St. Botolph’s Parish, Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council,

16 May 2010

‘For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice’. Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’ (John 18.37-38)

‘What is truth?’ The single most tragic words in the Gospel. Suspended on the life-giving Cross, Christ uttered no cry of pain that was not found in these words. ‘I thirst’ because an unbelieving world has become a desert. ‘My God, why have you forsaken me’, to die among those who do not believe? ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, or what they believe, except they do not believe in me’. They nail him on a slab of wood, hoist it into the air for the wind and the birds and the mocking voices. They leave him to die – all because it is forbidden to speak the truth. It was not the Jews who killed him. It was not the dull-witted soldiers, blindly following orders. It was our indifference to Truth. ‘What is truth?’ ‘Your’ truth, maybe, or ‘my’ truth; but ‘the’ truth? Honestly. Ask anyone in Oxford or Cambridge. They will tell you, ‘the truth looks different from here’. No one truly knows what truth is. It all depends on how you were brought up, plus what you prefer to believe. Truth is unknowable. At least, it is unsay-able. ‘You can say anything you like in the Theological Federation’, a student of mine once said, ‘unless you say that it is true’. Say your belief is true, and listen to the awkward hush fall over the room. Silence: like the silence that hung over the earth, when Truth gave up his life on the Cross.

The one they call Christ stands in front of Pilate, the governor. A dirty, long-haired rebel, a trouble-maker, in front of the clean-cut governor. What is the governor to do but ask, ‘What is truth?’ A noble Roman is allowed to attend the temple of his choice. He may worship any god he prefers … so long as he also worships Caesar. If you prefer Apollo to Jupiter, no problem. There are so many gods to choose from: ‘the truth looks different from here’. To say, as Christ says, that you alone have the truth; that you are the truth, the whole truth, the only truth – who but a seditious madman would say this? They killed him, not because he spoke a truth but the only truth; and every Christian martyr died on a cross or an arena, not because he worshipped Christ in his Church, but because he or she refused to worship anyone else. Who but a madman would be so rigid, so intolerant of others? Who but a madman, or worse – a fanatic?

That is what they said at the First Ecumenical Council. A noble Roman named Arius, an upright, reasonable man, said: ‘There is only one God, right? So Jesus Christ cannot be God, only the best man God ever created. Why can’t we all accept this formula and get along?’ The emperor seemed well-disposed. Didn’t Christ pray ‘that they may be one’? What easier way than a simple Biblical formula that every Christian will accept? A son is less than his father. Simple enough? But what if it is not true? ‘What is truth?’ said Arius and his followers. ‘The truth looks different from here’. The emperor was inclined to say so: no head for theological subtleties. Why can’t all the Christians get along? ‘But what if it isn’t true?’ A war-cry of the fanatics: Bishop Alexander of Alexandria; his short, fierce, hot-tempered deacon, a fanatic called Athanasius; Bishop Nicholas of Myra, so fanatical

that he struck Arius in the face? Why so intolerant, so fanatical? Don’t Christians strive for peace? If peace is won at the expense of truth, the Fathers taught, it is not peace but war; and if Christ is not God from all eternity, he cannot give us eternal life. When Christ gathers his disciples for the last time, he leaves no room for ‘viewpoints’. The truth does not look different from here, from there. The whole Truth, the only Truth: Truth in the flesh raises his hands to the Father. He does not pray that you should have ‘your’ truth and I have mine; he does not pray for the world, but for those whom God the Father have given – out of the world. A new people, called out of the unbelieving desert. ‘May they be one’, he prays, not as a political party is one; not as a coalition is one: no compromise. ‘May they be one, as You, the Father, and I, the Son, are one – absolutely one: one in essence, one in being. This alone is the unity of the Church that Christ, the Truth himself, decrees. Perfect unity in doctrine: not a few doctrines, but every doctrine that the Church has taught and still teaches today. Eternal life: what is it, anyway? A set of ‘viewpoints’, each of them – and none of them – true? ‘This – is eternal life, that they know thee’, not one of the gods, but ‘the only true God’; glorified in the only true Church that Truth himself established, when he walked on this earth. Glorified with the glory that Truth himself had with the Father before the world was made. This is the true glory. This is ortho-doxía: the life’s blood of the Orthodox Church. No union without unity! No peace without truth! No truth without Christ, our true God, who is Truth himself.

If this be fanaticism, make the most of it.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: Truth alone called you here. As an infant in the baptismal font, as an adult sealed with the chrism of the Holy Spirit. No matter how you came into the Orthodox Church, it is Truth who called you. Would you trade in Truth for the desert of unbelief, give him up to the wind, the birds, the mocking voices? Neither would any of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council that we commemorate today. They did not attend the Liturgy because it is ‘pretty’ but because it is true. They did not confess Christ our God because he is nice but because he is Truth itself: not your truth or mine but the only Truth. On this Sunday, when Christ has ascended into heaven and the Holy Spirit has not yet come, we do not ask, ‘What is Truth?’ We are Orthodox, not idio-dox: we do not stand for his truth, her truth, yours or mine. We know Truth as certainly as we know the flesh on our bones, or the breath in our lungs. We see him in his holy icon. We hear him in the voices of the choir and the priest. We smell him in the incense, offered only in the presence of a God. We touch him in wood and wax and brocade. We taste him, in his Precious Body and Divine Blood. Christ our true God, who sends us the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, from the bosom of the Father. The Truth that we hold on our tongues and take into our bodies is no teacher of ethics. We do not eat the flesh of a dead rabbi. We eat the Body and we drink the Blood of the Living God.