Consecrated in Truth

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow our Gospel passage for the day comes from John 17, sometimes referred to as the “High Priestly Prayer” because it is Jesus’ expansive prayer of intercession on behalf of his beloved disciples and then on behalf of all who would hear God’s Word through their witness. 

In the middle of this “High Priestly Prayer” though, we have a couple of verses that perhaps for our purposes we could call the “Most Deeply Dominican Prayer” and because of who we are as a community of listeners, perhaps we could focus our prayerful attention there today.

“Consecrate them in the truth,” Jesus prays.

The Greek here (and y’all know I’m not great with Greek pronunciations so bear with me) is: “Hagiazein autous en te aletheia.”

Scripture scholars struggle a bit with translation.  What does it mean to be consecrated in the truth?  It might be that Jesus was simply asking that his followers be made truly holy, be truly set apart.   The word truth here might just mean “indeed!”   Like “Consecrate them indeed!”

But most think that aletheia here implies something more.  Consecrate them in…. what is truth?  I ask that not to sound like Pilate but because I think it is something that many of us—including even within the larger Dominican family which bears “Truth” as its motto—struggle to define.   If you had to come up with a synonym for what Jesus is trying to communicate here, what word would you choose?  What is it that Jesus sees as necessary for making you holy?   I think it is important that we figure out what that might be because the very next line Jesus says to God is, “Your word is truth.” What is he saying about God’s Word here?

I highlight this because we live in time in which the word “truth” has been profoundly tarnished.  It has become a shell of a word in which the insides have been scooped out.  In the U.S. and, I recognize, in a number of other countries around the globe, we have government leaders who have changed the meaning of the word to imply power. Truth is whatever those with power say that it is.  And we have wide swaths of young adults who have such distrust of anything they’ve been told that truth is no longer seen as a relevant category in their worldview. Why does it even matter?  How can you even tell?  Who can say? 

Preaching that God’s word is truth in this historical climate is rather like trying to preach that God is love in a congregation that has grown up in a home permeated with domestic violence.  How do you talk about love in a situation where the letters L-O-V-E coming together sound the same but no longer hold any resemblance of the original meaning?

For us as Christians, I really cannot think of anything more dangerous to our faith right now than having the core words by which we communicate our deepest beliefs about God and God’s Word robbed of all meaning.  Soon, if not already, our daily experience will be that of the Tower of Babel where all we can do is scatter because we’ve lost all means of making sense to one another, incapable of passing on what really matters.

And for us in the wider community of the Dominican family that orbits its existence around the word Truth, I cannot think of any more pressing task that we should be about right now than rehydrating that word, once again giving this parched term life and meaning.  It is an immense task and will consume the remainder of our lives, but let me suggest three definitions of the word truth from the Dominican tradition that we can use to re-inject the word with meaning in our own time.

The first comes from Thomas Aquinas.  What is truth?  Truth is having a mind that is aligned with reality.  It means having a picture of the world as it really is.  Not as we might want it to be, but as it really is. To be consecrated in truth means having a picture of the world in our heads that will allow us to make good decisions and live life abundantly and not settling for anything less.  When Jesus says God’s Word is truth, he means that the teaching he has offered us about God and God’s dream for our world is authentic; we can build a genuinely good life on it.

The second also is based on Thomas.  What is truth?  Truth is having a mouth aligned with what you really think.  It is honesty.  It means not saying things that you know not to be real.  To be consecrated in truth means we avoid lying at all costs.  When Jesus says God’s Word is truth, he means you can trust it because God won’t lead you astray. 

The third thing we want to assert about truth has deep Biblical roots.  What is truth?  Truth is fidelity.  Like a married couple who promises to “be true to one another in good times and in bad,” being consecrated to truth means hanging in there in relationships and not stopping loving one another when we disagree.  When Jesus says God’s Word is truth, he means God is faithful to the promises God has made to us.  We can count on God.

The Gospel of John places the Highly Priestly Prayer on the lips of Jesus right before he goes out to the Garden across the Kidron Valley where he will be arrested by the temple guard and hauled before the political powers of his own time who will ask Jesus, “What is truth?” They are confused on the matter, but we do not need to be.  For Jesus continues to pray for us in our own time that we might continue to be consecrated in the truth as illuminated in God’s word.   And that we might then find the strength to continue to share that Word with others.

There is no more Dominican prayer than this.  To ask that the truth might make us holy.  Let us beg Jesus to continue to intercede on our behalf in our time.

(picture credit: Keith Luke on Unsplash)