Wrong, wrong… wrong

There was never a point when people were not getting it wrong about Jesus.

Herod thought Jesus was a challenger to his throne- the paranoia of all petty dictators who know that  those who claw their way to the top by betrayal and violence fall the same way. He thought Jesus just another pretender on the make. He was wrong. 

Jesus’s parents. Even though they’d been both warned what to expect by angels sent to tell them, they spent his childhood being astounded when people confirmed what the seraphs had said, amazed that when they lost him aged 12 they found him teaching the teachers in the Temple; perplexed by his adult ministry to the point that they wanted to force him to stop because they thought he’d lost his marbles. They were wrong.  

The disciples; the poor, confused disciples. Let us sit at your right and your left when you come into your kingdom. Let us make three booths, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah, hiding in the upper room, back fishing. A stumbling block, setting their minds on human things not divine;  So many times in so many ways, again and again. Wrong.

The crowds who wanted more bread. The crowds who wanted to make him king. The chief priests. The high priest. The pharisees and sadducees.  The scoffers at the crucifixion. The women at the tomb. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. 

As it’s the feast of the Epiphany today, let’s not forget the Magi following the star; they rocked up at the palace looking for the king. Awkward. Wrong.  All that way looking for royalty and at journey’s end they found instead a peasant baby.

From Bethlehem to Calvary, from then till now, there was never a point when people were not getting it wrong about Jesus.

Which is not really that surprising. God, incarnate as a human, among humans, with a ministry to humans, and if there’s one thing that defines being human it’s getting it wrong. 

And rarely getting any better, rarely learning the lesson, rarely learning from their mistakes.

Talking of mistakes, I did a degree in psychology. Obviously this means I can read minds. Don’t worry I won’t tell anybody what’s going on in there, but really? At your age? 

Because psychology sometimes looks like common sense (rather than nonsense) its academic terminology sometimes makes it into our everyday conversation, and almost always when it’s being used, it’s wrong. How many times have you heard someone say ‘this is a learning curve’? (I think you mean a steep learning curve).Or I’m a bit OCD about this? I think you mean you prefer things just so, not that you’re actually experiencing the anxiety ridden misery that is true obsessive compulsive disorder.  Triggering, gaslighting, narcissistic. From the Guardian to Good Morning Britain, chocca with analyst’s jargon and nine times out of ten,  of course, wrong.

Recently, I’ve noticed ‘cognitive dissonance’ out of the lab and in the media, usually used trying to describe someone who is contradicting themselves or is in two minds about something. As ever, wrong.

Cognitive dissonance is a complex idea that a person can hold two conflicting thoughts in their mind at the same time. Because their conflicting, this creates mental discord, an unpleasant experience. Most often the conflict will be between what we believe and what we do. Belief: I am a good driver. Behaviour: I was looking at my phone and I almost ran into the back of the car in front. Instant Birtwhistle in the brain. What is of interest to psychologists is how we resolve that conflict in the grey stuff without the extreme expedient of bashing our heads against a brick wall. And what we usually do is this:

I glanced at the phone but the car in front braked suddenly- it’s their fault not mine. 

That is, what I did was right, because I did it. Pure mental Mozart. Discordance, gone.

It may be an analysis of the situation that nobody else would agree with, but it works for us: we stay a good driver and our brain no longer sounds like a toddler thinking they’re Lang Lang.

It’s so much  easier to bring what we believe into line with our actions than it is to change our behaviour to fit our beliefs.  It’s easier to change what we believe than to change what we do. So…we keep right on doing it.

This means, most of the time, in most ways, about most things, we are wrong.

Worse, we will continue being wrong, because… we find it very, very hard to admit that we are wrong- so we simply change our belief about what is right and what’s not; so as far as we’re concerned, we’re never in the wrong.

But we are. Most particularly, we are wrong about God. All of us: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Christians. Wrong about God. It can’t be any other way.  Even if we’ve learned the three creeds, the articles of religion and the entire catechism by heart, if we’ve read the Bible including the Apocrypha cover to cover and our knowledge of the faith would make our bishop look like a beginner; even if there’s nobody more orthodox in what they believe than we: we are wrong. It can’t be any other way. What we believe about God is only ever an approximation; good enough to get us by, like pi for engineering, but we can only be in error. What we know is incomplete, we see in a mirror dimly. What we can know is only ever the smallest part of the whole; our guesses about the rest will be wrong.

And I think we do need to know that we are wrong about God; the risks are great if we do not. If we believe we have it right about God then we have nothing left to learn; if we cannot be surprised by him or delighted by his providence, if we cannot find our cherished beliefs confounded, our certainties turned upside down and inside out and round about; if we cannot admit readily that something we have always believed to be right is wrong; our faith will be rigid, inflexible, cruel and unloving. You don’t have to walk far to find a church like that. If we find ourselves in that certain space, then whatever we think we have found, it is not God.

What then can we do if we are always going to be wrong about God? 

Back to the Magi.

They have journeyed far to see the new king. They thought they would find him in the palace. They didn’t. They’d got it wrong. But, still, on they went. And they were led to Jesus. 

They could have turned round and huffed back home, stormed out of the stable, decided someone (not them obviously) had got the calculations wrong; decided they’d been right all along and Herod was hiding the child. 

But they didn’t. They were willing to admit they had been wrong. And then they’d found so much more than they were looking for. But they had to leave the beliefs they came with first, they had to lay aside their desire to protect their self esteem, allow the dissonance to resolve in another way. They came looking for a king: they found God.

We are wrong about God. But we are not wrong to want to know God. And so we must realise that our faith is not a thing that we can have and hold, it is a pilgrimage, a journey we are taking. We do not arrive at our destination as soon as we have taken our first step. We are following the star; we don’t know, we can’t know where it will take us; If we think we know, we are wrong. Neverthless we travel on, following the star, trusting that light. What the journey will be, we cannot know. But we can know who that star is leading us to: to God.