 WHAT IS TRUTH?... 


I recently read “The Gospel according to the Beatles” by Steve Turner. It is a telling of the story of the Beatles’ search for meaning. They were influencers of the 1960’s generation and beyond. They undoubtedly influenced a generation and much of the map of the decades that followed.

Yet church had left them cold.

Paul McCartney’s Father McKenzie writes sermons that no one will listen to in Eleanor Rigby. This shows what Paul and John, who wrote most of the songs, were left with from their Christian upbringing. Instead, the young men who were thrown into fame and fortune at a heady rate, were existentialists – interested only in the here and now.

They succumbed to a belief that this life is all an illusion and sought higher knowledge through expanded minds turning to drugs, especially LSD,  and meditation through eastern religions. They sought  ways to find out true meaning. The essence of the teaching was “Clear your mind and kill your ego”. Then, it was claimed,  you will experience something greater than you and see the world as it truly is rather than how we perceive it now.

I finished the book profoundly disturbed.

What they were searching for was Jesus. He needs no mind expanding or letting go of self to be found. He seeks us, as we are. In our messy humanity. Turning on and dropping out opens a huge opportunity but for the wrong side – the empty expanded mind that has distorted perception is one that is at threat from the enemy and his lies and deceptions.

St Paul clearly states it in 1 Corinthians 15. “2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance..” (1 Cor 15:2-3)

Christian writers do not separate mind and body in the same way that the Beatles were seeking truth. St Paul again wrote “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind(Rom 12:1-2) We are called to love God with all our minds, bodies and souls (or word to that effect).

It is the self that is transformed, for life in its fullness now in Christ and life to come, eternal life. Mind, body and soul together. Intertwined. Not separated. You come as a package!

The Beatles famously broke up by 1970, irritable and unfulfilled. They never found what they were looking for. Because it was Jesus,  and they did not find him.

They came seeking truth. They did not find it.

Because there is one truth.

Jesus made various claims to be “I am” in John’s gospel and in 14:6 it was :

I am

The way

The truth

The life

No one comes to the Father apart from me.

When faced with the reality of Jesus’ mission, out in the courtyard after the arrest,  Peter denied that he knew “the truth”, denied Jesus, for he knew that he too would be arrested. 

Jesus was inside giving testimony that he had spoken openly in the world.

The officials slapped and beat him. Jesus challenged them to say either why what he said was not true or to explain why he was being struck for telling the truth.

They had no answer.

Pilate questioned Jesus. “I was born to testify to the truth” Jesus said.

 ‘What is truth?’ asked Pilate.

Jesus had already answered that question, in the upper room, to the disciples…….. “I am”.

Current postmodern thought challenges all “truths” and concludes that there is no such thing as one truth. Postmodernist truth is that there is no absolute truth.

The paradox here of course is that to assert as a truth that there is no truth cannot itself be absolutely true, and therefore opens up the possibility that there is a single truth if postmodernism is untrue.

Confused?.....

You need not be.

Because of first importance to your life and that of anyone you meet is this.

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared” (1 Cor 15:3-5)

And “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matt 27:54)

We know this to be true because it is :

God’s

Honest

Truth

Preparation lesson 5: Jesus, the Word,  is the truth, of that you can be certain.

Blessings all

Doug
vicar@christchurchpurley.org.uk



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