Dear friend,
I want to sit with you tonight over something that has been in my mind all week.
Not an answer. A question.
Specifically: a question that was asked of Jesus directly, face to face, by one of the most powerful men in the world. A question that Jesus had every ability to answer. A question that the man asking it genuinely wanted answered.
And Jesus said nothing.
I have been thinking about why for fifty years. And this week something shifted in how I understand it. I want to tell you what I found. Not because I have the answer. Because I think the question itself is the thing worth sitting with tonight.
You will find this moment in John chapter 18.
Jesus is standing before Pontius Pilate. He has been arrested. He has been beaten. He is hours away from the cross. Pilate is questioning him; not because he believes Jesus is guilty, the text makes clear he does not, but because the political pressure is enormous and he is trying to find a way out of a situation that has no good exit.
And Jesus says something that stops Pilate completely.
He says: everyone on the side of truth listens to me.
Pilate looks at this battered, arrested, powerless man standing before him in chains. And he asks a question that has echoed across two thousand years of human history.
He says: what is truth?
And then John records something extraordinary.
He turned and went out.
That is all. What is truth. And then he left.
Jesus did not answer him.
I want you to sit with that for a moment before I say anything else.
Pilate asked what is truth to the only person who has ever walked this earth who could have answered that question with complete authority. The only person who ever said I am the way and the truth and the life. The living answer to the question was standing right in front of him.
And the answer was silence.
Why?
I have heard many explanations across fifty years. That Pilate was not genuinely asking. That it was a cynical political question from a cynical political man who had already decided what he was going to do. That he walked out before Jesus could answer because he did not actually want to know.
I think there is truth in that. But I do not think it is the whole truth.
Because I have noticed something about the way Jesus handled questions throughout the Gospels. He did not always answer the question that was asked. He answered the question underneath the question. The real question. The one the person asking had not yet found the words for.
And sometimes the most honest answer to a question is to let the person sit with it long enough to discover what they were really asking.
What was Pilate really asking?
I do not think he was asking for a philosophical definition of truth. I think he was asking something more personal than that. Something closer to — is there anything real in this world that is worth more than my position and my comfort and my survival?
Is there something true enough to stand on when everything else is shifting?
He was a Roman governor in an occupied territory trying to manage an impossible situation. He had seen enough of the world to know that power was real and loyalty was fragile and the things people called truth had a way of changing depending on who was in the room. He was a man who had stopped believing that anything was solid.
And then he met someone who spoke about truth the way most people speak about the weather. Casually. Confidently. As if it were simply the most obvious thing in the world.
I think what is truth was not cynicism. I think it was the question of a man who had forgotten that the answer existed. Who had been in the world of power and politics and compromise long enough that he had genuinely lost track of whether anything was real.
And Jesus let the question hang in the air because some questions need to hang in the air. Because the answer you find after sitting with a question long enough is a different thing from the answer someone gives you. It becomes yours in a way that given answers never do.
I want to ask you something tonight and I want you to actually sit with it rather than answer it immediately.
What is the question you have been carrying this week that you have not been able to resolve?
Not a theological question necessarily. A real one. The kind that visits you late at night or in the quiet of the morning before the day begins. The kind that does not have an easy answer and that you have been putting off sitting with properly because sitting with it properly is uncomfortable.
I am not going to answer it for you tonight. That is not what this letter is for.
What I want to say is this. The questions that will not leave you alone are almost never accidental. In my experience across fifty years of sitting with people in their hardest moments, the questions that keep returning are the ones that are trying to show you something. That are pointing toward something you need to see that you have not been able to see yet from where you are currently standing.
Pilate walked out without his answer. He went back to the crowd and tried to manage the situation and eventually handed Jesus over to be crucified. He chose the noise over the silence. The political solution over the unanswered question.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if he had stayed.
I have been sitting with my own version of that question this week.
Not about truth in the abstract. About whether I have said enough clearly enough in the time I have had to say it. Whether the things I have written to you have done the work they were meant to do. Whether the pattern I see in Scripture and in what is happening in this country has been communicated with enough precision that the people who need it most can actually hold onto it when the noise gets loud.
That is the question I have been carrying this week. And I have not fully resolved it.
What I have is this. I wrote the clearest thing I know how to write about what I believe God is doing in America right now. I called it They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. I wrote it not as a political document but as an honest attempt to answer the question underneath the question. Not what is happening. Why. And what it means for the people watching it happen.
If you have been carrying your own version of that question this week — why is this happening, what does it mean, is there a pattern underneath the chaos — I believe that guide will give you something to sit with that is more durable than a news cycle. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with Pilate.
He asked what is truth and walked out without waiting for the answer. And history records what happened next. He handed an innocent man over to be crucified. He washed his hands. He went back to his life.
And the man he handed over rose from the dead three days later and changed the entire course of human history.
Pilate's question turned out to be the most important question ever asked in that room. And the answer turned out to be standing right in front of him the whole time.
I think about that often. About how close people can get to the answer and still walk out without it. About how the noise and the pressure and the political calculation can fill the space where the silence needed to be.
Do not walk out tonight, friend. Sit with the question a little longer.
The answer is closer than you think.
God bless you. Have a quiet and wondering weekend.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This weekend I want you to do two things:
One. Read John chapter 18 verses 28 through 40 this weekend. The whole account of Jesus before Pilate. Read it slowly. Pay attention to every moment where Pilate almost makes a different choice. Sit with the question he asked. Let it ask you the same thing.
Two. Read They Tried To Stop Him this weekend: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it as my honest attempt to answer the question underneath the question — not what is happening in America but why and what it means. I think it will give you something to sit with that lasts longer than the weekend.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.