There's a classic line, okay, semi-classic, in the Tom Cruise - Jack Nicholson movie "A Few Good Men." Lawyer Cruise is confronting General-and-Antagonist Nicholson about the truth. Nicholson rises from his witness chair and shouts at Cruise, "You can't handle the truth!"
Most of us can't. Not the Gospel truth anyway; or perhaps I should say the truth of the Gospel. We may not be as contemptuous as Pilate who asked Jesus, "What is truth?" But we run from it, shy away from it, almost avoid it at all costs. For the truth of the Gospel message is very, very costly in terms of commitment and consequences. It comes at a price: that of our very lives.
Most of us, I suspect, pick and choose when it comes to the truth, like Nicholson's General. We choose that part which suits us and neglect, overlook or deny that which causes us anguish. Then in order to defend our denial of the whole truth, we turn the tables and accuse those who call us on the carpet of not being able to understand or, in Nicholson's words, handle the truth.
We also use the tactic of vociferously defending that part of the truth, that part of the Gospel message which suits us and which we can uphold. We make so much noise that those who would challenge us on the other aspects of the truth which we neglect can hardly get a word in edgewise. We become relentless in our pursuit of a partial truth, often very relentless.
We become crusaders for an issue that seems valid but which seems to become the only issue. But what we do in the process is miss the greater issue, the greater Gospel truth perhaps because it is so clear and so simple. That very basic message is that we must love everyone else with our total being, no matter who they are, no matter what they do., even what they believe.
But we do not. We claim that we love the sinner but hate the sin. But the sin that we crusade against subsumes the sinner and we can no longer recognize that fact. We claim we love Joe Smith but hate his adulterous ways. Actually we hate that Adulterous Joe Smith. We cannot seem to separate the two.
It is easy to condemn sins. It is very difficult to love the one who commits those sins or what we perceive to be sins: they may, in fact, not be sins, only that we have decided they are. Jesus loved everyone no matter what they did. He loved each person as a person. That was what brought about their conversions, not the condemnation of their sins.
Nicholson was right. As Christians, we do not really want to hear the truth of the Gospel because we would have to spend most of our time dealing with how we as individuals do not live out the truth of the message. That's no fun. It's more fun telling others that they can't handle the truth, that they are sinners. It's not fun realizing that at times we are no better than they, no fun at all.
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