I haven't seen Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, so I have no idea whether it is as good as people say; and I certainly have no idea whether the case he makes in it is valid or not. But one thing I do love about it is its title – An Inconvenient Truth. It's got all the ambiguity and depth to make great poetry. But it also makes a very telling point about our human nature. When truth gets in the way of our deeply held beliefs it is, to say the very least, inconvenient.
This week I was reminded of this when I watched a rather scary documentary about Myra Hindley, the infamous female half of the twosome responsible for the Moors murders in Britain in the 1960's. The documentary focused on this woman during her 35 years or so in prison, her attempts to obtain parole, her attempts to escape, her profession of Christianity, her illness, and her death. Some of that I was vaguely aware of, but what I hadn't realised was that for many years she had professed her innocence. She was the innocent, naïve girlfriend, she insisted. Whatever Ian Bradley had done, it wasn't her doing, etc.
And remarkably enough, some people passionately believed in her innocence. In fact, to me the most interesting part of the documentary concerned one of her supporters. Bradley and Hindley had been convicted of the murder of three people, but two other children had gone missing in the same area, and the Police had always believed that they had also been murdered by these two people. However, their bodies had never been found, and there was no direct evidence to implicate Bradley and Hindley, who had always denied any involvement.
Hindley was caught in the classic bind whenever she applied for parole. She never could show remorse, even for the murders for which she had been convicted, because she claimed that she was not guilty of those murders. The Parole Board said, no remorse, no parole. More difficult was the issue of the missing children. The Parole Board seemed to be taking them into consideration as well, and this was what really fired up Hindley's supporters. So in the documentary we see this lovely, passionate young woman insisting that Hindley had no involvement with these children, and that this was just political hysteria, bigotry, etc.
But several years later came a bombshell announcement from Ian Bradley. He confessed that he and Hindley had murdered these other two children, and he told the authorities where to look for the bodies. One of those bodies was found there, although sadly the other one has never been found. At first Hindley continued to deny her involvement; but there came a time, perhaps under guidance from a priest, when she decided to tell the truth, and confessed her guilt. The documentary showed how shattering this was for her supporters.
And that's the bit I want to focus on this morning. It reminded me of a discussion I had many years ago with the then chief psychologist in the Justice Department about a similar situation he was aware of from his studies in psychology. I forget the details, but the gist was that of a small dedicated group of supporters who had campaigned for years on behalf of a convicted murderer who protested his innocence but who eventually confessed, less than half of that group accepted his confession as genuine! The majority had become so committed to their belief in his innocence that they could not accept that they had been wrong. His confession confronted them with a truth that was simply too inconvenient to accept.
That classic dilemma is at the heart of our struggles to teach the Christian faith to others. And it always has been. There are many examples of it in the New Testament, and they almost always involve the miraculous, or (as I prefer to call it) the supernatural element of Jesus' life and ministry. If only he had stuck to teaching, he would have spared us all a great deal of angst; and he would certainly have spared himself a great deal of angst. To take just one example: if he had left Lazarus in the tomb – if he had simply done a nice funeral service for him, commended him to God's mercy, and then joined the family for light refreshments in the local hall afterwards, the authorities wouldn't have minded. If he had simply consoled and comforted the mourners, fine! But he didn't, we're told. He raised Lazarus back to life.
That was the truth of the matter and it was highly inconvenient. Why was it inconvenient? Well, let St John himself remind us: So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well, for on account of him many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and putting their faith in him. Inconvenient truths divide: they divide those who have a passionate belief to the contrary from those who are open-minded on the issue, and can therefore accept the new idea.
We see a very similar case in our lesson from the Book of Acts this morning. A much loved member of the Christian community in Joppa sickened and died. Hearing that Peter is in the next village they send for him urgently. We're not told why. Did they want him to conduct a funeral service for her, or to provide comfort and support to them in their loss; or did they really believe that he could bring Dorcas back to life? We're not told.
What we are told is that, regardless of their expectations, Peter prayed for Dorcas and she recovered. And then we get St Luke's account of what happened next: This became known all over Joppa, and many people believed in the Lord. Many, but not presumably, all. And this may be a good moment to pause before looking at the gospel reading, and to ask ourselves, as honestly as we can, how we feel about this particular inconvenient truth.
It doesn't accord with our own experience, does it? I suppose I have conducted somewhere around 100 funerals over the years, and not once has the deceased revived. And I have to say that I'm not at all sure that I would have coped too well if anyone had. Just think for a moment what would happen if, during a funeral service, the casket suddenly opened and the deceased got up and walk down the aisle. How would we respond to such an inconvenient truth? Would we all leap to our feet and praise God?
I have to say that, if I survived the shock at all, my immediate thought would be: "who the hell signed the death certificate?" In other words, I am not at all sure that I would be open to a truth as inconvenient as that. You see, we might laugh at that scenario, but the fact is that in stories such as the raising of Lazarus, and today's raising of Dorcas, we are confronted with exactly that scenario. So why don't we burst out laughing when we read these stories? Why when they are read in church the congregation doesn't fall about in hysterics? I wonder about that – I really do. I wonder if, at the deepest level, I don't really believe these stories. Their truth is too inconvenient for me.
Our gospel passage gives us another angle on all this. Here Jesus' critics do not deny the truth of his miracles. What they object to is his explanation of them. He insists that it is God working through him that enables him to perform these miracles. That as the Son he simply does the work of the Father. But no amount of hard evidence – of witnesses' accounts, and so on – will ever convince them because his truth is too inconvenient. It would turn their religious understanding on its head. They simply reject his explanation because it is inconsistent with their passionately held beliefs.
That temptation is for ever before us today. The popularity of people like Bishop Spong and Lloyd Geering and Ian Harris depends very much on their willingness to present a Jesus stripped of all his inconvenient truths. The miracles never happened, the Resurrection never happened, Jesus was simply a wonderful, charismatic teacher and healer.
Of course, to an open mind Joppa may raise some interesting questions. Today it is called Jaffa, and is a suburb of the capital city of Israel, Tel Aviv. It has three convents in that small area, a Greek Orthodox convent, a Roman Catholic convent, and an Armenian Orthodox convent. They claim that there has been a continuous Christian presence there from the beginning of the Christian Church. If nothing happened two thousand years ago at Joppa, if Peter was never there, if Dorcas wasn't raised back to life there, then how do we explain such a long history?
Al Gore is right. The truth can be so inconvenient sometimes.
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Louise Booth
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