L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity—October 19, 2004

A Life in Truth

“…The truth is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21).

St. Paul has a great deal to say about truth and falsity this morning, and all of it is good and useful, but there is one central truth, above all other truths, that can easily be lost if we are not very careful.

Modern religion almost always focuses on man and on the betterment of man, and it is an honorable goal to desire to become a better human being. It is an honorable goal, as well, to desire the betterment of all human beings. Nevertheless, in our rush to apply religion to human improvement, there is a tremendous temptation to take God for granted. After all, he’s always going to be there, isn’t he? So let’s get started on the urgent business of human reclamation.

But imagine, for a moment, trying to run a race in which we do not know the starting point, the rules of conduct, or the location of the “finish line.” How would we know when we had begun? How could we judge how well we were doing? How might we determine where and when the race was over? The more we think about such a set of hypothetical circumstances, the more we realize that we’re not really thinking about a race. We’re actually thinking about a chaos—a jumble of exertion and activity that adds us to exactly nothing.

Religion for religion’s sake is just as pointless as our imaginary race, but too often religion for religion’s sake is not imaginary at all. We want to be doing something, and we are not very fussy about what it might be. Busyness and fervor become ends in themselves, and so we exhaust ourselves and everyone around us without accomplishing very much. In fact, we may do real harm to ourselves and others by insisting that our blundering around is what religion is “all about,” to the point that we and those around us come to the conclusion, “Well, if this is religion, I want no part of it.”

Complicating matters further is the “extended version” of the temptation to take God for granted. If we begin with our needs, instead of with God, it is easy to take the next step and to assume that whatever we do that makes us feel better or happier, or even just keeps us busy, must be “good religion”—the sort of religion that God is obligated to accept at our hands. And soon we are telling ourselves the lie that all religions are good in their own way and that all religions lead, no matter how mysteriously or implausibly, to God.

But what happens is we stop in our religious whirl to let a little God back into our religion? What happens if we forget about ourselves for a moment, go back to “go,” and begin all of our thinking again with God? What happens is this—we notice that in all of today’s long excerpt from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians the most important words are these: “The truth is in Jesus.”

This is, moreover, an absolute statement: “The truth is in Jesus.” We are not dealing here with “some truth,” or with “a religious truth,” or with “one truth among many truths.” We are being told, not just by St. Paul, but also by the Holy Ghost, take it or leave it, that everything that is true begins and ends in Jesus Christ. This beginning and ending in Jesus Christ, furthermore, is just as much the basis of the truth of the times-tables or of the periodic table of elements, as it is of the salvation of souls. There is no truth apart from Jesus Christ, no matter what discipline of thought and inquiry we are considering.

Jesus Christ, for example, is the truth of engineering. A bridge stands or falls, not because of the inventiveness of the engineers that built it, but because of the bridge builders’ and that bridge’s conformity to the rules of reality that can be known only, finally, and completely in Jesus Christ. The rules of the material world, the tensile strength of the steel in the bridge, for example, are dependable enough to build bridges because the God who created the world is dependable. And we know that the God who created the world is dependable because his Son became a man in this world, participated in the rules of this world, and shed his blood to demonstrate the value that God in heaven puts on the existence and salvation of this world.

It is no accident, then, that what we call “science” originally developed as a branch of Christian theology and philosophical inquiry. Other cultures around the world were just as clever, just as intelligent, just as capable in principle of developing science, but only in Christendom was the dependability of all truth, including material truth, understood to be intimately connected to Jesus Christ, the Son of God become man. We moved beyond mere trial and error in our various experiments (maybe the bridge will stand, maybe the bridge will fall) because we knew that the truth is there to be known and can be known because God, the source and foundation of truth, is to be known in Jesus Christ.

Many Christians today unnecessarily trivialize truth by reducing the truth of Jesus Christ to their own feelings. But neither a bridge nor the kingdom of God stands or falls because of my feelings or because of the feelings of any other human being. God is first. God is reality. God is truth. And God reveals all truth in his Son Jesus Christ.

St. John attempted to express this inseparable relation of Jesus Christ and the truth when he quoted the words of the Lord Christ, heard in the vision of heaven called “The Book of Revelation”: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8). The Alpha and the Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. Thus, St. John is declaring in the Name of the Lord that everything that can be said that is true begins and ends with God in Christ.

Nor is St. John “inventing” some new approach to the truth that was never known before his time, the time he shared with our Lord Incarnate and with St. Paul. St. John is also pointing us to the divine self-identification that was given centuries beforehand through the Prophet Isaiah: “Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6). What has been clarified and reasserted in the New Testament is only this: that there is no specialized “religious truth,” but only the truth of God, so that nothing that is known apart from God, apart from his Incarnate Son Jesus Christ, can be known for a certainty to be true and dependable.

The alternative to the knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ is almost too terrible to contemplate. St. Paul tries to describe what a separation from the truth in Jesus Christ is like by describing the state of the unconverted nations that “walk” apart from Christ, so that they live their lives: “…in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:17-19).

We can only know what life should be in Jesus Christ, but if we do not know Jesus Christ, then we have no method to test whether we are living good lives or bad. Every appetite or whim becomes both an undeniable necessity and just one “personal choice” among many. The sum of all those “personal choices” is not a world of peace, order, and truth. It is a world become a mad-house, and it is increasingly in a mad-house world that we live.

But Jesus Christ did not die on a cross to give us a mad-house or to leave us defenseless against the madness of the world. The truth is in Jesus, and the closer we embrace Jesus, the more we embrace truth, logic, order, balance, and peace in all of our doings. The Christian religion is not about religion at all. It is about the truth that is in Jesus Christ. The details of our lives, at least, will fall into place if we begin with the truth in Jesus Christ. And if we begin with that truth, we really will have something good to offer our neighbors—not the imitation of some vague religiosity of our own, but the concrete and eternal life of truth in Jesus Christ. God first, truth first, and life first: these are the beginning of wisdom, and these are the foundation of never-ending life in the power of God. These are the foundation of true Christianity.