Chester A. Pennington - "The Truth Which Makes You Free" (October 27, 1963)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| (organ quickly plays) | 0:10 | |
| Pastor | Our Lord. | 0:28 |
| Amen. | 0:31 | |
| (organ plays in distance) | 0:33 | |
| (microphone jiggles) | 0:42 | |
| One of the best known of the words of Jesus | 1:05 | |
| is also one of the most frequently misquoted. | 1:10 | |
| And I suppose this is nowhere more true | 1:15 | |
| than on the average academic campus. | 1:18 | |
| I refer to the frequently heard quotation, | 1:24 | |
| "Ye shall know the truth, | 1:28 | |
| and the truth shall make you free." | 1:31 | |
| There's some evidence that this is not really what Jesus | 1:35 | |
| said, and I should like to look at that evidence. | 1:38 | |
| First of all, let me express my appreciation | 1:43 | |
| for this opportunity of worshiping with you | 1:46 | |
| in this important center, | 1:48 | |
| both of our church and of the academic world. | 1:52 | |
| If you will believe my saying so, | 1:58 | |
| this is a place which I have known from a distance, | 2:01 | |
| and have admired for a long time. | 2:06 | |
| And I consider it a real privilege to be here. | 2:09 | |
| And it has seemed appropriate that we should | 2:14 | |
| give some attention to this saying of our Lord. | 2:16 | |
| First, we may recognize that it may | 2:22 | |
| very well be true in a general sense, | 2:24 | |
| that freedom does emancipate us. | 2:28 | |
| Or that truth does emancipate us. | 2:32 | |
| The knowledge of truth, | 2:35 | |
| increasing knowledge in many fields, | 2:36 | |
| all of this contributes to our increasing freedom. | 2:40 | |
| Freedom from ignorance and superstition. | 2:45 | |
| These are very important aspects of our liberties. | 2:48 | |
| And it may be that increasing knowledge of various kinds | 2:53 | |
| contributes even to political liberties. | 2:56 | |
| But this is not what Jesus said. | 3:00 | |
| And since one ideal of any community and particularly an | 3:04 | |
| academic community is accuracy. | 3:09 | |
| I should like to suggest that, first of all, | 3:12 | |
| we should look with some closeness | 3:14 | |
| to what Jesus actually said. | 3:17 | |
| The full quotation is this, | 3:21 | |
| "If you continue in my word, | 3:24 | |
| you are truly my disciples | 3:29 | |
| and you will know the truth | 3:32 | |
| and the truth will make you free." | 3:35 | |
| Now it seems to me, we just can't go around, | 3:39 | |
| dropping out "if" clauses like this. | 3:40 | |
| You know, if you put enough dots | 3:45 | |
| in what a man says, | 3:46 | |
| you can make him say anything. | 3:48 | |
| If you edit and eliminate conditioning clauses | 3:51 | |
| or whole sentences, you can make well, | 3:54 | |
| every politician knows this. | 3:57 | |
| Every, every clever propagandist of any kind, | 4:00 | |
| whether it's Madison Avenue or Moscow, | 4:04 | |
| or other places closer to home. | 4:07 | |
| We all know this. | 4:10 | |
| And it seems to me, it's particularly dangerous | 4:12 | |
| when you're dealing with words, | 4:14 | |
| which carry some of the authority, | 4:16 | |
| which we attribute to the words of Jesus. | 4:18 | |
| We can't drop out this "if" clause. | 4:20 | |
| What he really said was, "If you continue in my word, | 4:24 | |
| you are truly my disciples. | 4:32 | |
| Then you will know the truth, | 4:33 | |
| and the truth will make you free." | 4:35 | |
| Now there's some interest in the occasion | 4:40 | |
| which evoked this word of Jesus. | 4:43 | |
| This is to be, this incident is to be found | 4:46 | |
| in the eighth chapter of the gospel according to John. | 4:48 | |
| And according to the author, | 4:51 | |
| Jesus is addressing himself | 4:53 | |
| not to opponents or to unsympathetic persons. | 4:55 | |
| He is addressing himself to some | 5:00 | |
| who had been believed in him. | 5:02 | |
| That is to say, to persons who were sympathetic, | 5:05 | |
| to persons who were willing to give | 5:08 | |
| some attention to what he was saying. | 5:09 | |
| And then, he said this strange thing, that | 5:12 | |
| if certain conditions were fulfilled, | 5:15 | |
| they would know the truth, which would make them free. | 5:18 | |
| And immediately, they reacted | 5:21 | |
| just like any typical American would react. | 5:23 | |
| They pleaded their tradition of freedom. | 5:26 | |
| They said, we have a tradition of freedom. | 5:30 | |
| We are the children of Abraham. We've never been in bondage. | 5:32 | |
| That's an historical inaccuracy. I, I suppose. | 5:36 | |
| But at least, this was their tradition. | 5:39 | |
| We are free. How can you say we will be free? | 5:41 | |
| Now I can see any self-respecting American | 5:47 | |
| responding to this kind of suggestion | 5:49 | |
| in very much the same way. | 5:52 | |
| We plead our tradition. | 5:54 | |
| We have a history of freedom and of liberties in our nation. | 5:57 | |
| How is it possible for someone to say under certain | 6:01 | |
| conditions we will be free? | 6:04 | |
| Well, Jesus replied in a quite remarkable way, | 6:08 | |
| which almost seems irrelevant. This is what he said. | 6:12 | |
| "Truly, truly I say to you, | 6:14 | |
| everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin." | 6:16 | |
| Well, now he's talking like the Bible, you know. | 6:22 | |
| This, this seems in irrelevance. | 6:25 | |
| He's talking about freedom in one breath, | 6:27 | |
| and then he is talking about being a slave to sin. | 6:29 | |
| Well, what he's saying, I think, is, is rather clear. | 6:32 | |
| He is saying that genuine freedom has a moral dimension. | 6:36 | |
| That if you would be truly free, | 6:41 | |
| you must have also a moral integrity. | 6:43 | |
| That there is a deeper bondage, | 6:47 | |
| a bondage of the will. | 6:49 | |
| That there is a deeper compulsion | 6:51 | |
| and that these compulsive reactions | 6:53 | |
| can be serious inhibitions | 6:56 | |
| though we think ourselves to be free. | 6:59 | |
| Well, his hearers realized that | 7:03 | |
| he was getting a little closer to home | 7:05 | |
| and they began to protest. | 7:07 | |
| They said, now, look, we are the descendants of Abraham. | 7:08 | |
| Abraham is our father. | 7:12 | |
| Well, Jesus said, | 7:14 | |
| you're not acting very much like children of Abraham. | 7:16 | |
| Your deeds make you look suspiciously, | 7:20 | |
| like the offspring of other origins. | 7:23 | |
| They began to get a little more annoyed | 7:26 | |
| and they appealed beyond Abraham to deity. | 7:29 | |
| They said, God is our father. | 7:32 | |
| And then Jesus had 'em. | 7:34 | |
| Well, he said, if God were your father, | 7:39 | |
| you would do the deeds of your father. | 7:42 | |
| Judging by what you do, he said, | 7:44 | |
| I would suspect that you have another parentage. | 7:47 | |
| That your father is really the devil. | 7:53 | |
| Well now, you know, this is hardly a way to make friends. | 7:58 | |
| (crowd laughing) | 8:05 | |
| But this was Jesus way of dealing with this situation. | 8:07 | |
| And what he was saying was, that there is a personal | 8:12 | |
| dare I say, existential on this campus? | 8:16 | |
| Brother Clone? | 8:19 | |
| There, there, there is an existential dimension to freedom. | 8:20 | |
| There is a personal integrity, | 8:25 | |
| which is basic to what we like to call our liberties. | 8:28 | |
| And he was addressing himself to this. | 8:35 | |
| Now, certainly we know in our time that this is true. | 8:37 | |
| Whether Jesus contemporaries | 8:39 | |
| shouted with joy when he pointed this out to him or not. | 8:43 | |
| We know today, rather desperately that this is true. | 8:47 | |
| We know it psychologically. | 8:51 | |
| We know that self-knowledge is essential to genuine Liberty. | 8:54 | |
| That we can only be ourselves as we know ourselves. | 9:00 | |
| And we know that self-knowledge is not a matter simply of | 9:05 | |
| psycho graphs and of intellectual learning, | 9:08 | |
| but that it is also a matter of emotions. | 9:11 | |
| It is also a matter of volitional knowledge. | 9:15 | |
| It is a matter of insight, which is frequently painful, | 9:17 | |
| and which often has emotional and moral dimensions. | 9:21 | |
| We know that there is no personal freedom without insight | 9:25 | |
| into what we are. And, and, and we recognize that this | 9:28 | |
| may be what Jesus was talking about. | 9:33 | |
| We know this is true, morally. | 9:37 | |
| That the Libertine is hardly the freest man on earth. | 9:41 | |
| He may parade his Liberty, | 9:46 | |
| but he is enslaved to compulsions and to desires, | 9:47 | |
| which have mastered him | 9:52 | |
| rather than, his being the master of them. | 9:53 | |
| The young man who, | 9:57 | |
| who pitches his life at the level of Playboy | 9:58 | |
| may think that this is really freedom. | 10:01 | |
| But it may very well be enslavement | 10:04 | |
| to an understanding of one's self, and one's partners. | 10:09 | |
| Which is a loss of personal integrity. | 10:13 | |
| That people are things to be used, | 10:16 | |
| especially if they happen to be members of the opposite sex. | 10:20 | |
| This is hardly what we mean by, by genuine freedom. | 10:24 | |
| Our culture is confused and frequently corrupt | 10:30 | |
| at this point. | 10:34 | |
| And we are bound to its confusions | 10:36 | |
| and sometimes limited by it's corruptions. | 10:38 | |
| And we think we are free because we are doing what our | 10:42 | |
| culture encourages us to do. | 10:45 | |
| You know, sometimes when I have the opportunity to talk to, | 10:50 | |
| to university students, | 10:53 | |
| I like to suggest that you students really should settle | 10:54 | |
| down and get serious about this business of being rebels. | 10:57 | |
| You know, the student generation is traditionally a, | 11:02 | |
| a rebellious generation. And so I ask you, | 11:04 | |
| what are you rebelling against? | 11:07 | |
| Oh, we're rebelling against our parents. | 11:10 | |
| Well, what's so original about that? | 11:12 | |
| (crowd laughing) | 11:15 | |
| Students have been doing this for generations. | 11:17 | |
| We're rebelling against the way we were brought up. | 11:20 | |
| This is nothing original. This is nothing new. | 11:24 | |
| This is not rebellion. | 11:29 | |
| This is conformity to the Morise of the student generation. | 11:30 | |
| This has been going on for a long... | 11:35 | |
| I suggest if you really want to be a rebel, | 11:37 | |
| then rebel against some of the confusions and limitations, | 11:40 | |
| and tawdriness of the culture | 11:43 | |
| in which we all are involved. | 11:46 | |
| This business of being free is not nearly | 11:50 | |
| so simple as we might suspect. | 11:52 | |
| And the kind of freedom to which Jesus is addressing himself | 11:55 | |
| in this great word is the profound, personal freedom, | 11:58 | |
| which grows out of integrity. | 12:03 | |
| It is the Liberty, which is grounded in, | 12:06 | |
| in moral understanding in, in self understanding. | 12:10 | |
| Now this interpretation of the freedom to which Jesus was | 12:17 | |
| addressing himself, enables us then | 12:22 | |
| to know something more about the truth | 12:24 | |
| to which he addressed himself. | 12:27 | |
| And we can return now, | 12:29 | |
| to the word which he spoke when he said, | 12:31 | |
| "If you continue in my word, | 12:34 | |
| you are truly my disciples | 12:38 | |
| and you will know the truth | 12:40 | |
| and the truth will make you free." | 12:42 | |
| Let's note, this Conditional clause. | 12:46 | |
| What Jesus was saying was this, | 12:49 | |
| if you will take me seriously, | 12:51 | |
| if you will commit yourself to me, | 12:55 | |
| and to the words which I am declaring, | 12:58 | |
| then you will know the truth that really makes you free. | 13:00 | |
| There is no truth in this deeply, personal sense, | 13:05 | |
| apart from personal commitment. | 13:08 | |
| So clearly, what Jesus was talking about | 13:11 | |
| is not the truth that we can discover in the laboratory, | 13:14 | |
| not the truth that we can measure with statistics, | 13:18 | |
| not the truth that we can discover | 13:21 | |
| in the writings of wise men. | 13:23 | |
| What he was talking about | 13:25 | |
| was the truth about God and ourselves. | 13:27 | |
| And the Christian claim has always been this, | 13:30 | |
| that in Jesus Christ, | 13:34 | |
| God has revealed the deepest truth about himself | 13:35 | |
| and therefore, about ourselves. | 13:39 | |
| In Jesus Christ, we see not only declared, | 13:42 | |
| but we see enacted before us, | 13:45 | |
| the character and purpose of God. | 13:48 | |
| And we see enacted before us, | 13:52 | |
| the meaning and purpose of our own existence. | 13:55 | |
| This is the kind of truth about which Jesus was speaking. | 13:59 | |
| And what he was saying is essentially | 14:03 | |
| what the Christian Church has tried to say, | 14:06 | |
| though, not always very well, | 14:08 | |
| but what the Christian Church has tried to say ever since. | 14:11 | |
| If you will take Christ seriously, | 14:13 | |
| if you will commit yourself to him | 14:17 | |
| at the level of your present ability to commit yourself. | 14:20 | |
| Doesn't mean that you have to swallow everything | 14:23 | |
| that you've been taught. | 14:26 | |
| Or accept everything for which the church stands. | 14:27 | |
| But what it means, is, | 14:30 | |
| if you will commit yourself to Jesus Christ, | 14:32 | |
| if you will really take seriously | 14:36 | |
| the significance and import of Christ, | 14:38 | |
| then you will be drawn into the deepest truth about God. | 14:41 | |
| The most profound insight about yourself | 14:46 | |
| and the meaning of your own existence. | 14:49 | |
| And you will be granted a power | 14:51 | |
| by which you can live truly free. | 14:54 | |
| What Jesus is saying here, is not | 15:00 | |
| that those who follow him | 15:02 | |
| will have all the truth about everything. | 15:04 | |
| Heavens, that's what we have universities for. | 15:06 | |
| This long tradition, by which men have restlessly | 15:10 | |
| searched for all kinds of truth, in all kinds of fields. | 15:14 | |
| Now, I'll admit, that some Christian representatives | 15:20 | |
| have not always been careful at this point. | 15:22 | |
| And there are times, when we have pretended to know more | 15:25 | |
| about more things than we are qualified to know. | 15:28 | |
| But the essential Christian claim, is not, | 15:32 | |
| that in the gospel, we have all the truth about everything, | 15:34 | |
| but rather that in Jesus Christ, | 15:38 | |
| we have an enactment of the truth about God and ourselves. | 15:41 | |
| And that this truth, can be related | 15:47 | |
| to all the other truths, which we | 15:50 | |
| are discovering in the bewildering world of the academy. | 15:52 | |
| All the other truths that have been revealed to men of other | 15:57 | |
| traditions and other religions, the truth, which Christ is, | 16:00 | |
| is the truth, which makes us free. | 16:06 | |
| Now, I believe this can be related | 16:10 | |
| to many of the things with which | 16:12 | |
| we are concerned from time to time. | 16:13 | |
| Up in the frozen north of Minnesota, | 16:18 | |
| we managed to have a little bit of culture up in the Tundra. | 16:22 | |
| (all giggling) | 16:26 | |
| We have a little university up there, | 16:30 | |
| the University of Minnesota. | 16:33 | |
| One of the Big 10, they call themselves. | 16:36 | |
| And not long ago, one of the ableist men at the university, | 16:40 | |
| a man who is well known in his proper field, | 16:46 | |
| made a statement that was published in the newspaper. | 16:50 | |
| I hope with some accuracy, you can't always be sure, | 16:54 | |
| but I hope with some accurate... | 16:58 | |
| Well, I, I wish he hadn't said this. | 17:01 | |
| But this is what he said, according to the reports. | 17:03 | |
| "Faith in a great man like Jesus." | 17:07 | |
| No, I think he said Christ. | 17:11 | |
| "Faith in a great man, like Christ, | 17:12 | |
| is the same to us, | 17:16 | |
| as faith in a great man like Buddha | 17:19 | |
| is to other people." | 17:22 | |
| Now, this sounds very learned and tolerant. | 17:26 | |
| But it happens to be untrue in terms of the Christian faith. | 17:28 | |
| This is not what we believe as Christians. | 17:33 | |
| This is not the central proclamation of the Christian faith. | 17:38 | |
| Faith in Christ is not the same thing as faith in Buddha. | 17:42 | |
| In the beginning was the word, | 17:48 | |
| this magnificent symbolic prologue to the fourth gospel, | 17:50 | |
| which was our scripture lesson this morning. | 17:54 | |
| "In the beginning was the word, | 17:56 | |
| and the word was with God. And the word was, God. | 17:58 | |
| All things were made by him. | 18:04 | |
| And this, created the eternal word | 18:06 | |
| became flesh and dwelt among us." | 18:10 | |
| Now, this is our affirmation, | 18:15 | |
| that God has uttered himself in Jesus Christ, | 18:17 | |
| as he has been able to utter himself at no other point | 18:21 | |
| in all the long searchings of man for God. | 18:25 | |
| Now, we have to take some measure of this claim | 18:34 | |
| and it may be that many cannot accept it. | 18:35 | |
| But let's not misunderstand what the claim is. | 18:38 | |
| That in Jesus, the Christ, we have to do with | 18:43 | |
| the very word which became flesh, | 18:48 | |
| And the apparent tolerance | 18:55 | |
| and broad mindedness of other claims may be | 18:56 | |
| admirable, but they may be false | 19:02 | |
| to what Christianity truly is. | 19:06 | |
| I know on many campuses, not long ago, I, | 19:11 | |
| I dunno whether this is a current concern or not, | 19:13 | |
| but not long ago, when we were shooting men | 19:16 | |
| out into space with a bewildering kind of rapidity. | 19:18 | |
| And of course we're shooting | 19:23 | |
| all kinds of things up there now, | 19:24 | |
| and this is an extraordinary achievement | 19:26 | |
| to the lay mind like myself. | 19:28 | |
| But pretty soon we began to think, well, | 19:31 | |
| if we ever do get out to some of these other planets, | 19:33 | |
| suppose we find strange, little creatures there | 19:35 | |
| who have certain characteristics | 19:39 | |
| that we have thought were exclusively human. | 19:40 | |
| Suppose we find living creatures on other planets. | 19:43 | |
| What does that do to your Christian claim to exclusiveness? | 19:46 | |
| Well, just between you and me, | 19:53 | |
| I don't think it does anything to it. | 19:55 | |
| I just think in it all the bigger that's all. | 19:56 | |
| That what God has done in Jesus the Christ, | 19:59 | |
| has always been regarded as universal in its significance. | 20:02 | |
| And we just have to learn | 20:07 | |
| to deal with a little bigger universe. | 20:08 | |
| What God has done in Christ, | 20:11 | |
| he has done for all men. | 20:13 | |
| And if indeed, there are creatures elsewhere, | 20:16 | |
| then God can do for them what may need doing. | 20:19 | |
| What is revealed to us about the | 20:26 | |
| character and purpose of God in Jesus Christ is, | 20:28 | |
| that God loves all his creatures. | 20:31 | |
| And that no matter how we may... | 20:34 | |
| Well, I almost used a slang expression | 20:38 | |
| and that's not quite congruous with | 20:41 | |
| where we are at this moment. | 20:43 | |
| No matter how we may confuse and distort what God has done | 20:46 | |
| with us and for us, he still loves us. | 20:51 | |
| And he gives himself to us. | 20:54 | |
| This is the meaning of Jesus, the Christ. | 20:56 | |
| And if there are other creatures elsewhere | 20:58 | |
| who have had the same unwisdom that we have had, | 21:01 | |
| then God can do for them and does do for them, | 21:03 | |
| whatever is needful for the fulfillment of his purposes. | 21:07 | |
| This is the meaning. If we really take Christ seriously, | 21:12 | |
| this is what Jesus, the Christ really means. | 21:16 | |
| I suppose, one of the continuing perplexities of most | 21:24 | |
| academic experiences is this business of moral relativism. | 21:27 | |
| I mean, we aren't on the campus very long | 21:32 | |
| before we discover that growing up in Samoa | 21:34 | |
| is a little different from growing up in | 21:37 | |
| Durham and points nearby. | 21:40 | |
| When we discover that the Ubangi's don't have the same | 21:44 | |
| moral principles that the American's do. | 21:47 | |
| And sometimes, we wish we were Ubangi's. | 21:51 | |
| (crowd laughing) | 21:56 | |
| Or sometimes we make like Samoans. | 21:58 | |
| (all giggling) | 22:02 | |
| Or, or, or else we are tempted seriously to say, | 22:05 | |
| Well, why not? If they do it in Samoa, | 22:08 | |
| why shouldn't we do it in Durham? | 22:09 | |
| This kind of relativism, it seems to me, | 22:13 | |
| is a continuing perplexity in most campuses. | 22:15 | |
| Oh, all right, I think the Christian faith replies, | 22:19 | |
| there is a kind of relativism to be sure. | 22:22 | |
| But for the Christian, | 22:25 | |
| every decision that we make of this kind | 22:27 | |
| is relative also to what God has done in Jesus Christ. | 22:29 | |
| And we must take seriously | 22:35 | |
| the disclosure of the divine purpose | 22:36 | |
| and the disclosure of the purpose for our existence, | 22:39 | |
| as it has been uttered in Jesus Christ. | 22:42 | |
| And if it is true, that all through our culture, | 22:46 | |
| the ideal of chastity is being widely questioned, | 22:49 | |
| then we may raise the question, | 22:53 | |
| whether we are made for chastity | 22:55 | |
| and that unchastity is a violation | 22:58 | |
| of our personal integrity. | 23:01 | |
| If it is true that all through our culture, | 23:05 | |
| cheating seems to be the way to get things done, | 23:06 | |
| not only on campuses, but in the other | 23:12 | |
| areas of our, of our culture. | 23:14 | |
| If this seems to be the way to do things, | 23:17 | |
| we may ask ourselves whether perhaps | 23:19 | |
| we are made for honesty. | 23:21 | |
| And that dishonesty is a violation | 23:23 | |
| of our being of what we essentially are. | 23:26 | |
| I often think that the 10 commandments are really not some | 23:29 | |
| arbitrary rules, which a cosmic spoil sport | 23:33 | |
| asserted in order to make life dull for us. | 23:36 | |
| But rather, the 10 commandments are the expression | 23:40 | |
| of what we essentially are and of what God intends | 23:43 | |
| for our existence. | 23:47 | |
| Relativism may be a very real possibility, | 23:51 | |
| but the Christian faith would assert that | 23:54 | |
| everything we decide and everything that we do | 23:57 | |
| must be done relative to what God has revealed | 24:01 | |
| of himself in Jesus Christ. | 24:05 | |
| This is the truth, | 24:10 | |
| which makes us free. Free from the compulsions | 24:12 | |
| of our own unmanageable desires. | 24:16 | |
| Free from the compulsions of our confused culture. | 24:19 | |
| Free to do and to be what God intends us to be. | 24:23 | |
| I suppose, one of the strangest confrontations | 24:29 | |
| in all of history was when Jesus stood before Pilate. | 24:32 | |
| The proud Roman ruler who really had all the power, | 24:37 | |
| but who was somehow thrown off balance, | 24:41 | |
| by the composure of this peasant, | 24:44 | |
| this primitive character who had been hailed before him. | 24:47 | |
| And Pilate in his defensiveness was cross examining Jesus, | 24:51 | |
| somewhat, roughly. And Jesus was replying in a way, | 24:56 | |
| which said to him in effect, Pilate, | 25:00 | |
| you really can't touch me, you know. | 25:02 | |
| And Pilate knew it, and that made him feel all the worse. | 25:04 | |
| Until finally Jesus said, you know, | 25:08 | |
| this is really why I was born, you know. | 25:10 | |
| This is why I came into the world | 25:14 | |
| to bear witness to the truth. | 25:17 | |
| And then Pilate, the troubled Roman ruler, | 25:20 | |
| voiced the question, which has long outlived him. | 25:23 | |
| What is truth? Now what Pilate didn't know, | 25:28 | |
| but could have known, was that this man Jesus | 25:34 | |
| had been moving around for two, three years | 25:36 | |
| among his compatriots saying | 25:39 | |
| many strange and wonderful things. | 25:41 | |
| Some of his hearers were astonished | 25:43 | |
| and some were annoyed and repelled | 25:45 | |
| by what he said and has been so ever since. | 25:49 | |
| And yet, those who have come to know this man, Jesus, | 25:51 | |
| as the Christ have come to believe that in his words | 25:55 | |
| and in his character, this is truth. | 25:58 | |
| What Pilate did not know, was that, | 26:02 | |
| because of his own fumbling ineptitude, | 26:04 | |
| this man would be stretched on a cross | 26:07 | |
| and hanging there in agony would die | 26:10 | |
| as a consequence of Roman justice. Shall we say? | 26:12 | |
| And what poor Pilate did not know was | 26:17 | |
| that the followers of this man would sometimes say, | 26:20 | |
| that is truth. Truth is cruciform, a man dying on a cross. | 26:23 | |
| This is the deepest insight into what truth is. | 26:28 | |
| This is what God is, suffering love. | 26:33 | |
| Giving himself on our behalf. | 26:37 | |
| What is truth? This is truth. | 26:41 | |
| What Pilate could not know was | 26:44 | |
| that after the death of this man, | 26:46 | |
| a strange, almost unbelievable report | 26:50 | |
| would begin to circulate among his followers | 26:53 | |
| that this man Jesus had somehow been raised from the dead. | 26:55 | |
| By a means, which we have not yet deciphered. | 27:00 | |
| In a way, which we do not yet understand. | 27:02 | |
| He is mysteriously alive among us. | 27:04 | |
| And the followers of this strange man have said ever since, | 27:08 | |
| this is truth. Truth, alive. Truth, triumphant. | 27:11 | |
| Truth, undefeated by all the powers of evil. | 27:17 | |
| Truth, giving itself in love. | 27:22 | |
| This is the truth which makes us free. | 27:25 | |
| God, giving himself to men and releasing in men, | 27:28 | |
| the power to give themselves for the sake of others. | 27:32 | |
| This is the truth, | 27:39 | |
| which makes us free. | 27:42 | |
| (speaker buzzing) | 27:46 | |
| "If you continue in my word, | 27:48 | |
| then are you truly my disciples? | 27:53 | |
| And you'll know the truth. | 27:59 | |
| And the truth will make you free." | 28:03 | |
| Let us rise for the concluding prayer. | 28:16 | |
| (all standing) | 28:19 | |
| Almighty God, thou hast been seeking to reveal | 28:28 | |
| thyself to men always and everywhere. | 28:31 | |
| Still thou doust seek to make thyself known to us. | 28:35 | |
| Help us we pray, in this place of worship | 28:41 | |
| to be open to thee, and thy coming responsive | 28:44 | |
| to thy speaking, that the truth, | 28:47 | |
| which thou art, the truth, which is love, | 28:50 | |
| may not only be revealed to us, | 28:55 | |
| but may become alive in us through | 28:58 | |
| the power of Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 29:02 | |
| And now may the grace of our Lord. | 29:08 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund