Lent this year has fallen in such a way that it lines up with my inner life. That’s not always the case. True confession, from an author of a book on the church year: some years, I don’t get all that into Lent, or it sneaks up on me and is half over before I’ve managed to make my way into it. But this year, I was ready for Lent.

A month ago, my daughter’s best friend, Michaela, was diagnosed with leukemia. I was shocked when I heard the news. We’d seen her the day before her diagnosis. She’d had a little lingering cold and a tummy ache, but she still played with Jane for several hours. Nothing indicated that she was seriously ill.

Her sudden diagnosis has made me intensely aware of the fragility of life and of how much I take for granted. Life is not a given, though I have lived most of my 34 years as though it were. Life is a gift. Each day we wake up and have breath in our lungs and a heart beating in our chest and limbs that move and a brain that thinks is a grace. I do not like to think this way. I’d rather life be a given. But it’s not.

Suffering, it seems, is the given. Pain will come into each of our lives in some shape, some way, some form. Physical, emotional, spiritual—we will all know suffering of some kind. As I entered Lent this year, I ached. I ached for Michaela, whose body is weak with chemo and illness. I ached for her mother, my friend, who is watching her child suffer. I ached for the pain that my own children will know, no matter how hard I try to prevent them from suffering. In the cynical words of Wesley in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain.”

We have a cynical man in tonight’s reading, too. Pilate is a petty governor—in all senses of that word. The Jewish leaders have brought Jesus before him because they want a capital sentence, and only Rome has the authority to issue such a verdict. But Pilate dislikes the Jews. He delights in thwarting them, which is what the give-and-take of this passage is about. It isn’t until the end, when the Jewish leaders back him into a corner—“If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar’s!”—that Pilate capitulates. His little slice of power is more important to him than anything else—more important than doing what is right, more important than acting on what he believes is true, more important even than the very life of a man he knows is innocent.

I don’t usually associate myself with Pilate. He seems a weak and apathetic person, power hungry and insecure. But as I meditated on this passage, I came to see some uncomfortable similarities between us. But before we get to that, we have to grapple with his interaction with Jesus.

First, he asks Jesus, point-blank, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

Jesus doesn’t miss a beat. “Is that what you think? Or did someone tell you that?”

Pilate’s getting annoyed. “I’m not a Jew. I didn’t bring you here. What have you done?”

Jesus doesn’t answer that question. Instead, he tells Pilate, “My kingdom doesn’t come from this world.” In other words, my kingdom is from heaven, so don’t kid yourself. That’s where the real power is.

“Ah,” Pilate says, “so you are a king.” He’s missed the entire point of Jesus’ answer.

“You say I am,” Jesus says, “but listen: I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

I think Pilate may have rolled his eyes here. He shrugs. “What is truth?” Then he leaves the room. He doesn’t really care about truth. He may not even believe there is such a thing. And he certainly doesn’t want to hear about it from this delusional Jewish hillbilly.

What is truth? It’s a pretty cynical and uncomfortably post-modern question to be in the mouth of a first century Roman leader.

But however cynically Pilate—and our postmodern friends— maybe when they ask this question, it’s actually a really good question.

What is truth?

In John 14, Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’

Truth is a who, not a what. Jesus is truth. The truth was standing right in front of Pilate, and he didn’t even see it or know it.

I think that’s because he didn’t believe it. All he saw was a Galilean troublemaker who’d fallen on the wrong side of the Jewish authorities. And he couldn’t see past that.

If he hadn’t been so blinded by his own prejudices and his own view of the world, he might have been able to see Who stood before him. He might have come to know the truth. And the truth, as Jesus said in John 8, the truth would have set him free.

But free from what?

Jesus continues in John 8: “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”

Jesus—Truth—sets us free from our slavery to sin…whatever form that happens to take in our lives. For Pilate, it was his lust for power that enslaved him. What is it for you? What is it for me? Fear? Anger? Self-loathing? False guilt? Pride? Vanity? Envy? Greed? Whatever it is, Jesus has set us free.

He frees us to live the life God has called us to, a life in relationship with Him.

But in spite of what the Psalmist says in Psalm 25 that we read earlier—“Those who fear the Lord shall live in happiness, and their offspring shall possess the land”—the freedom to live righteously—and even actually living righteously—is no guarantee of a happy life free from suffering. Jesus was the most righteous person who ever lived—and the person who suffered more than any other, for He took all our suffering, all our sin, onto Himself. So clearly, if being the truth, does not free one from suffering, being in the truth, walking in the way of Truth, will not free us from suffering, either.

Jesus sets us free from sin. He does not set us free from suffering. For the way of Jesus—this way we’re walking in during Lent—is the way of the cross, the way of sorrow.

As I meditated on the interaction between Jesus and Pilate in this passage, Michaela’s illness and my sudden realization of how fragile and precarious life is were always hovering at the edges of my mind. So I asked God, If the truth does not free us from suffering, then what good is it?

Later, I realized that in asking that question, I had set myself in the place of Pilate. Pilate shrugged and said, “What is truth?” Then he walked away, as if truth did not matter, as if it were irrelevant. Now, I did not ask what truth is—I already knew that Jesus is truth. But I did ask, What good is it? Who cares that You are truth? It’s not like Your being the truth changes much—Michaela still has leukemia, children all over the world still die of hunger, mothers everywhere must watch their children suffer. YOU still suffered. So what good is it that You are truth?

I took my place on the judgment seat as surely as Pilate did. But where Pilate is skeptical and indifferent—“So you are a king?”—I am angry.

“You’re a king!” I cry out. “Don’t just stand there! Do something about this! What’s the point of being a king if you don’t use Your power to eradicate evil and injustice and suffering? What’s the point of being a king if you end up on trial in the biggest mockery of justice the world has ever known? What’s the point of being a king if you end up suffering just like the rest of us?”

What good is it, Jesus, that you are truth? What does that even mean?

The biggest difference between Pilate and me is not that that I have faith and he didn’t, that I am strong and he was weak, that I don’t crave power and he did. No, we’re not really all that different in those ways. The biggest difference is that I stayed to hear the answer to my question. I did not leave the room.

Now, I am not one to hear the voice of God very often. God speaks to me through circumstances or books or the wise counsel of friends and mentors, but rarely do I hear His voice directly. After asking this question, though—Jesus, what does it mean that You are the truth?—I heard these words, words that were unquestionably from Him:

It means you can trust me .

That was on Tuesday. On Sunday I came to church and Tim Dearborn said in his sermon, “Our deepest temptation is to distrust God.” My eyes grew wide, and my heart leapt up. Yes, I thought, yes. I am afraid to trust God. I am afraid He will not come through for me.

Tim also said, “In drinking the cup of our suffering, Jesus drank the cup of our god-forsakenness, our sense of being abandoned by God.” Suddenly, the words of Jesus on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—took on new meaning. Perhaps God had not forsaken Jesus at all. Perhaps Jesus simply felt forsaken and abandoned in His pain. He felt what we often feel—that suffering separates us from God, that a God who loved us would not allow us to suffer.

And those words that I had heard on Tuesday whispered in my mind again.

Jesus, what does it mean that you are truth?

It means you can trust me.

Jesus says to me, as He said to Pilate, “My kingdom doesn’t come from this world. My kingdom comes from Heaven, and there, things look—they are—different from anything you know. I came to testify to this kingdom, to testify to the truth. Listen to me. Trust me. I know the truth. I am the truth.”

What does it mean that Jesus is truth?

It means we can trust him.

In other words, truth yields trust.

Now, being a word nerd, I went to the OED (that’s the Oxford English Dictionary, every writer’s best friend) and looked up both words—truth and trust.

Truth means faithfulness, constancy, good faith. Jesus is the truth—the faithful, constant One.

And the word trust, which now means to have faith or confidence in someone or something, comes from the Early Middle English word treysta. Treysta means to comfort or console, and it’s related to several other Germanic words that mean to cheer or encourage.

Isn’t that interesting? Trust in the sense of comfort is something Jesus gives us. Trust in the sense of faith or confidence is what we give Jesus. We can trust—have confidence—in Him because He gives trust—comfort and consolation—to us and because He is truth, the faithful, constant One who never fails.

You can trust me, He says. I’ve walked this road. I know what you feel. I bore it all. You can trust me. Let me hold you in this place of pain. Let me comfort you, let me console you, let me encourage your heart.

And there is more. “In this world,” Jesus says, “you will have trouble, but do not be afraid, for I have overcome the world.”

He has overcome the world. He has overcome the pain and the suffering and the injustice and the horror. We can live without fear, even in the midst of suffering, because Jesus has overcome the sin and evil and death that this world metes out to us. His triumph on the cross and in the Resurrection is the triumph of Life. Jesus is not just the way, not just the truth—though He is both of those—He is also the Life! And His life that cannot stay dead is the same life that courses through our veins.

I think of Michaela here and am stunned and comforted to realize that even more than the cancer cells that are taking over her blood, it is Jesus’ blood, Jesus’ life that courses through her body. And though her prognosis is good and we are confident she will survive this disease that has got hold of her, someday, someday, she will die, as will you, as will I, but she will not stay dead. Nor will you. Nor will I. Jesus’ death and resurrection give us the hope and the promise that though we, too, will know suffering and death, we will also know life. Life with a capital L.

As I walk the road of this life, with all its joys and sorrows, I do not walk alone. Michaela does not walk alone. You do not walk alone. Never, ever alone. Jesus is with us. He walks the via dolorosa with us. He knows our sorrow and our suffering intimately, for He has already lived them, in those six hours on a Friday nearly 2000 years ago. He knows what it is to feel pain and fear. He knows what it is to feel god-forsaken and abandoned. And He knows what it is to rise to new life, for He is Life.

He is the Life.

He is the way.

He is the Truth.

We can trust him.