03.12 | Truth Walks
2 & 3 John
‘I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.’
3 John 1:4
Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese second lieutenant in World War II, posted on Lubang Island in the Philippines. When the war ended, flyers were scattered into the jungle areas in which Onoda was posted, to spread the good news.
But Onoda didn’t believe them. Considering them a hoax, he continued living in the jungle alongside three other soldiers, an ongoing guerrilla warfare in a battle nobody else was still fighting. While the rest of the world celebrated and moved on, while the baby boomer generation was born, and the Civil Rights movement happened in the United States, Onoda remained in the jungle. On several occasions, Onoda was involved in shootouts with locals or with the police. His fellow soldiers either surrendered or were killed, ultimately leaving him alone, holding to his mission. Eventually, his former commanding officer Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, flew to Lubang to personally relieve him of his mission.
This finally happened in 1974.
For twenty-nine years, Hiroo Onoda was fighting a war in which nobody else was fighting.
Today we read two letters of John, written briefly—due to his preference to meet and speak face-to-face with those to whom he writes. And yet, in both letters, John uses the same phrase:
Walking in the truth.
It is a truth that confronts us, for it raises a dual idea.
That it is possible to walk in untruth.
And that it is possible to hear truth, and yet not to walk in it.
To walk, in the Scriptures, carries a more significant meaning than simply what you or I do when we make our way down the street. Walking is a phrase used to describe the whole of your conduct and the whole of your life. It is a word that metaphorically describes all of your ways and doings, your choices and words, your actions and endeavours. Walking is used as a metaphor for our entire manner of living.
The Greek word that John used for truth, as he sat to pen this word in the late First Century, is alētheia. But alētheia does not really describe theoretical truths, or hypothetical truths, or the truths of the academic. Such truths belong in textbooks and academic discussions. Alētheia describes that which is real. It describes reality. John is not referring here to something ethereal or cerebral, but something tangible, practical, personal, and universal. He is describing the way things truly are.
Walk in the truth.
The tragedy of Hiroo Onoda’s story is of a life wasted. He heard news of a greater reality, and yet remained living in narratives of the past. For twenty-nine years he lived far from his home. For twenty-nine years he lived with fear and violence. For twenty-nine years he walked in untruth.
There is an invitation and a reminder to us in these words. For the truths that we believe—of a God of utter love, who created a world intended for goodness and yet lost to sin, before being gloriously won back by His own intervention in history in the person of His Son; whose love reaches personally and specifically to you and to me, to restore us in love to glory, to participation, and to the wholeness for which He always intended us—are not merely truths for the mind or droning recitation. They are reality. They are the way things are. They are the declaration of victory, and the invitation to the ways of life beyond, where love becomes our paradigm and the grave is eternally defeated.
Hear the joy of John, dear friends. For the Christian way is endlessly further up and further in to a whole way of being that is defined by the new realities. Where fear gives way to love, and darkness gives way to light, and death itself gives way to the life of eternity, inbreaking into our every moment.
For the victory is won. And thus, dear friends, we walk in the truth.
Reflect:
Where do I see myself walking as if the truths of Jesus were not true?
Pray:
Father,
I ask you for a kind of renewal in me—
Not one of theoretical statements,
Or religious actions;
But rather,
Of a reorientation of my entire ways of thinking and being and doing,
That I be utterly reshaped
According to reality.
That, Father,
Love be the atmosphere of my every thought,
And life be the trajectory of my every expectation,
And hope be the animating vibrancy of every beat of my heart,
That my life may not walk in unreality,
But Father,
That through the renewing of your Spirit and your Scripture,
I may daily, hourly, and eternally
Walk in the truth.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Hosea 1-3 | Proverbs 29:12-22