Truth Is Not a What, but a Who

Although the exact formulation escapes me, there is a line in an essay by Romano Guardini that I’ve never forgotten, in which he says that, at the end of the day, there can be no moral difference in the sight of God between the sin of Cain, who killed his brother, and the sin of Pilate, who failed to prevent the killing of his brother. The brother in question, of course, whom he might have saved but for want of a little courage, was none other than Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for whose innocent blood the Jews were baying.

Confronted, in other words, by massive imperial power in the person of a Roman governor, whose job it was to keep the peace in a distant province of the empire, this poor itinerant preacher named Jesus of Nazareth, who’s just been accused of disturbing that peace, really hasn’t got a chance. And, as history shows, things do not turn out well for the so-called King of the Jews. Pilate having duly signed the death warrant, Jesus is led away to be crucified.

Leaving aside all that for the moment, however, it is the brief exchange leading up to his death that stays in the memory, that continues to fascinate. Here is how John, the beloved disciple, puts it in his eyewitness account: “Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks. He needs to know who Jesus is, you see, and what he’s done to drive the Jews mad with jealousy and rage. Why should they want a mere harmless prophet arrested and killed? It makes no sense to Pilate. Nor, for that matter, does it make much sense to those of us steeped in a world where nothing finally makes sense.

So, what does Jesus tell Pilate? “My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingdom is not of this world.”

Pilate then asks: “So you are a king?” To which Jesus answers:

You say that I am a king. For this I was born; and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.

At which point the exchange breaks off with Pilate abruptly asking the question that has since become skepticism’s gold standard:

What is truth?

And he would not stay for an answer.

Could there ever have been a juxtaposition more jarring? I mean, in the entire history of the world, where else has there been a conversation even remotely like this? The irony of the thing is totally over the top. In this corner we have the holiest Being that ever walked upon the face of the earth, who faith tells us is the very enfleshment of truth itself come down from Heaven. And in the other corner what have we got but a miserable little man putting on airs before the Generative Matrix Itself, daring to stand in judgment upon the very Word who spoke the universe into being. A twit in a toga taking on the Tri-Une God in the form of the human being Jesus—what was poor Pilate thinking? What could be crazier? Is there a scene anywhere in the world exceeding the strangeness of seeing these two utterly disparate beings suddenly thrown together in the middle of Judaea in the first century?

And yet, for all the strangeness of the scene, the sheer absolute disproportion between the two—that of the Creator God on one side, the creature man on the other—what is no less odd is the fact that only one of them is using every card he’s got. Only Pilate is playing with a full deck, flaunting the hand he’s been given. “You will not speak to me?” he demands, incredulous in the face of the latter’s silence. “Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

Rather than hang fire, why doesn’t Jesus just hurl a thunderbolt or two at this Roman upstart? Why not awaken an army of angels with which to smite all his enemies, hip and thigh, as they say? Why won’t he play the hand he’s been given from all eternity, the hand his own heavenly Father holds? Why must he be so meek and humble, so seemingly supine? It’s positively disproportionate! What game is he playing anyway?

In other words, what is going through his mind, a human mind to be sure, but with every synapse charged with an energy not of this world? Christ may possess a human nature, a human heart and soul, but the Acting Person throughout is nothing less than the divine LOGOS himself, the uncreated Word without whom there can be no creation. In The Lord, Guardini’s masterful unpacking of the Gospels, he warns the reader on the very first page that, despite the usual tendency to psychologize everything, it simply will not work in the case of Jesus. “A psychology of St. Francis, yes—at least to the point where something beyond mere human nature stirs: that superhuman reality through which true humanity in God’s sense is established.” But that will not do when trying to unpuzzle the human being Jesus, in whom that something beyond mere human nature will always be there, will forever be stirring. “Anyone who attempts to overstep the obvious limitations only loses sight of the authentic figure,” he tells us, “core of which is the mysterium Dei, canceler of all psychology.”

It is here, therefore, that we learn the truth about Jesus, the motive force behind all his actions in time and space. “Here lies the secret of grace: participation in the divine mystery; hence the impossibility of ‘analyzing’ any true Christian.

All one can do is demonstrate from ever new points of departure how all attributes, all characteristics of Christ terminate in the incomprehensible, an incomprehensibility, however, of measureless promise.”

This is the only interpretive lens we’ve been given through which to see Christ, to understand anything about him. “How strangely disturbing Jesus’ conduct!” comments Guardini. “We must shake off a two-thousand-year-old simplification of Christ as ‘our dear Savior,’ prototype of patience and love, long enough to realize how incomplete this representation, how little known he really is.”

It is in the silence of Christ that his witness becomes most eloquent. He will not fight his accusers. “He proves nothing. He denies nothing. He attacks nothing.” But in his silence, Guardini tells us, “there is neither weakness nor desperation. It is divine reality; full, holy consciousness of the approaching ‘hour’; perfect readiness. His silence brings into being what is to be.” In this hour of darkness in which there is great evil and hatred, Jesus makes no protest, mounts no defense, but instead permits it to crush and kill him. “In this turbulent hour only truth per se takes the stand, and therefore must be trampled beyond recognition before the sentence can fall.”

But there will, please God, be another sentence, only it may not be heard for another three days. In the meantime, Christ will journey into a hell of such human hopelessness that only a God infinitely pure, infinitely alive may succeed in vanquishing the darkness and desolation of it. It is he, the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who will speak that sentence, and what it spells is victory over sin and death.