A Matter of Trust

A Matter of Trust--October 19, 2017

[Jesus said:] "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and I will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." [John 14:1-3]

Really, the question is whether Jesus is trustworthy or not.

Honestly, that's what this all comes down to--the whole of our hope in God's future, the whole way of life we are drawn into now--it all comes down to whether we trust that Jesus knows what he is talking about, and that Jesus actually means what he says. If Jesus is the sort of person who tells the truth, we are more likely to be able to rely on what he says and live in light of the future he promises.  But if Jesus is the sort who makes wild and unverifiable claims that have to be walked back the next day by backpedaling disciples and official messianic spokespersons, then we would be foolish to stake our lives on his way of living in the world.  If Jesus is the sort who just sort of fires off big talk in a shoot-from-the-hip sort of way, whose words don't mean anything or have any grounding in reality, well, then, we shouldn't listen or believe him when he says that he will gather anybody to himself beyond the reign of death.  We should just ignore him and leave him alone in that case, because you can't seriously devote any of your attention to the kind of voice that just blurts out nonsense and hopes you will forget about it later.

This might seem obvious for a moment--after all, religious people are "supposed" to automatically trust Jesus and what he says. But think for a moment about it: we are so used to it anymore when voices claim to have "authority" and then reveal they aren't reliable.  We all know what it's like to know someone who talks a good game, but never actually follows through... or makes a claim, and then never has the facts to back it up.  We all know what it's like to be let down by someone you put your trust in, who then turned out not to mean what they said, or shouldn't have promised what couldn't be guaranteed, or simply was hoping you would forget they had ever made a commitment.

There's a famous argument of C. S. Lewis from his Mere Christianity about Jesus, one that's often called the Lunatic-Liar-Lord trilemma.  The gist is that someone who says the things that Jesus says, like here in John 14 about having the authority to offer life beyond the grip of death, can only be one of three things: either a lunatic (that is, he's insane like someone who thinks he is Napoleon or a sea cucumber), or he is a liar (that is, someone who deliberately deceives people into thinking he has power over death when he knows full well that he doesn't), or, Lewis says, he must be who he says he is: the Lord himself.  Lewis' point, ultimately, is that we don't have the option of just saying, "Jesus was a fine moral teacher, and that's all," or "Jesus was a respectable Jewish rabbi who didn't want anything more than to teach people to be nice," because Jesus himself doesn't allow that choice.  You don't say things like, "I will come again and take you to myself" about life after crucifixion, if you are just being a nice religious teacher.  You don't get to claim that you in your very person are embodying the Kingdom of God if you are just a respectable teacher of morals.  Jesus keeps saying things that either make him crazy, a con-man, or the Christ.

Now, that said, sometimes I wonder if, in this day and age of ours, we need to add a fourth option to Lewis' argument.  Perhaps we need to ask whether Jesus is not a Lunatic or a Liar, but that other unique phenomenon of our day, the Loudmouth.  Unlike, say, the Liar, who knows what the truth is and cares what the truth is, but tries to hornswoggle you to believe a deception, and unlike say, the Lunatic, who is so detached from reality that he doesn't know what is or isn't real, the Loudmouth is the figure who blurts things out without even caring whether they are grounded in the truth or not.  And because we now live in the era, not only of twenty-four-hour-a-day news channels that have to fill their airwaves with something, but also the era of social media when we are constantly being manipulated by stories, accounts, and messages that turn out to be either partially or completely unfactual but still get passed along and shared because we want them to be true to reinforce our picture of the world, it is now possible to be a Loudmouth who doesn't care if what he says is true or false or whatever.  He just says it, and then blurts out the next thing to make you forget (or at least to stop asking about) whatever the last thing was.

This, maybe, is the pressing question for us in the age of social media and reality TV: can we trust Jesus to tell us the truth about the future he promises us, or is he just one more in a long line of Loudmouths, who just say things without thinking that those words have any consequences?  

That's a vital, life-changing question to ask, because honestly, Jesus doesn't just make claims about an afterlife, but Jesus' statements about God's promised future also dramatically affect what we do with this day, this year, this life.  Take the well-known story Jesus tells that we often call "The Sheep and the Goats."  When Jesus imagines a future moment when it is revealed that loving the people on the margins (the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the prisoner, the sick, etc.) is received as loving him, the question to ask is, "Can we trust him on that?"  After all, if Jesus is just saying stuff because he loves the sound of his own voice, or making these big claims because he wants to distract attention from something else, we could just as easily spend our lives doing something different.  But if Jesus really knows what he is talking about, and if Jesus really is tapping into the truth when he says, "As you did it to the least of these, you did it to me," then claims are made on our lives.  We really will spend our lives, our energies, our money, and our time differently.

For that matter, too, if Jesus is just being a Loudmouth bloviating about things without caring whether it's true or not, then we dare not live now like there is the promise of life beyond death, and we dare not ever take risks with our own lives because we'll be so afraid that something bad might happen and our lives would be unfixable.  If Jesus is just a Loudmouth, we don't have to take his words seriously, and we don't have to actually listen to him--he can just be our figurehead, or our Cosmic used car salesman.  If Jesus is just occupying the role of Loudmouth, and if we know he doesn't really mean anything that he says, we can make him mean anything we like and turn Jesus into our mascot to pretend he endorses whatever we want him to endorse. 

This is actually, I think, what makes the Loudmouth possibility even scarier than the "Liar" or "Lunatic" figures of C. S. Lewis' original argument--at least with both the Liar and the Lunatic, there is some underlying commitment to something that is real, that you could check a liar or a lunatic against.  If a person believes he is Louis XIV, there are ways to either confirm or deny that (for example, is the person in front of you French? ... and dead?). If a person is lying to you deliberately, you can verify or disprove things he or she says against other verifiable facts.  But the Loudmouth is even more insidiously dangerous--the Loudmouth keeps talking and doesn't seem to notices when the things that come out of his mouth have no grounding in reality.  Much less, he doesn't seem to care--it's only what gets said now, and whether you buy it.  If you do, he's got you, hook, line, and sinker, and if you don't, he's upset that you're undermining his credibility.  In all seriousness, I think that if Lewis were living today, he would have had to put something like the Loudmouth alongside Liar and Lunatic as possibilities we have to examine before concluding that Jesus really is who he says he is... and that he can be trusted when he makes claims about God's promised future.

What gives me deep hope today, in the midst of a world full of Loudmouths, as well as its share of lunatics and liars, is that Jesus seems to foresee that we will need to ask this sort of question, and he grounds all of his promises in his track record.  Jesus knows that any time he talks about something we cannot see--about the hope that sounds too good to be true of a life beyond the grip of death--he runs the risk that we will run away in skepticism or disbelief.  Jesus knows that we will have had our fill of nonsense-spouting Loudmouths who fill the air with their sound and fury, and that it will be difficult at times to know why we can trust him if we have learned to ignore the Loudmouths.  And so Jesus puts it directly to his followers--us included--and puts his own reputation on the line.  "If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?"  That is to say, "You know me.  You know what I say and how I say it.  You know that I am truthful with you.  And you even know that sometimes I tell you truths you do not want to hear.  If you have known me at all and seen that I am reliable and trustworthy, then, yes, you can dare to believe when I tell you that I will come and take you to myself.  You can dare to believe that there is future beyond the rule of death, beyond the power of our self-destruction, beyond the grip of the grave.  You can dare to believe it, not because you have "proof," but because you dare to trust me... because I have shown myself trust-worthy."

In this life, there will be plenty of voices that ask for you to believe them.  Some of them will be reliable, and some of them will not be.  Some of them will be lunatic-type voices who are living in their own world.  Some of them will be liars who are trying deliberately to deceive you.  And some of them will be Loudmouths who don't even care about truth or falsity any longer, but just say things because they love the sound of their own voices.  And then there will be Jesus. 

Jesus is the voice who stakes it all on his trust-worthiness, and who says, "I have not failed you or let you down before, and I have not shied away from saying uncomfortable truths when I have to.  And now I am telling you--asking for your trust again--that I will hold onto you beyond the power of death.  Live today--go ahead, you can trust me--go ahead and live today like I really will hold you through to life beyond the power of death, and make your choices in this day as though resurrection is more than a rumor.

See--it all hangs on whether Jesus is trust-worthy or not.  What do you say?

Lord Jesus, speak your truth and dare us to live in light of it, today and always.