A Homily for the Fourth Sunday after Easter

​+ Quid est veritas? Pontius Pilate retorts to Our Lord in the Passion of Good Friday. “What is truth?”
 
It is a good question. No, it is more than a “good” question—that is simply too banal and dismissive. It is the question; the fundamental question which, if its import is faced up to and is honestly answered, can transform everything—ourselves included—for the good, temporally and eternally, and which, if it is avoided, can leave us mired in and sinking ever more deeply into the quicksand of relativism and despair.
 
For the temptation—nay, the presumption, if not the unwritten constitutional principle—of the world in which we live is that of the cynical Pilate: truth is relative; claims to speak the truth, let alone to be the truth (cf. Jn 14:16) are both absurd and completely unacceptable. Power is truth, political authority is truth, positive law is truth, wealth is truth and confers power, and it is with these realities that we must reckon daily—even as they change according to whom it is that holds and controls them, each according to their desired ends.
 
Thus, the concept of marriage can be redefined to include situations utterly inimical to human nature, the word “gender” is subjected to perverse preferences of personal will, murder can be routinely practised as a normal medical procedure under the guise of alleviating suffering—even that of others than the human person being killed. The boundaries for the use gift of sexuality are purely utilitarian—a matter of personal and sometimes social 'health and safety', as it were, and it is to these same criteria that any use at all of the words “good” and “bad” must be subjected.
 
So too, questions of faith and religious practice are relativised and privatised. Religious tolerance rapidly becomes religious indifferentism where, at best, the god of syncretism is worshipped as the only one true god (with all the logical fallacy that that involves), ignoring the realities involved in any given religion.
 
Even the One True Church of Christ suffers from these worldly diseases: episcopal conferences announce their resolve to bless sinful relationships, heads of Roman institutions personalise moral truth in respect of the sanctity of life whilst “understanding” that others could take a different course, bishops who actually try to build up their dioceses rather than depressively presiding over their decline are targeted and removed, pontifical documents contradict those of their predecessors without regard for the principles upon which they were founded. Authority seems at times to be so inebriated with positivism that it seeks to manufacture truth rather than to serve it, reducing ecclesiastical discipline to merely yet another form of base political activity.
 
We may very well, then, ask with Pilate: “What is truth?” And we may indeed share much more than a small dose of his cynicism.
 
Yet, despite her current difficulties and wounds, through her Sacred Liturgy our Holy Mother the Church confronts the malaise with which we are surrounded, and by which we so often feel trapped, with the reality of the Resurrected Christ, who is not an idea or an opinion, let alone an interpretation or a comforting psychological construct, but a person—no less than the Son of God, Truth incarnate, definitively revealed once and for all for the salvation of all of mankind.
 
And, as the Holy Gospel of this Mass teaches us, we are to be given—we have already been given through our Baptism and Confirmation—the gift of the Holy Spirit who will convict the world in which we live and who will—who does—guide us into the fulness of the truth through the Church’s liturgical tradition and through her doctrine faithfully taught and handed on from the apostles.
 
My brothers and sisters, we are immersed in a sea of syncretism and relativism that seeks to drown the Spirit of Truth—the truth about God, that truth that every human person is made in His image and likeness, the truth about the devil, sin and evil, the truth about our just eternal destiny in heaven or in hell according to our free moral choices, the truth of God’s love and mercy for a sinner who repents and turns back to Him.
 
Certainly, the dangers are real and there are many battles to be fought—beginning with the conversion of my own life—but let the Holy Gospel comfort us. Help—super-natural help—is at hand! The power of the Spirit of Truth is available to us if we believe in Jesus Christ, who offered Himself on the Cross for our salvation and who has risen from the dead and conform our lives to He who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. As now we worship Him at His altar, let us beg the increase of faith that we so need to conform ourselves to the Truth. +