In my experience, and I’m sure in yours too, people who claim to know the truth about life’s big issues tend to be taken with a large dose of scepticism. ‘Who are you to say what the truth is?’ ‘What makes you think, whatever your academic or technical credentials, that you can tell me the truth about matters which are complicated and complex beyond belief?’
So many people these days have given up, not only on the idea that some one or some group might just know the truth about life’s big issues, but even on the concept of truth itself. Sure, we can agree at the micro level – the truth that, for instance, 2 + 2 make 4: but at the macro level? No. There seem to be so many different and differing understandings and interpretations of the truth about this life and our part in it that people just give up and become no longer interested in truth – it’s all too difficult, they say, or else they just become cynical. And who can blame them?
‘Bad news’, which so often means ‘the truth’, is ‘buried’ by those powerful enough to do so: all three of my careers to date have certainly convinced me of that! We are all of us flawed, fickle and fallible human beings: can anyone be believed? Is it not therefore wise to be sceptical? Take, for example, climate change. Whose evidence about the truth of what is happening and what is predicted are you going to believe? There are Nobel Prize-winning scientists on either side of the debate; and we know, going back to my first point, that unhelpful truths in this particular debate quickly get buried.
And so it’s really not surprising that for many people ‘truth’ becomes ‘whatever works for me’. And if something else ‘works’ for you, then that’s fine by me. As long, that is, until our truths clash; and then we have a problem. How are we going to resolve it? On what basis, what standard, what authority?
A few weeks ago I spoke about Jesus Christ’s claim to be ‘The way, the truth, and the life’, and about the incredibly compelling factual evidence to support his claim - his claim not only to ‘know’ but to ‘be’ the truth. Such a claim by anyone would generally be regarded as at best bonkers, at worst evil. But when people have examined closely him, his life, his teaching, his claims about who he was, and, so very importantly, what happened to him after his death - they have realised that he presents a most disturbing challenge to their ideas about the world, about humanity, about themselves.
The fact (t?) is that Jesus’ truth, though he intended it first and foremost to be wholly liberating for us, is at odds with the world and what the world believes. And what so many people find so uncomfortable in his teaching is that he refused to compromise - however well-meaning or well-intended - with the views of the world - by ‘the world’ I mean, as he meant, ‘those beliefs at odds with his’ – because he knew that views contrary to his truth lead not to liberation but to frustration, not to freedom but to slavery, the frustration and the slavery which take hold when, ironically, we think we know better about ourselves and about the world, both of which were his design, his creations.
I would like to take just three areas this morning where the truth Jesus taught was and increasingly is at odds with current and popular thinking. And I must add, because it is a most worrying and dangerous matter, that in all three areas members of our very own Church of England, in the House of Bishops and in General Synod, have begun to be taken in by or given in to the world’s views on these matters, to the Spirit of the Age, the Zeitgeist, to accommodation …just as Jesus and his Apostles warned us would happen.
Almost certainly the most shocking and insulting statement of Jesus, as far as most people are concerned, is his statement on the main reason why he came; his firm and clear statement that human beings need to be ‘saved’ from our sins and from our ‘selves’ or, if you like, the ‘selves’ which are responsible for the sins we commit and which, says Jesus, are a barrier between us and God and which spoil our relationships with one another. But he also made it clear that he and he alone could solve this problem for us – but only his way. As you read the record of Jesus’ life and teaching in the Gospels, it becomes crystal clear, crystal clear, that God is not at all happy with how we are. But Jesus presents God as our ‘Heavenly Father’ who loves us more than we can conceive of or imagine and hates to see the damage we do to ourselves and to others by our selfishness and our sinfulness. And as would any concerned parent, he must do something about this because he loves us. The Gospels show clearly Jesus’ love and compassion for all; but they do not show him coming to indulge our views of ourselves, to flatter our egos, to tell us that we need not change. Rather, he warns us to believe him and to believe in him; that only he can put us right with God and give us new lives freed from the destructive slavery to ourselves and to the temptations and demands of the other gods in our lives - all those things which blind us to the truth about life’s most profound and pressing issues, beginning with ourselves and our relationship with God and our fellow human beings.
The world tells us, subtly but o so persuasively, that it can satisfy our pursuit and longing for ‘identity’, whereas Jesus says that our true identity is to be found in relationship with him. The world tells us that we must be ‘affirmed’ in whoever or whatever we are, whereas Jesus says that we need to ‘repent’ and to be ‘born again’ through faith in him. The world tells us to indulge our narcissism and our hedonism – our preoccupation with ourselves and our appetites, whereas Jesus says, ’Come to me with all your burdens and I will give you rest. Take my truth to heart and you will find peace for your souls.’
No, this need to be ‘saved’ is so greatly at odds with the world’s understanding of the human condition and what it means to be human.
A so a second, idol-smashing, way in which Jesus’ truth is at odds with the way the world sees things is in his view of what human beings are and how we need to be transformed. Jesus says that we are made in God’s image by him and to live in relationship with him; that to know him and to obey his commandments is to enjoy a freedom the world cannot give. Indeed, the world without God can only offer, as I mentioned, frustration and slavery, the delusion that we can recreate ourselves into whatever we want to be.
Sadly, I have talked with so many who, looking at themselves and at their lives, have realised the frustration and the slavery – to job, to wealth, to success, to ambition, to appearance, to feelings, the list goes on: yet will not take the step of faith to trust Jesus’ offer of new life. And so they just carry on. I have also talked with those who, having examined themselves and their lives, have taken that step of faith and found in Jesus the peace and the freedom he offers discovering their true ‘identity’ in him. But the world is very cunning in its propaganda and in its temptations and in its apparently credible but innately specious arguments, drip fed as they are through the media and by groups whose aims are anything but the genuine freedom of the individual. Jesus came to set us free: they offer only slavery to appetite and to destructive addiction. When the New Testament writers spoke of ‘transformation’ and of ‘identity’ they were not speaking of what the world speaks of today regarding those things: ‘transformation’ was not about changing our God-given and scientifically and medically identified sex, it was about becoming like Christ, in whom we find not only our true identity but also the freedom to live fulfilling and abundant lives beyond the prison of the self.
All this leads to the third area in which Jesus’ truth is at odds with the world; and that is in how we behave to and with each other. The great and powerful thrust of the world’s propaganda is towards the deification of the self: it puts the self in the place of God and even declares that we are God. The trouble with this though is that the more we concentrate on satisfying our own appetites, the less time and space we have in our lives for others: this alone speaks volumes as to why loneliness, suicide, alienation, family break up, violent crime, and much else are on the increase. The facts simply do not allow us to blame it – though it is very consoling to do so – on economics, on poverty, and much else. The truth, uncomfortable though it is, lies much closer to home – in the preoccupation and infatuation with the self. It may start small; but it gets bigger and bigger as the world strokes and inflates our egos. We have to choose between two incompatible gospels. The world’s gospel centres on ‘me’, on my ‘identity’, on my ‘sexuality’, all of which must be ‘affirmed’ as they are and as I see them - or else! And today ‘or else’ has come to mean such socially destructive weapons as ‘no platforming’ or ‘hate crime’. This ‘gospel’- and powerful forces, even within the Church of England, are promoting it - can seem just and reasonable, appearing to be compassionate and in the name of equality and justice. But it flatters…. to deceive. On the other hand, there is the true Gospel which centres on God and his redeeming and transforming love in Jesus Christ, confirmed and made real in our hearts and minds by his Holy Spirit. There is no possibility of compromise between these two gospels, however much the world and the wolves in sheep’s clothing in the Church try to use Christian vocabulary in support of their views and even change its meaning to suit their own deceitful purposes. We would be both faithless and foolish to swop the true vine of Jesus for the diseased vine of the spirit of the age. We would be both faithless and foolish to swop Agape for Eros. We would be both faithless and foolish to swop the communion of the saints of God for the ‘radical inclusion’ of those who deny God - simply in order to remain the ‘established’ church of this land. And we would be both faithless and foolish to believe that accommodation with world views at odds with God’s revelation in Jesus Christ are ‘harmless’. If we are prepared to stand up for Christ’s truth however, we will find ourselves being persecuted. If so, said Jesus, we should ‘rejoice’! (?!) Let me finish by saying this. If you feel uncomfortable because what the world says is ‘ok’ you feel is not - as a woman, as a man, as a parent, as a disciple – because God’s word tells your mind it is not and God’s Spirit stirs your heart that it is not, then you can be sure that God is with you. Remember. As John put it in his letter, ‘He who is in you is greater than he that is in the world’.
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