What is Truth?

Pilate saith unto Him (Christ), “What is truth?” John 18:38a

This passage in Scripture came to my mind several weeks ago. I don’t remember why. Something that had happened during one of my days. But I do recall thinking about it quite a bit. Was Pilate asking Christ this in faint despair? As if he had tried to find truth during his lifetime and simply given up that it didn’t exist. Or was he scoffing? As if in his search he had found that truth was relevant and so didn’t care anymore? From the reading, I don’t get the sense that he was being sincere in his question. After all, he immediately goes out to speak to the Jewish leaders after asking it. He wasn’t really seeking an answer. To him, the question was rhetorical. Whatever his thoughts on truth, he had given up that it actually existed. And yet he was looking Truth in the eyes.

Two weeks ago as I sat at Emry’s dance class, one of the other mothers who says just about everything that comes to her head declared to rest of us as she looked over the e-mails on her phone, “Purdue has just shut down it’s campus.” Instantly, visions of the Berlin Wall came to mind, built around the campus to keep everyone inside enclosed and everyone outside from entering in. If I, a mostly sane 40-year-old imagined that, no wonder the late teen/early twenty sorority girls of the house she manages were in utter panic and desperately sending out e-mails as their final lifelines. 

But what she stated wasn’t the truth. The truth was that Purdue suspended all face-to-face classes (as most colleges were) and put a hold on all events that would bring visitors to the campus. Spring break would start early, classes would resume online following it, and all students who could were highly encouraged to go home. No Communists had suddenly invaded Indiana and locked up thousands of kids against the world around them. But that’s certainly what just about everyone believed.

Two days later as I pulled the two fruit-crate boxes we use to put our groceries in at Aldis from the back of our car, the lady loading her van next to me look at the boxes, looked at me and then matter-of-factly stated, “There’s not much food in there.” Even my imagination can’t quite stretch to their not being enough food available to fill nine-square-feet of space. Were the eighty or so people already in the store fighting over the last box of Raisin Bran? Could I still buy a jar of peanut butter? Not sure what to imagine, we walked into the store where we did find 95% of the canned goods gone, only skim milk remaining, no bread, certainly no toilet paper (because no one has that right now), and a meat section where remained only the sort of meat people who are on some diet or other even know what to do with. But I still left the store with 95% of my grocery list checked off. We weren’t going to starve.

But I could imagine that same women, thinking a store only 90% stocked means practically empty, going home and getting on every single social media platform she has and then posting, “Lafayette Aldis’s shelves are mostly empty!!!!” A statement that would be reposted by all her “friends” and their “friends” that had not checked the store out for themselves (or remembered that said store would be restocked every morning), causing undo panic as people started imagining they would starve to death on top of getting coronavirus that would also kill them. A total and complete lie.

Over the past few days, I have just about come to the conclusion that the only truth to be found in the midst of this pandemic is that no one knows the truth. Or is telling it. Or is even bothering to discover it. I have had to stop even looking at my news feeds, fed up with both right and left media as they battle to give us their own biased “truth”. Certainly no politician in the whole United States is doing anything right now except trying to one-up their neighbor on the latest power-grab this virus has presented them with. Our real pandemic is no longer COVID-19 but utter and complete fear. Something that grows on an hourly basis, stoked by half-truths and exaggerations – both, of which, are ultimately lies.

What is truth? In the end, I’m not sure we’ll ever know the truth of the coronavirus pandemic that is reshaping our world. But, at least, some of us do know the Truth. The One who never changes no matter what the world around us looks like. The One whose word is never exaggerated or twisted. And that is the Truth I stand on every day as I navigate even the small changes that are coming to my life. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane.