So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You could put it that way. I prefer to put it this way: that I was born and came into this world to testify to the truth.”
The truth of things is more often something human beings prefer to conceal – as if the truth of things would shake up the comfort zone we create by not quite telling the truth – by lying. Listen to commercials, to political debates, read history books, the script of so many movies, one’s own justification of oneself in the privacy of one’s mind – the excuses used, the judgments made about others. Do they speak the truth or do they twist, hide, divert, avoid facing, indeed forget the truth; do we live in an environment of half truths, biases, wishful thinking rather than getting to the heart of the matter regarding what and who we really are and why?
That’s why Jesus came into the world, to take the mask off individuals and institutions, the false face by which we beguile ourselves into thinking we are superior to everyone else. That’s why the Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t like Jesus, even hated him – because he reminded them of what they were and worse yet, what they could be if they listened to his words and adopted his way of being.
It’s possible that Pilate knew what Jesus meant when he said he came into this world to bear witness to the truth, to uncover the phoniness, the games people play to survive. And that was the last thing a Roman governor would want, given the importance of concealing the truth, covering things up, keeping secrets from fellow bureaucrats – even one’s own secretary – if one were to survive. [Watch Pilate cringe when Jesus’ enemies remind him: “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar.”] Living out in the open, being truly true would soon end his career.
Yet that’s what Jesus came to do – to make us honest – about our weaknesses, our need, and our truly divine potential as implanted in the graciousness of a God who St. Paul says is not taken in by masks – but by that lovely (even if you don’t think so) face you see in the mirror – your true image as it emerges into an image of Christ; a simply honest face as only a loving soul can produce.
Mark Twain wrote a story called The Prince and the Pauper in which two identical boys undergo a transformation. The one named Tom is an urchin in 16th century London who lives amid beatings and hunger and cold nights spent upon straw. The other is Prince Edward, someday to be king, who lives in palaces, served by soldiers, courtiers, splendidly clothed. You know the story. They meet and exchanges places – and the world they have taken for granted as the “given” world is unmasked. Tom, when he becomes the Prince, finds the justice system he must administer to be brutal, death decreed on the basis of superstition instead of evidence. And Prince Edward, unable in his rags to convince people he is anything but a threat to society and hardly a royal heir, is imprisoned, himself made the victim of legislated violence where he comes face to face with human suffering. In other words they awaken to the sickness that so often constitutes so much of the culture they lived in. They learned the hidden truth that people ignore: that they unwittingly value delusion over what’s truly true.
No mention of the Gospel occurs in Twain’s story except, in an indirect way as when Prince Edward realizes: “The world is made wrong . . . Kings should go [experience] their own laws and so learn mercy.”