"What is truth?"

Fourth Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  We might say that we live in the age of Pontius Pilate.  What do I mean by that?  Pontius Pilate, while trying our Lord in the Praetorium, skeptically asked Christ, “What is truth?”  Pope Benedict XVI warned us of the effects of relativism, of the assertion that there is no such thing as objective truth.  But our times have continued down the path of relativism, despite its inherent contradictions.
    We use phrases like, “live your truth.”  We have media outlets of all kinds, conservative and liberal, who twist the truth to promote their agendas.  We have fact checkers, which would seem to be a good thing, except they, too, consider facts from a particular perspective, and their results do not always ring true.  Those who have great power or great prestige often say one thing, but then do not live up to what they say, or live in a way contradictory to it.  We even have leaders of the Church who openly posit teachings which the Church has taught is wrong and contrary to what our Lord revealed.  In the midst of all this, is it any wonder that people doubt if there is truth, or find themselves asking the same question as the governor of Judea: what is truth?
    Our Lord today tells us that He will send us the Spirit of truth, who will lead us into all truth.  The Savior doesn’t modify the truth, or say that He will help us to know our truth.  The Holy Spirit will teach us the truth.  Truth, by definition, is one, like God.  It does not admit of variations, even though people may have different perceptions of it.  There was a picture floating around Facebook a while back, and I suppose, in the best light, it was trying to help us look at things from another perspective.  It showed a number on the sidewalk in chalk, and two people arguing about whether it was the number 6 or the number 9.  But, as one commenter pointed out, someone put the number on the sidewalk, and intended it to be a 6 or a 9.  So even with perspective, there is still an objective truth, a reality to which the image refers. 
    And truth cannot change based upon the time in which one lives.  Our understanding can certainly grow and develop, but the truth is eternal, again, like God.  It’s not as if the world was flat at one time, until we started to learn more about the earth and the solar system, and then it became spherical.  It was always spherical; we just thought, from our base of knowledge, that it was flat.  Or, to use an item of faith, it’s not as if God was a monad until the New Testament, and then He became a Trinity.  God was always a Trinity of Persons, but we didn’t fully understand that until our Lord revealed it to us. 
    To live a successful life, we have to acknowledge the truth.  Otherwise, truth will exert itself in painful ways, no matter how much we try to ignore it.  I do not have to believe in gravity, but if I try to ignore it while walking off the roof of a building, gravity will impress upon me that it exists whether I want it to or not.  And, depending on the size of the building, my desire that gravity not exist may prove fatal.  I may want to walk through walls, but if I try, I will end up getting a serious headache and body ache. 
    The same is true with the truth about how God made the world when it comes to religion.  Just because we do not want something to be true, does not make it less true.  A person who does not believe in God will come face to face with that false opinion when he or she stands before God in judgement.  A person may convince him or herself that saying God’s name in vain doesn’t really matter, but at some point he or she will recognize the truth of the pain that the violation of that commandment brings.  Yes, our ability to know that truth, whether our ignorance was vincible or invincible, conquerable or unconquerable, will affect God’s judgement of us.  But the reality will impress itself upon us, and perhaps cause us a longer time in Purgatory, or perhaps even mean our eternal damnation.
    On a much happier note, we have children today who are making their first Holy Communion.  They are receiving our Lord in the Eucharist for the first time.  They have come to recognize that what looks like bread and wine is not bread and wine, but has become, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the ministry of the priest, the Body and Blood of Christ.  You, my dear children, fulfill today the words of Psalm 8: “on the lips of children and of babes / you have found praise to foil your enemy, / to silence the foe and the rebel.”  Though there is still a lot of truth you need to learn, you have come to understand the truth that our Eucharistic Lord gives Himself to us at each Mass so that we can eat His flesh and have life within us, even though it looks like ordinary bread. 
    And the way that you receive, kneeling and on your tongue, helps to demonstrate the truth that you have come to learn.  If it were only a matter of eating regular food, we would pull up a table and chairs and have you eat like normal.  But because Christ gives Himself to us, we kneel down in adoration, and allow Him to nourish us, like a baby bird receives its nourishment from its parent in its mouth.  In some ways, children, you are wiser than some adults, and know a truth that they have rejected.  Hold on to that truth.  Never doubt what Christ has taught us through the Scriptures and through the Church, that if we wish to have eternal life within us, we need to eat His flesh, which is the Eucharist.
    And for all of us, pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us all into the fullness of truth.  Not just the opinions that we like or that seem easy for us; not just the soundbites that support our pre-conceived notions; but the truth, the reality of how God has made the world.  There is real truth, because God exists who can ground the truth in Himself.  Our goal, aided by the light of the Holy Spirit, is to acknowledge the truth and live according to it, the truth that grounds itself in our Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

What is Truth?

 Sixth Sunday of Easter
    “What is truth?”  It may not be the best thing to quote Pontius Pilate at the beginning of a homily, but as we hear about the Holy Spirit today in the Gospel, and how He will “‘teach you everything and remind you of all that [Jesus] told you,’” it seems an appropriate question.  The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth, the Advocate who pleads our cause against Satan, the father of lies.  
    While we may have a general internal understanding of what truth is, it may be harder to define.  Truth is what is real, what is actual.  Truth allows us to interact with the world in a way which allows us to succeed.  Truth exerts itself and demands obedience, even if we don’t want to give it.  For example, the truth about gravity may be inconvenient, and we may want to ignore it, but if we jump off a cliff, hoping to go up, we will be sorely disappointed (and probably dead!).
    But truth isn’t only about physical realities.  Truth concerns both what is available to our senses, and what is beyond our senses, we might say both the physical and the metaphysical.  Pope St. John Paul II wrote an entire Encyclical about truth called Veritatis splendor, the Splendor of Truth, and writes that truth “enlightens man’s intelligence and shapes his freedom, leading him to know and love the Lord.”

    Truth is not up for debate.  Truth, like God, simply is, which is why it makes perfect sense for Christ to say in the Gospel, “‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’”  Because of the Incarnation, we can say that truth is not merely a set of propositions; truth has a face.  
    Truth does not change over the centuries, even if our understanding of it does.  Truth does not change depending on the type of government, or the political party in charge.  Truth is a light in the darkness that helps us walk on safe paths, without which we can often stumble and fall.
    But society for the past decades has struggled with truth.  Society has questioned if there even is such a thing as truth, has denied that there is truth altogether, and now can often only speak of voicing “your truth,” as if it changes not only for every time, but even for every person.  But if truth is different for every person, then communication is altogether impossible, as words presume a set meaning, an expression of a real idea, not simply our own invention of ideas based upon what we want something to be.  And this trend of questioning truth has found its way even into the people who profess, week after week, belief in God who is Truth Itself, and who reveals the truth about Himself to us out of love.
    It is vogue now, as it often has been in every century of the Church, to question this or that Church teaching, not for the purpose of understanding it more, but for the purpose of rejecting it.  Because some truths are hard for a given culture and time.  In the fourth and fifth centuries, as we came to understand Jesus Christ more, we discovered that explaining who Christ is could be difficult, but the easier answer didn’t account for who Christ had to be to save us.  He is fully God and fully man, unbegotten, consubstantial with the Father.  It would have been easier to say, like the heretic Arius, that Jesus was simply a special creature of God, above us, but not God.  That would have seemed to have been better to preserve the oneness of God.  But then, if He was not God, He could not save us.  But then, if He were not one of us, He would not be under the cost of disobedience that we acquired through sin.  And so we held to the hard truth, that Jesus Christ is one hundred percent God, but one hundred percent human, and that God, while one, is a Trinity of Three Divine Persons, while still one in substance.
    Lies are often easier, and less complicated, at least at first.  It’s easier to say, “Yes, I love this food!” that looks more like the charcoal you use in a grill.  And yet, even those “white lies” as we call them can lead to hurt and pain when, as most often happens, the truth is discovered (in this case when it’s discovered by your spouse that swallowing has suddenly become quite difficult).  And that’s just with small issues.  Imagine being told, “I love you,” by a person who is just using you.  You think that he or she really cares for you as a person, and you give yourself to him or her, trusting that you will not be betrayed, only to have that hope dashed against the rocks and your heart broken by someone who was not concerned about you, but only about him or herself.  
    Many times we know what the Church teaches, but we don’t want to accept it, because it was hard.  It was likely hard for those first Christians, especially those who were Jewish, who saw their faith as simply the right way to be a good Jew, to accept the truth revealed by the Holy Spirit to the Apostles that being a follower of Jesus didn’t require circumcision or the following of dietary laws that had been given by Moses.  It was hard, but it was the truth.  And the truth was revealed and preserved by the Holy Spirit, using the cooperation of the Apostles.  It wasn’t simply that old men wearing pointy hats decided to go one way, as is so often parroted when the Church holds fast to an unpopular teaching.  
    But just as gravity forces itself upon the individual, whether he or she likes it or not, the truths of our faith are also as stubborn; they cannot be wished away.  So if we wish to have a happy life, which comes from following the truth, not only here on earth but especially if we hope to go to heaven, we are called to subject ourselves to the truth, even when that’s hard.  If we wish to call ourselves follows of Christ who is the Truth, then we are called to follow the truth as revealed through the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, no matter how hard it may be.  Ask the Holy Spirit today to help you know the truth, for the truth will set you free to be the person you are made to be, in the world as God made it.

Loyalty to our Team

 Feast of Christ the King
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Yesterday there was a big game, at least if you’re a college football fan in the State of Michigan.  Undefeated University of Michigan Wolverines, ranked 6 in the US, played the undefeated Michigan State University Spartans, ranked 8 in the US.  While there are other universities and colleges in the State, there does seem to be a general division between Michigan and Michigan State.  In fact, that was one of the first questions Bishop Boyea was asked when he was announced as the newest bishop of Lansing back in 2008 (to which he demurred).  

    It is interesting that we put so much weight on loyalty to a particular football team.  Some have loyalty because they attended that school.  Others like a winning record, or the history of a particular program.  I must admit that I have supported both schools in the past, as my parents both went to Michigan State, but I have some very good friends who attended Michigan.  Some, like me, go back and forth, or try to split their loyalties, especially if you have kids who go to either university.
    But today, as we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, and the thirty-second anniversary of the Traditional Latin Mass community in Flint, we deal with something much bigger than college football.  We are invited to renew our loyalty to Christ the King, to a King who will suffer no rivals, at least not in the end; to a King who is head and ruler of His Mystical Body, the Church; to a King who has myriad of angels waiting on His command; to a King who suffered and suffers our rejection patiently, hoping for us to convert.
    Those may seem like contradictions, but in Christ what would normally be a contradiction is held in the tension of the truest reality that exists.  Christ is both King who has no equal, but who also humbles Himself.  We see it in His exchange with Pontius Pilate.  St. John is very clear in His Gospel that Christ is always in control.  And yet, He engages in a kind of dialogue with Pilate, sometimes responding, sometimes in silence, which propels Christ to the Cross, which is His perfect throne on earth.  He admits that He has angels who would protect Him from any harm.  And yet, a chapter later, He will allow His sacred hands and feet to be pierced so that our rejection of our King could be healed and forgiven.  
    Christ is a patient king, and that should give us hope.  He allows us time to turn back to Him after we have turned away, because we are part of Him, and He wants us to be a part of His Kingdom.  This is not an excuse to be lax, or to presume on His mercy, but it does encourage us that, when we are not the subjects that we are supposed to be, because Christ wants to be generous with His mercy.  
    Further, since Christ is the Head of His Mystical Body, and we are members of that Mystical Body by baptism, Christ wants us to remain part of Him, reigning in heaven, just as we would like to retain all of our body.  Only those parts of the body that are dead need to be cut off, so Christ does all He can to nurse back to health ailing parts of the body.  So we should never be afraid of running to Christ for mercy when we have sinned.
    But at some point, both individually and collectively, our opportunity for mercy will come to an end, and our decisions about which kingdom we are loyal to–the kingdom of darkness, as St. Paul says, or the kingdom of light–will be a final decision, with no chance of turning back.  For many, that comes after death, when our loyalty or disloyalty to God will be locked in for all eternity.  Or it could come when Christ returns in glory at the end of time.  But we don’t know when that will be, in either scenario.  And that calls us to prepare.
    As we enter into November, we can spend especially the next month (and every day of our life) we call to mind the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell.  We shouldn’t be neurotic about it, and so concentrated on death that we lose the joy of life and the blessings Christ our King gives to us.  But, as we are faced with temptations, when we consider that we are choosing our loyalty to heaven or hell with each choice, it helps us to make better choices and become more and more each day a part of the Kingdom of Christ.  
    Yesterday, before the game at noon, no one knew who would win: Michigan or Michigan State.  People had their loyalties based on their own reasoning.  But when it comes to the Kingdom of Christ, our Lord has already won; there is no competition or challenge left from the enemy.  But while our Lord has won, we are still in the last seconds of the contest of eternal salvation, and these last seconds will decide, not who wins, but whether or not we’re on the winning team.  Choose your loyalty carefully.  Be sure you know which kingdom you’re trending towards.  Long live Christ the King!  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.