Of First Importance
Today’s Gospel is one of my favorite scenes in scripture, but I think we need to go just one more verse. The very next verse frames the conversation between Pilate and Jesus. Please turn in your Bibles to John 18:38. “Pilate answered him, ‘What is truth?’”
What is truth? There seems to be a growing assumption that the only real truth is fact, that only whatever we can prove by math or scientific experiment is real. The rest is superstition or something. Our world has been improved immeasurably in many ways by scientific and technological advancement, but facts don’t define truth and they don’t define reality.
Most of us have a smart phone. That is a great tool with a ton of brilliant science, engineering and design that went into it. It’s a phone, a camera, a video recorder, and on and on. It’s a computer more powerful than the computers they used to go to the moon. We can find out news from anywhere in the whole world, translate any language, read almost any book and listen to almost any song.
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Come out!
Each of us answers a specific question about our faith: How important is this? We answer it internally as we make some sense about who we are, what our lives mean and even how much we decide to think about that at all. We answer it externally in the ways that it affects the ways we talk and the ways we act in the world. Each Gospel passage challenges us some way, usually pushing us to be better people. We learn to give and forgive, to see the potential in others, to endure temptation and so on.
Today’s Gospel pushes us hard on faith in Jesus.
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Let love be your aim.
I’m just curious, when was the last time you ran into a Scribe? We don’t really use Scribes very often. It’s an antiquated synonym for secretary or clerk of meetings, maybe a writer. But it feels like you’d need a flagon or something to really use it correctly. I remember when I was in Boy Scouts we actually had a leadership position called Scribe. The Scribe was like the clerk, which was a pretty easy job because we never made motions or took minutes or anything.
The scribes of Israel were not that. They were a guild of experts, teachers and exponents of the law. Remember that in their culture the law of Moses wasn’t just for their personal religious direction and observances. It was their law – everything from national laws to civic ordinances that defined how they lived in community.
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