Indifference to the Truth

One

Coward in Authority

Pilate will stand forever as the model of a coward, someone who clearly knew that what he was being pressured to do was wrong, cruelly and hatefully wrong, but who did it anyway because he was afraid of what would happen if he didn’t.

He said clearly that he found no case against Jesus, but he ordered Him to be whipped within an inch of his life and then He ordered Jesus to be nailed to a cross until he died of asphyxiation.

Pilate was the governor. His job was to preserve law and order, to keep justice. He tried to wash that responsibility off his hands, right there, in front of everyone. But no leader can wash his hands of his responsibility before God and his fellow man. No man can escape the responsibilities of justice.

So the question is, what made Pilate such a coward?

Two

Pilate did what all cowards did, he pretended that he didn’t know what truth was.

When Jesus said, “All who listen to the truth hear my voice,” all Pilate could say was, “Truth? What is that?”

The path to cowardice, and the cruel injustice that results from it, always takes the form of agnosticism, of not knowing or caring about the truth.

CS Lewis once wrote that we are building a race of cowards, of, “men without chests,” as he put it.

These are people who aren’t willing to pursue the ultimate truth of the universe, of God, of human nature, of morality. People who are just interested in getting by, in being practical, in getting a job and keeping it.

That was Pilate. And Pilate was the one who gave the order to scourge and crucify the Son of God and the Savior of the World.

Unless you are willing to pursue the truth, you will be a coward, and you will hurt the innocent you are obliged to protect.

Four

Social Justice can never survive without conviction, without a public commitment to the truth

We still see today how leaders hide their cowardly injustice behind the excuse of not knowing what truth is.

For instance, when a recent President was asked when life begins, he said the answer to that question was, “above his pay grade.” In other words, he said truth wasn’t his responsibility and he used that cowardly excuse to justify his policies by which innocent children are cut to pieces.

Some people think democracy requires a kind of relativism. But it’s not true. If democracy isn’t based on a clear commitment to the truth, it always degenerates into mob rule just like it did with Pilate and the crowd. And that never leads to the common good. That never leads to justice. What it leads to is the death of the innocent.

Five

God has put each of us in authority and we can’t wash our hands of our obligation to use that authority to promote what is right, and not what’s easiest or most popular

That holds true in our families, in our jobs, in the voting booths. It means we have to be committed to the truth. We have to understand truth in principle: the truth about Jesus, about God and the world, about right and wrong. And we have to understand the truth in practice.

We also have to be ruthlessly honest in examining the situation. We do that in prayer. We do that by humbly taking counsel from others (remember how Pilate ignored his wife’s warning?) And we do it by being committed to trying to do what’s right no matter how difficult.