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No one
could match the depths of his understanding of the human psyche and of
what motivates humans to act the ways they act. With his words he
him the task of influencing the views of people outside the nation as
well. These three quotes will give you an idea of his brilliance.
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First, “It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and
in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until
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Third, and this may be familiar to many of you, “Repeat a lie often
enough and it becomes the truth.” The person I refer to, whom I think
the minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich. Almost single
believe it was the single truth that defined them, a truth to die for - a
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But he also said, “The truth is always stronger than the lie.” And it pays
his lies. You know why? Because Joseph Goebbels was an ambitious
man. He initially joined the Nazi party against his convictions only
because he believed that the Nazis would ascend to power, enabling his
rise in the ranks as well. The teachers he favored most were his Jewish
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But years of developing, fine-tuning, and repeating the Nazi propaganda
turned him into a vitriolic anti-Jewish person who, in the end, actually
believed all the lies that Nazi party was spreading across Germany and
other parts of the world. He, in other words, was the living embodiment
of his statement, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” -
and he knew it. He had repeated what he knew to be a lie often enough
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We Christians, living in the twenty-first century, have been lied to and
we have believed the lies and have become liars ourselves. And we have
repeated the lies so often that we don’t even realize we are lying
anymore. The lies, repeated often enough, have become our truths.
Today’s passage gives us the knowledge we need to lay bare the lies and
to recover the truth. And in fact, the passage tells us four important
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The first lesson we learn is that truth does not need to hide. At the start
probably at his wits end with Jesus. When he questioned Jesus, Jesus
had asked him what had merited all the secrecy with which he had been
temple courts. If indeed the Jewish leaders were keen to know what
Jesus had been teaching, they could have done so quite easily.
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Jesus was also implying that, if he had been saying incorrect things,
then the Jewish authorities had had ample opportunities to correct him
in public. To the contrary, they had come to capture him under cover of
the night, when the common people, who thronged around Jesus, were
away asleep. The stealthy manner in which they captured Jesus clearly
indicated that it was they, not he, who had something to hide. What was
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But someone could cite situations in which governments employ stealth
tactics to catch criminals. Such sting operations are widely used not just
to bust crime rings but also as a tactic in warfare. On the face of it, this
may seem like a valid point. However, it pays to observe that the party
that came to capture Jesus was not acting on the orders of the
threat to all systems that support injustice - the party was just a mob.
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You see, if the party had been sanctioned by Pilate, they would have
taken Jesus to Pilate, not the Jewish authorities. Since they took Jesus to
the Jewish authorities we can conclude that this was a primarily Jewish
mob that came to capture Jesus. But such group vigilantism would
certainly have caught the eyes of Pilate. You can’t have different fringe
segments of the populace deciding that they would be the agents for
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That would actually be anarchy since every group or person with
sufficient means and motivation could then decide to take to the streets
And since mobs know that they do not have the backing of the law, they
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The truth, you see, does not operate in the shadows. It works out in the
open for all to see. This is why Jesus reminds his interlocutors that he
worked in public where anyone could hear his words. There was no
secrecy about him because it is only falsehood that requires the cover of
things really are, does not fear the light and in fact flourishes in the
light.
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But when we accept what is untrue, what is false, we have no recourse
but to resort to hiding. Peter had a false view of Jesus. He thought Jesus
view, Peter realized that he had been believing a falsehood. But because
he was not convinced of the truth of what Jesus said, he could not bear
the light of the truth and followed Jesus from a distance, skulking in the
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The second lesson we learn is that truth cannot be coerced. While
wrong, testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you
strike me?” I’m going to make a slight detour now before returning to
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It is quite likely that Jesus primarily spoke Aramaic and that he had only
‘well’ or ‘rightly’. We don't know what Jesus said in Aramaic, but John
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As I said, it is a play on words. But also, we learn an important life
lesson. When our kids were young we introduced them to Veggie Tales,
a Christian animated show. One of the songs from the show has the
following lyrics: “If your friends tell you that you gotta be cool/
Remember what you learned in church and Sunday school/ Just check it
out/ The bible tells us what it’s all about.” The message of the song
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What is implied by the song is that it is easy to decide between right and
wrong. All you have to do is attend church and Sunday School and read
the Bible. But if that were true, why would Christians differ so greatly
on all sorts of issues? But what John tells us with his word play is that it
is extremely difficult to decide what’s good and what’s bad in real life.
One is κακῶς while the other is καλῶς, a difference of only one letter in
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So back to the second point. Jesus asks the High Priest’s servant to
declare where Jesus had gone wrong instead of resorting to striking him.
You see, the one thing that cannot be imposed by force is the truth. One
of the best stories of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a two parter
Captain Picard to say he sees five lights when in fact there are only four.
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When he is finally released, as he is leaving his interrogator, he shouts
out, “There are four lights.” The interrogator wanted him to be willing
to state a lie in order to be spared the torture. But even if he had broken,
there would still have been four lights, not five. All the violence in the
world would not change that fact. And all the violence in the world
could only be invoked in the service of the lie, not of the truth, for only
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This, unfortunately, is a lesson the Church has failed to understand and
has resolutely rejected. The dismal story of the Christian Church is that,
and oppress others. In recent years, this tendency has been revealed in
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Both of these examples reveal the inability of Christians who obtain
power to act in ways that are consistent with what Jesus said. While
Jesus said, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve,” most
take our cue from Jesus, it would seem that those who impose their wills
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But the message of such people is enticing. We humans love to be in
without trial of people like Father Stan Swamy, some of us may wish we
had more power to change the world for the better. That his arrest is a
regime is evident when you consider a simple fact that he was awarded
the Mukundan C. Menon award for human rights earlier this year.
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In the face of such injustice and abuse of power, some of us may believe
be handled only by those who abjure its use to control others and bend
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The problem is that power is enticing and seductive. It is easy to
Last year, when we were dealing with the life of Joseph, we saw how he
Pharaoh. We then saw how his policies led to the enslavement of the
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We see a wise approach to power in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. When
Gandalf tells Frodo about the insidious nature of the ring of power,
Frodo asks Gandalf to take the ring from him for safe keeping. In
response Gandalf says, “Don’t tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not
even to keep it safe. Understand Frodo, I would use this Ring from a
desire to do good. But through me, it would wield a power too great and
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You see, most of us think we would be better at wielding power than
those who currently do. And this is simply because most of us never
have had any real power to wield. We speak from our ignorance about
what we do not understand. Jesus tells us this when James and John ask
him to assign them to sit at his right and left when he is enthroned. Jesus
tells his disciples that those who are in positions of authority lord it over
those who are subordinate to them. But it was to be different with them.
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And the reason why Jesus says that his disciples are not to attempt to
dominate others is precisely because the truth does not need the support
This is why, despite all the persecutions the early Church faced, it was
the Roman Empire that was defeated by the truth of Jesus’ resurrection.
No amount of coercion could convince the Christians that Jesus was still
dead when they experienced the truth of his life in them daily.
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But when we know we do not have the truth, we cannot stand our
ground. And then the slightest coercion will make us deny the truth and
proclaim a lie, especially when we know that declaring the truth could
fire, hiding in plain sight. It’s a good strategy when you are wearing a
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But when someone recognizes you, the strategy fails and you find
yourself exposed and feeling the pressure to lie your way out of an
Peter discovered that the brightness of the spotlight was too much to
bear and he lied, denying Jesus, and crept back into the shadows.
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The third thing that we learn from our passage is that truth and violence
the truth. This is why Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this
note an important point. Jesus does not say he does not have a kingdom.
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Too often we have bought into the Enlightenment split that relegates
accept such a sacrilegious thought? How did we buy into this lie? Jesus
was not crucified in private, out of the way, in some quiet corner of the
public humiliation that announced the truth that Rome was in power.
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The central event of the Christian faith is the public humiliation of its
central figure in a political act that was intended to declare to all the
world who it was that ultimately wielded the power over life and death.
And we have given up this political truth and cowered down in the safe
and sterile and ultimately fruitless confines of our homes and communal
worship spaces. It is time we recover the truth that, if Jesus has nothing
to say about our politics, then he has nothing to say about anything.
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But I digress, even though it is an important digression. Jesus tells Pilate
world, then his disciples would have fought to ensure that he wasn’t
this world rely on violence to enforce their wills and subjugate others.
On the other hand, the Kingdom of God is quite different and repudiates
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In the early years of the Christian Church, this rejection of violence was
which saw the merger of the Church and the state, the clear lines that
separated the Church from the state vanished and the Church became
embroiled in the matters that concerned the state. But as soon as this
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But the Church knew it was on the earth for a crucial purpose, even
Church began to defend itself with swords and even advance itself with
swords, we lost the true battle. The spread of the Christian message was
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Please note what I am saying. It was not the governments that thwarted
the Church. Rather, it was the Church that stunted its own growth by
means that were at odds with the message it was created to bear, the
Church gave up its prophetic voice and has been rendered mute for
much of its history, except in small pockets where Christians have dared
to proclaim the truth of its message into the darkness created by power.
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The fourth thing we learn from our passage is that God ushers in his
which the wrongs of the world can be righted. Truth telling is the world
matter how deeply ingrained in our minds, cannot but vanish when
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The sad story of the Christian Church is that, once it gained political
power, it used that power to subjugate others and enforce its truth on
them. But if there is one thing we learn from Jesus it is that only a lie
needs the help of coercion in order to stand. The truth comes with its
own legs and does not need any external support. It is my prayer that the
Church around the world recovers its truth speaking and darkness
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One way in which we do this is by remembering Jesus’ suffering and
death. All through his ministry, Jesus was faced with the temptation to
acquiesce to the pressure to not speak the truth and to seek the short
truth cannot coexist with falsehood just as light and darkness cannot
coexist and just as water and oil do not mix. We will now be moving on
to a celebration of communion.
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And as we do so, let us take this occasion to speak truth to power. The
that the powers of darkness would find in us, disciples who are equally
the lie.” We should listen to him because he of all people knew the
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The truth we speak as we participate in communion is that Jesus has
defeated sin, Satan, and death. The truth we declare as we eat the bread
and drink the wine is that sin, Satan, and death have been vanquished. It
wine. But through it we loudly speak the truth to power that Jesus has
comprehensive victory.
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But we also speak another truth to power. By participating in Holy
powerless in the face of truth and that any human person or institution
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So, as we participate in this Holy Communion, let us recognize that,
through his victorious death, Jesus vanquished and defanged the powers
of sin, Satan, and death. And let us commit to take this truth into the
weeks ahead, declaring to the fallen powers that they have been
this Lord who calls us to join him in his task of speaking truth to power.
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