The Peripatetic Preacher
I steal my title today from that famous Tennessee Williams play, “Cat on a Hot Tine Roof,” when Big Daddy cries out in a kind of summary of the piece, “lies and mendacity!” In some 42 days, the current occupant of the White House, no slouch in the lies and mendacity department, will exit that famous abode and return to his sumptuous Florida estate. Trump’s lies or truth-stretching or resort to “alternative facts,” call it what you will, began early in his tenure and continued nearly unabated throughout the last four long years. The day after his inauguration as the 45th president, Sean Spicer (remember him?) announced that the crowds at that inauguration “far surpassed” those that appeared on the day Barak Obama was sworn in as president #44. Actual photos of the two events suggested clearly that Spicer, official spokesperson for the commander-in-chief, was in fact lying. Trump’s crowds were far smaller than Obama’s and though various doctored pictures were presented as “evidence,” the facts were obvious to anyone willing to compare the pictures. Thus began a veritable avalanche of untruths, comprising now, according to the fact-checkers at the Washington Post, over 23,000 such truth-bendings out of the president’s own mouth or the mouths of his ever-changing press people. Such misrepresentations finally included a hilariously altered chart of a hurricane’s possible path to include the state of Alabama, because Mr. Trump had claimed publically that the hurricane did threaten that state, despite there being no threat at all. The chart was changed via a crude drawn-in bubble with a Sharpie that included Alabama, fodder for late-night comedians for weeks.
Why all the lies? The constant wave of prevarications has kept psychologists and would-be amateur psychologist-pundits busy, churning out reams of copy and scads of on-camera musings. Well, we have been told, Trump is a narcissist, and as such he needs constant affirmation that he is above telling lies, that what some call lies are in reality to him merely his own genius-level understandings of what must be “true;” only the desperately “fake news” folk at the “anti-Trump” networks and newspapers could possibly believe that the president would ever consciously lie. In fact, Trump lies with numbing regularity, always trying to fit the world’s reality into his narrow vision of what is important and “true” for him in his universe. His crowds on inauguration day were in fact larger than Obama’s; the hurricane really did threaten Alabama and the reason it did not touch that state was thanks to good luck, having nothing to do with the projected path of the storm that never threatened the state at all. It has been said that Trump only lies when his lips or his twitter fingers are moving, a slight exaggeration, of course, but close enough to the truth to give one pause.
Lying is endemic to humanity, of course. All of us have lied at one time or another, either to save face, to appear smarter or better than we are, to show the world our superior wisdom, our supreme cleverness, or just to get what we want. Lying is rooted in multiple causes, and two biblical examples are especially telling. In reality, there are many biblical liars, but I have chosen the two I think are the supreme examples of invention in the entire Scripture.
The first is the priest Aaron, the purported brother of Moses, though all traditions of the Hebrew Bible do not see him as such. Nevertheless, in Exodus 32 he makes perhaps the biggest lie in the Bible. At the beginning of this rich scene, at the instigation of the restless people at the base of the sacred mountain of Sinai, Aaron makes with great care a molten calf, after he has demanded from the people all the gold they possess. Later, after the calf’s creation, and the subsequent wild ruckus that ensues around the object, Moses, upon completion of his brief chat with YHWH on the mountain’s top, heads down the mountain with the Ten Commandments in hand. Upon witnessing the chaotic picture at the mountain’s base, he hurls the tablets of the Torah onto the ground, shattering them in pieces, and then confronts Aaron, whom he had deputized to take care of any problems while he was gone, demanding to know what the people had done to him to cause him to lead them to sin so egregiously. Aaron’s reply to Moses’s fury is a superb and overt series of falsehoods. He first assures Moses that he knows these terrible people all too well; they are “in evil,” he says, meaning they are rotten to their core. He then reports that he had politely asked the people whether they had any gold; in fact he had demanded gold from them. And finally he says that when they brought their gold to him he just tossed it in the fire and, surprise, surprise, out popped this calf!
The source of Aaron’s whopper appears to be fear in the face of the enraged Moses, fresh from his confrontation with the fiery YHWH. However, the richness of his lies also, I suggest, stem from his desire for power over the people of Israel, his genuine belief that they are just no good and need direction. However, his manufacture of the calf, a fact he tidily does not admit, led to disaster; his search for power resulted in idolatry and denial of YHWH altogether. Aaron’s web of lies was a tissue of thin excuses and trumped-up inventions designed to deny his power desires and to assuage Moses’s fury. Lies often do that; they disguise deeper designs that once unraveled lead only to harsher problems for everyone involved.
Peter’s terrible lies in the Gospel of Mark are born of fear and a final unwillingness to follow Jesus in the terrifying way he has chosen to go. While Jesus is being questioned by a council of religious authorities, Peter, Jesus’s first and most loquacious disciple, is warming himself by a fire in the courtyard of the high priest’s house. Suddenly, one of the priest’s servant girls notices him and says, “You were with Jesus, that man from Nazareth.” But Peter does not simply deny Jesus; he actually says, “I neither know or understand what you are talking about” (Mark 14:68). Note he does not mention Jesus’s name. Instead, he claims complete ignorance of the entire conversation. “What are you going on about, woman,” might be a good summary of what Peter implies with his words. We of course remember that he had earlier avowed that he would never deny Jesus.
After leaving the fire and moving toward a gateway (deeper into the shadows?), the same woman proclaims to some people standing near, “This man is one of them” (Mark 14:69)! This time Peter says nothing; he merely denies that he is one of them, perhaps with a shrug of the shoulders or a scornful drop of spittle. At last, those bystanders who heard the woman’s claims about Peter, now say, “You certainly are one of them, because you are a Galilean” (Mark 14:70). How they conclude that is not clear, but either Peter’s accent or his clothes give him away. However they know, this time Peter loudly curses, and then swears an oath, a deeply solemn act in an oral culture: “I do not know this man you are talking about” (Mark 14:71)! This direct denial, this infamous lie, is followed by the fateful second crowing of a cock, and when he hears that, Peter “broke down and wept” (Mark 14:72). Here is one of history’s most memorable lies, a lie that reveals Peter’s deep fears of the tenuous future and his terror at what may be happening to the man he has supposedly offered his life to. This is a lie of disappointment in self, a self-revelation of weakness and inability actually to do what one has promised and vowed to do. I suggest that Peter’s lies, and his subsequent tears at his denial of Jesus, is an honest reflection of who Peter finally is, as Jesus said, a man whose “spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak.” This lie becomes a very richly human one, for it speaks to many of us who feel as Peter does as we attempt to follow the way of Jesus.
Donald Trump’s lies bear little of this deeply human character. They appear to be lies designed merely to cover his insecurities over against those he fears (and perhaps knows?) are his betters in multiple ways: matters of knowledge; matters of wealth; even matters of power, though he surely imagined that becoming president would give him ultimate power. Why else would he claim, beyond any of his predecessors, that the second amendment to the Constitution gives him “power to do anything I want?” He is a man who has too much, but never enough, as his niece so cogently put it. His lies are born of that desperate need to cover over that insatiable necessity for more of everything, more adulation, more recognition, finally more real power to determine even what is true. This is why he can never concede his election loss to Joe Biden; to concede his loss is to admit that someone else has his power, his strength, his acceptance by everyone. Trump’s lies are closer in kind to Aaron’s but rather different than Peter’s. Because that is so, we can expect no public tears from Donald Trump and no refutation of his many lies. None of that will be missed as this desperate, lying man exits the White House next month.
(Images from Wikimedia Commons)
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