In today's gospel we hear one of the simplest and yet most profound statements in the Gospel, when Jesus describes himself with three words: way, truth, and life. That Jesus is the way to eternal life is the bold claim at the heart of the Christian message. But it is the middle word that we need to focus on, truth.
We live in a culture in which for the first time, the question of Pontius Pilate
What is truth? (Jn 18:38)
has become the central question of our time.
Gradually, over the last few decades at least, we have been sliding away from a belief in objective truth. More and more people conflate opinion and truth. Your opinion is "your truth." People are encouraged to find their own personal truth. This error is often dressed up as something profound. It is simply wrong and dangerous.
The corollary danger is that if there is no such thing as truth, then there is no such thing as a lie. That person isn't lying, they are only speaking their truth. And at that point lies become like wire grass in the lawn, enmeshed.
Some act horrified as day after day statements coming from the White House are shown to be factually incorrect. And yet we have no one to blame but ourselves. Some want to blame the culture but we are the culture. We, collectively, create the culture. We have created this culture of personal subjective truth, alternative facts.
Let us pray that the current crisis will force left and right to come together around some fundamentals.
There is such a thing as objective truth.
It is knowable.
And we should all want to hear it, even when it runs contrary to what we want to believe.
The truth is the truth. A lie is a lie.
Without searching for the Truth we will never find the Way that leads to the Life.
