One of the modern tactics in politics and even in internet marketing is to flood the media with misinformation. If you get too many bad reviews of your services on the internet you can hire a firm to flood you site with hundreds of fake reviews that will bury the bad review. In politics when bad news rises the subject gets switched to something different, a new crisis, a new initiative, the opponent’s faults and responsibility. This is called obfuscation. And the modern world is filled with it.
Obfuscation is the magician’s art. You get people to focus their attention where you want them to focus so that you can do your dirt deeds unnoticed. The global warming scare is just such a scandal. The 1930’s was the hottest decade and temperatures have been falling ever since. “Scientists” have been revising the old temperature data to fit their computer models, rather than allowing the data to speak for itself. Since the data didn’t fit their theory, they got us to focus on the polar bears.
This past week I read an article about the volcanic activity under the Antarctic causing the melting of the huge ice formation. The melting has nothing to do with global warming caused by greenhouse gases, but by something over which we have no control, a volcano.
“It’s Bush’s fault” has been the battle cry over the last six years. No one every takes responsibility for something that happens under their domain, but the finger is always pointed toward Bush. Obfuscation.
But this is nothing new. People have been pointing fingers at other people since the beginning. It’s the snake, it’s the woman. In Jesus’ day many things were being said about Jesus. The religious leaders were beginning to spread rumors about Him. He works with the Devil. He parties too much. He has the wrong kind of friends. He is an enemy of the state.
It would be easy to listen to this campaign of misinformation. After the barrage of news, it might be easy to begin to doubt what you know. If everyone else feels this way, maybe I am wrong.
As Jesus has gathered His disciples and asked about public opinion on who He was, He turns and asks who they think He is. Peter pipes up and places the label “Messiah” on Him. So what would that mean?
Well, the Messiah is a two sided figure, religious reformer calling people back to a life of holiness and dedication, and as a result, a political figure who establishes a righteous kingdom here on earth. These two sides can’t be separated. And yet Jesus tells them to keep this reality under wraps. He doesn’t want people to know His true identity at that time. The people would have pushed for the political change without the power resulting from the Resurrection. Political change without Resurrection power leads to yet another corruption of God’s plan.
Messiah can’t mean ‘really good teacher’ as some today want us to believe Jesus was. We aren’t left with the option to think that his disciples got carried away and corrupted His message after His death. If Messiah simply means a really good teacher, then why tell disciples to keep it quiet. What harm would it do to let the world know that Jesus was just another really good teacher, like so many others. There is no danger in a really good teacher. No one listens to teachers anymore.
The Arnold Journey 