Who are you going to trust?

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010719.cfm
1 John 3:22-4:6
Matthew 4:12-17, 23-25

There’s a quote often attributed to Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me, or your own lyin’ eyes?” That’s the way I remembered it. But after a little investigative work, it turns out to be close but not exactly correct.

According to the website quoteinvestigator.com, a similar remark was actually spoken by Chico Marx in the 1933 movie “Duck Soup”. Chico, as the character Chicolini, was made up to look like the character played by Groucho, and the mistaken identity was led to this exchange between actress Margaret Dumont playing Mrs. Gloria Teasdale and Chicolini:

Teasdale: Your Excellency, I thought you left.

Chicolini: Oh no. I no leave.

Teasdale: But I saw you with my own eyes.

Chicolini: Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines trust as “to rely on the truthfulness or accuracy of”.  We are asked all of the time to trust what we hear or see. There is an underlying implication that all is well, you don’t have to check things out – trust me! When a company tells you that their product will make your teeth whiter, give you better gas mileage, or make you money on your investments, they are asking you to trust them. If you find out, often later, that not everything you were told was true, you become skeptical and distrustful.

“Trust, but verify” entered American usage when Reagan’s adviser on Russian affairs, Suzanne Massie, was preparing the president for talks with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. Perhaps Reagan ought to learn a few Russian proverbs, Massie suggested, and the one he liked best was “Doveryai no proveryai” — trust, but verify. Reagan liked it so much, in fact, that Gorbachev expressed annoyance at the president for using it at every meeting.

Studies point out the ambiguity of “trust, but verify”: if you trust, you don’t need to verify. And if you insist on verifying, you are pretty much showing a lack of trust.

The internet as we know it today did not exist during Reagan’s two terms in office. The web browser, our window into the world’s online existence was not invented until 1990. As the personal computer market grew, so did the internet. People became able to communicate to many friends and acquaintances at one time, the ability to spread false information in a hurry became commonplace.

How do you know for sure if that email you got from your Uncle John which he forwarded from a friend’s lawyer is the real deal? That email said in part “For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, You will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.” Oh my! I’ll be rich!

I was on several “family and friends” email lists and would often get some kind of breathless offer of such richness, or that some celebrity wants me to co-star in a movie or some other offer that just doesn’t ring true.  How do you know?

I began turning to Snopes.com for a sanity check. Snopes got started in 1994, investigating urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore. On their About Us page, they describe what they do: “When misinformation obscures the truth and readers don’t know what to trust, Snopes.com’s fact checking and original, investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis. We always document our sources so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.” Seems trustworthy enough!

When I found that Uncle John had been misled, I would let him know that I looked up things on Snopes, that he was in fact a victim of a hoax, and even sent him the Snopes website link so that he could see for himself that I was truly working hard to protect his reputation. Uncle John took me off of his email list.

We live in a world of fake news and fact-checking. Too many politicians, news organizations, and pundits are telling us what they want us to hear. Who do we trust? It’s often a very complicated problem.

In our first reading today from 1 John, we are told “Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them, and the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit whom he gave us.” Seems pretty easy-pleasy. But then, we are admonished “do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether thy belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

Wow, we have just been told to not trust every spirit. What’s that all about? The spirits St. John is talking about are the influences and teachings that are being used to inform and direct us on matters of God. Some of these spirits are being used to gain power “in this world”, our daily lives here on earth. 

At the time John was writing this, the formative Christian church was dealing with many other attempts by groups to form a religion. One of the more notable teachings at the time was Gnostism. Jesus is identified by some Gnostics as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring God’s knowledge to the earth, while others adamantly denied that the supreme being came in the flesh, claiming Jesus to be merely a human who attained divinity through gnosis and taught his disciples to do the same. Among the Mandaeans, Jesus was considered a mšiha kdaba or "false messiah" who perverted the teachings entrusted to him by John the Baptist.

John was providing a roadmap on who to trust on matters of God. We are told that the test is this: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus came from God and was flesh as man is the Spirit of God, and those that fail to acknowledge Jesus are the spirit of the antichrist. The guidance was to only trust only those who understood and confessed (or proclaimed) that Jesus was true man and true God. This understanding was the source of the Spirit of God, all others were not to be trusted.