We’d probably agree that truth is at something of a premium today. When the fact-checking team of the “Washington Post” started to catalogue President Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 in the first 100 days of his presidency alone. And that was just for starters: by the end of his term, they reckon that he had uttered 30,573 untruths, which comes to about 21 erroneous claims – or should we say “lies”? – per day. What’s especially striking is how this “tsunami of untruths” kept rising the longer he served; it increased steadily from about six per day in his first year as president, to 39 per day in his final year. And, of course, we all know how he attacked incontrovertible, proveable facts which he didn’t want to hear as “fake news”; I’m troubled by the fact that so many people, including Christian pastors, believed (and still believe) that he is a truthful man.

That’s perhaps an extreme case; but I’m sure many of us, if presented with something that claims to be true, say: “But can we be sure?” It seems to me that there are many challenges to truth today. One is that it’s considered arrogant to say, “I’m right and you’re wrong” – we prefer to say something like, “Well, this is the truth as I see it – but you may have a different view”. Hopefully that wouldn’t be the case if you could both look out of the window and see the rain tipping down; but few debates are resolved that easily. Another challenge to truth comes from the Internet: this can be a wonderful source of information but it’s also a place where false so-called “facts”, errors, conspiracy theories and downright lies freely circulate – we’ve come a long way from carefully peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals (although these do still exist). Neither can we necessarily trust the printed or broadcast media; just this week I was listening to a radio programme which said that editors are putting more and more pressure on journalists to produce good stories quickly without much interest in whether they are actually true. This is placing huge stresses on journalists who want to present an accurate and impartial account of what is going on, as that takes time and can even be dangerous.

And so (“At last!”, you’ll say) we come to the Bible; and, in particular, to the verse in which Jesus speaks about the “Spirit of truth”. John places this in the setting of the Last Supper, although it’s possible that he, as editor of his Gospel, has actually brought together several nuggets of what Jesus said and put them into an appropriate context. What we read, anyway, is that Jesus and his disciples have eaten their meal, that Judas has already left the room, and that Jesus knows it won’t be long before his persecutors come to arrest him in the Garden of Gethsemane. There is a sense of tension and urgency in the air; the disciples are horrified to be told that Jesus is about to leave them, at least for “a little while”, and Jesus is determined to reassure them with one final round of teaching – teaching about the Holy Spirit which, unsurprisingly, they struggle to understand.

Jesus gives the Holy Spirit two names or titles in this short passage. The first is “Paraclete”, which isn’t exactly a word which we use every day! It’s a Greek word which literally means “someone you can call on to stand beside you” and which can be translated as “advocate” (in the legal sense), “strengthener” (which is what “Comforter” in the old King James Bible actually means), even “tutor”.

The other title, the one I’m focussing on this morning, is “Spirit of truth”; and we almost need to think of that as one phrase, linked by hyphens: “Spirit-of-truth”. I say this because, very often, we use the word “spirit” in terms of a vague feeling or atmosphere: “There’s a fantastic spirit among the lads in the dressing room, it will help us to do well in the competition” or “Our company is committed to a spirit of creative innovation and great service” (ugh!). But that’s not what Jesus is saying here: he is talking about a living entity, a person, in fact the Third Person of the Trinity. Although he doesn’t have a body and can’t be seen (which was disappointing to the disciples and puzzling for us), the Holy Spirit  is just as much a person as God the Father and Jesus himself.

So why is Jesus sending this Spirit of Truth, what (to put things a bit crudely) is his job? Well, let’s get some inaccurate ideas out of the way first. We’re not being told that he will help us to be truthful people, although Christians are supposed to be people who tell the truth and churches are supposed to be places of honesty and integrity. As it happens, I’m sure that becoming more truthful is part of becoming more Christ-like, and I believe that that’s something the Holy Spirit does do if we let him. But it’s not what Jesus is talking about here.

Nor do I think that Jesus telling us about the Holy Spirit’s character, that he is a Spirit who is always true to himself: honest, trustworthy and reliable; nor that he is truthful when he speaks, saying what he means without exaggeration, pretence, flattery or obfuscation. Again, I do believe that these are qualities which perfectly describe the Holy Spirit; but they’re what Jesus is wanting to say here.

No; Jesus is being very specific – and we must remember that he was speaking to a group of disciples who were saying, “We need you to tell us what to do, so what will we do if you’re not here? How on earth will we cope?” I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that they were panicking at the thought of life without their leader to guide them. So what Jesus was saying – and he amplifies this in the next couple of chapters – is that the Holy Spirit would continue to teach the disciples the truth about God, and that he would keep on leading and guiding them, just as Jesus had done. In a sense he was preparing his friends for that time after his Ascension when he knew he would have vanished for good. And of course we are in the same situation.

However we have a problem – in fact two very similar ones! One is a problem about religion in general: how can we say that there is just one truth or set of truths about God? We live in a world where people follow many religions; and while some sit fairly free to ideas of God, others are not only very specific in what they say about him (if God truly is a him!) but say that they are the ones with the “real truth”. Here I’m thinking in particular about Christianity and Islam, both of which would claim that they possess the truth about God rather than the other. And we can see those claims in verses such as Jesus saying, “I am the Way, the truth and the Life; no-one comes to the Father except by me”, or Peter declaring that “there is no other name under heaven and earth by which we must be saved, except Jesus”. Equally Muslims will declare that Muhammad is God’s final and true prophet; Jesus does get a look-in but he is not regarded as the divine Saviour in the way we do.

I suspect that most of us are uneasy about saying that “our faith is the only true faith” and that other religions are, at best, incomplete and, at worst, inaccurate distortions. As I hinted earlier, that sounds incredibly arrogant; I think that many Christians (though probably not Muslims), if pushed, would actually say, “Many religions are valid, they’re all different ways of expressing the same truths about God, you can take your pick as to which is true for you”. The problem of course – and we must remember that Christianity was born in a world of several competing faiths – is that we aren’t really given the option of taking that line. For Jesus tells us that it’s the Christian Holy Spirit who will lead us into the truth about God, rather than any other. That’s something which each of us will have to think through for ourselves.

So we have the problem of different religions all claiming to know the truth about God. But (and this may be an even harder nut to crack!) we have the problem of different Christians who claim to know the truth about God. They would each say that they have been led by the Holy Spirit, they would all claim to be interpreting the Bible correctly. But can that really be true? If so, it makes the Holy Spirit sound as if he’s been leading one set of Christians in one way and another in the opposite direction! Someone that doesn’t sound right, does it!

We all know that there are issues which deeply divide the Christian Church. There always have been, over the centuries, albeit about differing topics. When I was a young man there was a great deal of debate about Charismatic gifts of the Spirit, with some folk declaring that God wanted to give these to present-day Christians and others avowing that they had been withdrawn from the Church once the New Testament was complete. There was the debate over female leaders, with some denominations not only embracing them with open arms but weeping with shame because they’d been sidelined for so long, and others sticking to the line of “We can’t have woman ministers because Jesus only chose men to be his Apostles”. At the moment it’s matters of gender and same-sex marriage which are provoking lots of discussion and disagreement, not least within my own Baptist Union.

So who, in all these matters, is being led by the Holy Spirit? Everyone says that they have the “truth”, but are some of them mistaken? Is it right, if God is guiding each one of us, for one church to arrive at their conclusion while the one down the road comes to a diametrically-opposite one? Jesus said that God’s Spirit would lead us into truth – but it clearly isn’t always easy to know exactly what the truth is. As a result, Christ’s Church has become argumentative and fragmented.

I don’t have all the answers to this dilemma. It’s easy to say that some Christians are so entrenched in their positions that they have closed their minds to God, that they’re unwilling to let him give them fresh insights or lead them down unfamiliar paths. It’s also easy to say that other Christians have either sat too lightly to the Bible’s teaching and have confused trends in secular society with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But, while both those sentences may well be true, they don’t help us understand why sincere and devout Christians who love God deeply, who read their Bibles intelligently and who earnestly seek guidance through prayer, can arrive at such different understandings about God and his truth.

The only things I can say is that we’re all conditioned by our background, that none of us understand the Bible perfectly, and that we’re never as attuned to God as we might be. I’d add that God is much bigger and complex than we are and that, at times, his truth may have aspects which we can’t reconcile in our human minds but which present no problem to him whatsoever. Is that a helpful way of looking at things? I’m not sure.

It was Pontius Pilate who asked Jesus, “What is truth?” It’s hard to tell whether he was genuinely searching for an answer or not, but it’s certainly a question which philosophers have grappled with since ancient times. (In fact philosophy has a specific branch which deals exclusively with the theory of knowledge). Perhaps the main thought that Christians need to keep in mind is something which I mentioned earlier, which is that we think of “truth” in a religious sense we aren’t thinking of an idea but of a person, Jesus Christ, who declared that he himself was God’s truth, God’s word, God’s light, and God’s life for the world. And it he who, despite our unanswered questions, we must serve, proclaim and worship.