Easter is coming and people will flock to church. Few will hear a sermon based on the gospel of Matthew 28:11-15.
This is not the story of the women arriving first, nor the story of the angels who sat where Jesus had lain, nor the story of Mary encountering a man she thought was a gardener. None of these are as relevant today as the story often ignored, of the elders bribing the soldiers to report that Jesus’ disciples came during the night and stole the body of Jesus.
“Their story,” the gospel writer records, “spread widely and they tell it still today.”
It is a biblical version of the Big Lie.
How is it that people, thousands of people, believe one story when scores of witnesses report a very different story… in this case, that they had seen Jesus days after his burial?
How is it that people believe the Big Lie?
To find an answer to this question, we only need to hear millions of Russians talk today. What war? They ask and then deny any reports of an invasion into Ukraine. Oh yes, they say, our soldiers are putting down a rebellion and protecting our citizens. But a war, with tanks and planes and buildings destroyed and refugees homeless? None of that has happened.
They believe this Big Lie based on the repeated assertions of their leader, Vladimir Putin.
Millions of people—not all, by any means—but millions.
We look askance at these apparently gullible people. How is it that so many people living so close to the great drama of the world today can fail to understand, accept, and embrace what is so apparently true to us?
But people are gullible.
Think of the Germans during the reign of Hitler. They believed his repeated lies about the Jews: that they had murdered Jesus, that they ate babies, that they were engaged in a global conspiracy to undermine the German people and control the world.
Believing this cluster of lies allowed Hitler and his minions to demonize the Jews, gather them into concentration camps, and murder six million of them…using the labor of his own German people, many of whom were baptized Christians.
How could this happen? How could people believe that Big Lie?
But we have our own illustration of this phenomenon right here in the United States. We have our own Big Lie.
Millions of people believe that Joe Biden was catapulted to the nation’s highest office in an election rife with fraud, that Donald J. Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and that a great and expansive coverup has been perpetrated upon the American people.
Forget the reality.
Nobody has been tagged with fraud even after massive investigations in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, even after more than 45 judges have heard arguments to that effect. Unless we count the former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his wife Debra who apparently fraudulently registered to vote in North Carolina!
Nevertheless, millions of people in these United States believe this Big Lie. And they do so based also exclusively on the assertion of their political leader. Embracing the Big Lie is the primary way they show deference and loyalty to Mr. Trump.
We should not be surprised, then, when we read of Russians denying all the images and testimonies we are seeing on the daily news.
More important, we need to examine our own convictions, to bring them under scrutiny, to say to ourselves: “Am I ignoring evidence about politics or religion or health or history? Am I buying into a mass appropriation of willful deceit? Am I even passively acknowledging the legitimacy of some prejudice, some position, some doctrine that deep down I suspect is false?”
We have often done just these things in relation to unpopular judgments, directed toward minority groups, or as such things impact the political or religious mood of the day. It is easy to be swept along with the sentiment of our group even if it means we must believe some Big Lie.
It takes courage to stand against the clan, to break ranks with the tribe, to repudiate even our own family, to denounce the Big Lie that everybody else affirms.
Honors and approbation to Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at state-controlled Channel 1 in Russia. She ran onto the studio set during a live broadcast holding a sign saying, “no war”. She was arrested and grilled for 14 hours.
But that is what often happens when even a lone citizen or adherent no longer believes the Big Lie.
(March 2022)
