A Reflection for Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent
Find today’s readings here.
Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said,
“This is truly the Prophet.”
Others said, “This is the Christ.”
But others said, “The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he?
Does not Scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family
and come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?”
So a division occurred in the crowd because of him.
Some of them even wanted to arrest him,
but no one laid hands on him.
I never listened to podcasts until the pandemic. When lockdown began, they (temporarily) replaced the hole in my life that had once been filled by in-person conversation, and some of my favorite hosts became my parasocial friends and teachers. When I think of my first apartment in New York, where I worked remotely for America for a year and where I spent most of my time until vaccines became widely available, I almost feel like Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, the then-cohosts of “You’re Wrong About,” lived there with me.
On their media criticism podcast, these two journalists dive deeply into the past and set the record straight on historical events or people that have, as they put it, “been miscast in the public imagination.” The format usually goes like this: One host researches the episode’s topic and presents it to the other host, who comes in knowing little to nothing about the topic, serving as a kind of stand-in for the general public’s memory of it. Usually we discover that the story is not exactly as we remember it or as it has been told to us. In other words, if you think you know it all, chances are you’re wrong about it. (Title of show!)
Listening to Sarah and Michael, I went down rabbit holes on everything from the O.J. Simpson trial to the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s to figure skater Tonya Harding. Along the way, I came to respect and appreciate the hosts’ healthy level of suspicion about the stories we tell ourselves. They asked, and in turn taught me to ask, questions like: What do you not need evidence to believe? What do you accept without question? How often are you wrong because of those assumptions?
I was surprised when these were also the kinds of questions that popped into my head when I read today’s Gospel. To be more precise, I recognized a kind of inverse of these questions in the crowd’s reaction to the idea that this man they have just heard speak is Christ. They have an idea, a story they have been told about who the Messiah will be, where he will come from, what qualities he will have. Because of this, some listeners get stuck on their way to recognizing Jesus for who he is. Rather than believing or assuming something without evidence, they struggle to believe in the living evidence they see before their eyes.
I think there’s a place for healthy suspicion, and certainly for questioning, when it comes to the stories we think we know about God and ourselves. I’d like to think I could treat my own relationship with God with the same kind of enthusiasm and curiosity I bring to my favorite historical and pop culture rabbit holes, diving deeply enough to learn something new and being open-minded enough to challenge my assumptions.
What a gift it would be, several times in the course of a long life, to come across a new insight, in matters of the head or heart, that makes us spiritually re-evaluate. What I thought I knew about God? I was wrong.
Thanks to a pair of smart podcast hosts, I know how great, how exciting, it is to be wrong. Being wrong is the beginning of something: Now I get the fun of going down a new rabbit hole. The story of God and me continues to unfold.
