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My favorite television show of all time, hands down, is Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which aired in 1967. McGoohan plays Number Six, an unnamed former intelligence officer who decides, for unknown reasons, to resign. He is then kidnapped and taken to the Village, which houses all sorts of people who have sensitive information that would be too dangerous to have out there in the world. Throughout the series, the Village tries to find out why Number Six resigned as Number Six tries to escape the Village.
In one episode called “The General”, there is a new technology engineered by a person only known as “The Professor” called “Speed Learn”. All you have to do is look at your TV screen as a photograph of the Professor stares back at you in order to learn an entire course-load of information in a matter of seconds.
On the surface, this seems like a very good thing, except that Number Six finds a tape recording of the Professor saying that Speed Learn is dangerous, an “abomination” and “slavery”, and cannot be allowed to continue.
Number Six, of course, investigates this Speed Learn program further. He discovers that behind the program is a highly advanced computer, called “The General”, and it is highly implied that the Village hopes to use the technology as a means to control the thoughts of others through its ability to quickly teach anything, that soon people will only know what the Village wants them to know.
However, the General is shown to be a false hope. There is one question that it cannot answer: “Why?” Number Six feeds the question into the machine, leading it to start to smoke and go up in flames.
The General was something the people put their hopes in. Instead, that hope could be turned too easily to a tool to control them as opposed to merely teaching them. Even for the Village, their hope and trust in the General was unfounded, for not even the General could provide all the answers that they wanted or needed.
We have to be careful who we put our hopes and trust in. That’s what Jesus says in Luke today in yet another reading that is trying to prepare us for the Second Coming, and thus for Advent.
Jesus tells those listening to him to be careful not to be led astray by those who come in Jesus’ name saying “‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’” These are those false prophets and messiahs, those that claim to be “the chosen one” when they are nothing of the sort.
We live in an age where there are so many voices out their vying for our attention, both inside and outside the church. Some of those voices are good, and some are bad. Most of them seem to claim they have all the answers and that if we’d only follow them, we will be okay at the end of the day.
I often see people rally around one or more of these voices out there with such fervor that you might think they actually were the returning messiah. Some of these voices are worthy of our listening and attention, others are not.
But either way, the truth of the matter is this: there’s only one voice we should be listening to, and that voice is Jesus. Jesus is the only one that can actually get us to a point where we are okay. Jesus is the only one, as He says later in the Gospel, who can make sure “not a hair of your head will perish.” Jesus is surely the only one who can save us, as we hear in the First Song of Isaiah this morning. Jesus is the only one who can bring about true and lasting change, as we hear in Isaiah with “new heavens and a new earth”. Jesus, as again Isaiah tells us, is the only one who can bring warring parties, like “the wolf and the lamb”, together and bring us lasting peace in His Holy Place.
Like the General in The Prisoner, there are many voices out there who claim to have all the answers. The only voices we should listen to are the ones that can accept that we, as humans, do not have all the answers, and those who can admit so without blowing up. The only voices to listen to are the ones who can say “I don’t have all the answers, but I can point you to the one who does: Jesus.” Really the only voices to listen to in this world are the ones who lead not to themselves, but to Jesus, and Jesus alone.
Be careful who you listen to. It can be very easy and tempting to follow anyone who seems to have some sort of answer, or who even seems to know how to make life easier to go through. It can be easy to follow these people with almost cult-like intensity. Don’t do that. As one of those voices in the world, I am telling you, don’t follow me. Follow the one I follow. Don’t follow me, follow Jesus. Beware of anyone who tells you otherwise, and if people begin to follow you, tell them the same thing: “Don’t follow me, follow Jesus.”