I have developed an extra layer of my relationship to the person of Jesus of Nazareth this Holy Week, this year in particular. With these kinds of troubles facing our people. Similar injustices, different millennia. Same need to speak out and be bold in favor of justice. If we think of this in terms of something that God really hopes we’ll manage to pull off, to speak uncomfortable truth to power must be considered holy.
But there’s more to this form of speech than merely arguing. Or even winning an argument. It focuses itself on the intention of bringing someone around to a more loving way of thinking. It’s not about beating them down or, especially, cutting them off. It is about finding that middle route which gets around the defenses and helps them actually feel safer in the end. Even if after a bit of uncomfortable reckoning.
To speak holy truth is not simply to say what is correct. It is to participate in something older and deeper than correctness — a moral clarity that carries both light and heat. Holy truth illuminates, yes, but it can also burn. So the question is not only whether we speak truth, but how we hold it, and how we care for the aftermath of waking someone up. It does burn a little. It’s not a pretty process. Bring ointment.
There is a temptation, especially in times of ethical conflict, to treat truth like a weapon. To sharpen it. To wield it. To prove, to expose, to win. And sometimes, if we are honest, to punish. But truth that is used this way may still be accurate, yet it ceases to be holy. It becomes something else — something closer to self-righteousness than righteousness. It will move no boulders. Only settle them further into the sediment.
Holy truth requires discipline. It asks us to examine our own motives before we open our mouths. Are we speaking to restore, or to dominate? To invite transformation, or to secure our own sense of superiority? The line between these can be thin.
In the Christian tradition, this tension appears again and again in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He spoke hard truths — uncomfortable truths — about hypocrisy, injustice and the misuse of power. But he did not speak them indiscriminately. His harshest words were reserved for those who held authority and used it to harm others. To the vulnerable, to those caught in moral failure or social shame, his truth sounded different. It came as invitation. As restoration. As a path forward rather than a final verdict. This distinction matters.
Because when we encounter ethical error in others — and we will — we are standing at a crossroads. One path leads toward condemnation disguised as clarity. The other leads toward accountability shaped by compassion. Both involve truth. But only one preserves the dignity of the person standing before us. Which is the only way we move forward.
Compassion does not mean avoidance. It is not kindness to ignore harm, nor is it loving to remain silent when silence allows injustice to continue. But compassion changes the posture from which truth is spoken. It reminds us that the person we are addressing is not reducible to their error. That they are, like us, unfinished. Capable of change. Worth the effort of careful speech.
There is a phrase often attributed to the Buddha — though its exact origins are debated — that offers a kind of ethical filter for speech: before speaking, ask whether it is true, whether it is necessary, and whether it is kind. All must be answered yes before speaking. These are not soft questions. They are rigorous ones. Something can be true and still not be necessary. It can be necessary and still not kind. Holy truth asks us to hold all three together, even when it is difficult.
And it is difficult.
Speaking truth justly requires courage. It means resisting the comfort of silence when silence would be easier. It means risking misunderstanding, or even rejection.
But speaking truth compassionately requires something just as demanding: restraint. It asks us to resist the urge to say everything we think, to deliver our truth in its rawest, most unfiltered form. We can so easily satisfy our rage upon someone. Speaking holy truth asks us to consider not only the content of our words, but their impact.
Justice without compassion is not separate from cruelty. Compassion without justice will be complicity always. Holy truth lives in the tension between the two.
It is the difference between a hammer and a bridge.
A hammer imposes. It forces change through impact. But a bridge — if built well — invites crossing. It creates the possibility of movement from one place to another. When we speak truth in a way that is just and compassionate, we are not simply declaring what is wrong. We are constructing a path by which someone might come to see it for themselves.
This is the deepest responsibility of all. This is the full weight of what Jesus was trying to convince us to take upon ourselves. To live this powerfully. To move the goal post.
Because the goal of holy truth is not merely to correct behavior. It is to awaken conscience. To call forth something within the other person that recognizes, however faintly at first, the shape of what is good and right. This cannot be coerced. It must be invited. Which means we must also be willing to listen.
This is the part we often forget. The speaking of truth is only one half of the equation. The other half is the willingness to remain in relationship long enough to hear how our words land, to be changed by the encounter ourselves, and to acknowledge that we, too, are capable of error.
Humility is not optional in this work. It is the ground on which all holy speech must stand.
Because the truth we carry is never ours alone. It is something we participate in, imperfectly, provisionally. We see in part. We understand in part. And so we speak not as those who have arrived, but as those who are still on the way.
There is, in the end, no formula that guarantees we will get this right every time. We will speak too sharply when we should have softened. We will hold back when we should have spoken. We will misunderstand, and be misunderstood.
But the responsibility remains. To tell the truth. To tell it justly. To tell it with compassion. To stand our ground and know with all our being that it will be okay.
And to remember that the person before us is not the enemy, even when they are in error. They are, like us, a bearer of dignity. A participant in the same fragile, unfinished human story.
If we can hold that — if we can speak from that place — then even the hardest truths may become something more than correction.
They may become, in their own quiet way, an offering of grace.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
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