Truth is Just One Thing

June 2025   John 17:11-19  

“Holy Father, keep them in Your name that You have given Me, so that they may be one just as We are.”  John 17:11​

Truth is just One Thing.

If it were not, if there were rival truths, if 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 could both be equally true, then the concept of Truth would become empty, and things we now depend on would fall apart, starting with math, ending with civilization. We simply can’t live together if Truth is up for grabs.

Truth is just One Thing, and so the great purpose of life is for all of us (at least all of us who are intellectually honest) to gather up all the data of experience and assemble it all into one piece. If Truth is One, then we must be one also, or we are missing the point.

But there are so many people, so many ideas, so many moving parts. Where are the directions, we ask, that show us how to put such a massive puzzle together? The teaching of the New Testament is that Jesus is the directions.He is the hermeneutical key that allows us to see all things and all people the right way. He is the lens that brings everything into focus, the mind who sees how all the oddly shaped Tetris figures make one shape. He is the healer that restores the battered and broken so that their lives, at last, fit; the physician who knows exactly what cut of the knife defeats disease. He is the artist who knows just which pigment will redeem the ugly, exactly what mix will make beauty.

All of that being the case, the first and most urgent task for every Christian is to reflect constantly on the person and work of Jesus – Jesus in the Bible, Jesus in the sacraments, Jesus in the liturgy, Jesus in prayer. All day, every day, Jesus.

We mustn’t miss the point. Jesus is the point.

Because Truth is just One Thing.

“I gave them your word, and the world hated them” (John 17:14). The world hates Jesus because the Devil, the ruler of this world, does not want the One Thing to be the One Thing. The Devil thought it was a catastrophic error to make humans in the first place, and to give them such an exalted place, a place so exalted that God himself would take on human flesh and lead the humans there. The Devil thought humans unworthy of such a place, and of course he was right. He thought heaven should be reserved for those whose righteousness is perfect. He was right about that, too. Therefore, he opposed God’s plan and rebelled. His plan is simply to give us what we have coming, which of course is hell. The Devil does not want us to think about Jesus’ plan to wrap us in God’s Life and God’s Truth, the plan God deployed by wrapping our flesh around Himself. So, the Devil tempts us to think that Truth can be whatever we want it to be – we can all have our own truth, and it doesn’t matter if those truths are incompatible with each other. It doesn’t matter if that makes civilization collapse. We are good only for hell that way, which is precisely what the Devil means to give us.

“I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the Evil One” (John 17:15). Jesus wants us to stay here for as long as we can as testimony to God’s plan to save everyone from hell, which is why we have to be reflecting constantly on the Person and Work of Jesus. All day, every day, just Jesus.

Because Jesus is the hermeneutical (interpretation of the Bible) key for seeing all things and all people the right way, the lens which brings everything into focus. Jesus is the Plan of God to wrap us all in God’s Life and God’s Truth and make us fit for heaven.

Because Truth is just One Thing.