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Good morning. I don’t envy anyone who has to sit on a committee of enquiry whether it is in parliament or anywhere else. The fact is that getting at the truth is often so difficult. We each of us experience life differently and see the world through different coloured spectacles. Yet, although it is so difficult, it is essential for the functioning of our public life in all its aspects, that we try to make judgements that stand up to scrutiny.

If this is difficult in public life how much more testing it is when it concerns the big questions about the meaning of life as a whole. We are all bedded down in our own culture and language. There is no bird’s eye view from above. No wonder some simply give up the attempt. In the wonderful, highly dramatic dialogue between Christ and Pilate recounted in St John’s Gospel, Jesus says ‘I came to bear witness to the truth’, to which Pilate replies ‘What is truth? Francis Bacon, in 1597, thought that Pilate was jesting and added that would not stay for an answer.

Yet if there are some like disdainful Pilate the vast majority of people in history have taken the search for truth seriously. They have felt almost haunted by the obligation to get at the truth of things. Indeed so seriously that for much of philosophical history the word truth, like the words beauty and goodness were not just treated as abstract nouns but regarded as having some kind of spiritual reality. This search for truth can sometimes be regarded as even more crucial than adherence to a particular faith. The remarkable French philosopher Simone Weil wrote once that ‘Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth.’

This wider truth about life includes truth about ourselves. During this Lenten period the church encourages Christians to greater self-knowledge, more self-awareness, sniffing out the deceptions and collusions by which we too often live. And I think it is this truth about ourselves that John Masefield has particularly in mind in his fine poem called truth, which begins

Man with his burning soul
Has but an hour of breath
To build a ship of truth
In which his soul may sail-
Sail on the sea of death
For death takes toll
Of beauty, courage youth,
Of all but truth.

Truth, whether in public life or private, about little things or the big questions of life is not something to be cynical about. There is something about it that rightly seems to claim and haunts us.

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