This is an absolutely remarkable reading of the passage because of what’s missing. I bet a lot of you could fill it in already. What’s missing? Jesus says, “Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.” and the passage ends. If we just held on for one more second, Pilate turns and says, “What is Truth?” Good question for Pilate. “What is Truth?” And a good question for ourselves, “What is Truth?” and how do we find the truth? I think the truth is often in short supply. It’s often hard to find and it’s even harder to live by.

We know that truth is in short supply because we have just had a political campaign, and we saw the ads and we know that truth is in very, very short supply. It’s in short supply at times from our government and, at times, even from our Church. We live in a day and age with instant news stories breaking and non-stop media coverage and, even there, truth is in short supply. I’ve heard now several times at Thanksgiving Dinners of families who got together, half the family conservative, half the family liberal, and the conservatives complaining about the liberal media and the liberal press that never tells us the truth, and the liberals complaining that the media never covers important things, never tells us the whole truth and can’t be believed. The one thing these fighting families at Happy Thanksgiving agreed on was that you can’t get the whole truth from just watching the media. Even just to fact-finding, we have to be a people who are not lazy, who do our homework and who listen, listen to different voices, listen to one another, listen to others.

But Jesus is not talking just about fact-finding when he says, “Those who belong to the truth listen to my voice.” Belonging to the truth.... Belonging to the truth is a life-long task. That’s why I like the phrase from Daniel Berrigan, “We are would-be Christians,” every one of us, our whole lives, we are would-be Christians. It’s a life-long task to listen to the truth and hear Christ’s voice.

Christ gives us four radical steps, of what it means to belong to the truth, to listen to his voice. By “radical” I don’t mean they are extreme. I mean they are rooted deep. They are at the heart of ourselves and at the heart of things. They are radical in that sense. The first of the four steps is we are called to be a people of conscience. The fancy word for it is Christ’s radical ethic. To be a people of conscience.... Sometimes when you say to people, “You have to follow your conscience,” they say, “Oh, then you do what feels good. You do what you’d like.” Remember the young soldier at Abu Graib who blew the whistle against the will of his superiors, against the will of the media, against the will of the government? He said, “This is just not right.” I don’t think that’s called “doing what feels good.” He acted out of righteousness and out of conscience. We are called to be a people who act out of conscience. Jesus comes to a people and a place with lots of rule-keeping, lots of laws, and he says, “You have to get to the heart of things. You have to behave not just to show off, and not just for rule-keeping, and not just to look better, and not just to get a higher place at the dinner table or in heaven. That’s not why you do it. You have to do it and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. You have to do it from the heart. You have to be among the blessed who are poor in spirit, who are single-hearted, who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Then you are among the blessed. Even our Catholic catechism says “If we do not act in accord with our conscience we cannot be saved.” So the first radical step is we have to be a people of conscience.

The second is we have to make room for others. This is called radical equality. Make room for others. Jesus, in a society where he went against the culture and the religion and the caste system, reached out to outsiders. He was seen with and associated with and reached out to women, to public sinners, to a Samaritan, semitic but not “one of us.” He reached out to foreigners, to the Roman centurion, to the Canaanite woman, to the leper who was this foreigner who came back to give thanks. We are called to be a people who make room for others. I think it calls for us to listen to others who differ from us and to respect others, those who are specially different from us.

The third step is radical compassion. When I was growing up in Oakland, there was a preacher who was in the news all the time, and he had one famous phrase: “It’s nice to be nice.” It’s nice to be nice. Well, that ain’t compassion! Compassion means to feel with other people when they are hurting, to walk with them and to respond, and to do something about it. Jesus was moved with compassion himself, toward the multitude who were hungry and he fed them, toward the woman who had lost her son, the widow, and he brought him back to life, toward the leper who asked for help. He was moved with compassion and healed him. And his heroes in his stories are always moved with compassion. The father of the Prodigal Son is moved with compassion and runs out and greets his son and welcomes him home. The Good Samaritan is moved with compassion about the Jewish victim. And then Jesus looks at us and says “Be compassionate as your own Heavenly Father is compassionate.” And then he uses himself as the standard. He says, “It was I who was hungry, who was thirsty, who was naked, who was in prison, who was sick. Were you compassionate?”

And the fourth step, so radical to belong to the truth, is to be a people of radical forgiveness. How many times shall I forgive, seven times? No, seventy times seven, says Jesus. “Forgive as you are forgiven,” we say in our signature prayer, the Our Father. He says, not just to his leaders, the apostles, but to the whole community, “Whose sins you forgive, they’ll be forgiven.” And he models it by himself saying on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Well, how do we belong to the truth? How do we listen to his voice? We try to be a people of conscience, a people who make room for others, a people of radical compassion and radical forgiveness. I can just imagine Jesus standing there and Pilate saying, “What is truth?” It never got written down, but I can imagine hearing Pilate say, “What is truth?” and Jesus saying, “Just pay attention to me and pay attention to those who try to follow me and that will give you a pretty good idea.” May we be a people who give the world around us a pretty good idea of what is truth. Amen.