By James Wilson
Actress Ingrid Bergman was best known for her role in the Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca. Only slightly less well known is her performance as missionary Gladys Aylward in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Aylward, whose true story is told in the film, objected to Bergman portraying her because of the actress’ adulterous affair. After prayer she shelved her objections. Bergman turned in a memorable performance and embraced Jesus Christ as her personal savior in the wake of it. The fruit was good –spectacular – and the glory to God is Aylward turning away from the fear of her witness being compromised by Bergman’s reputation.
Aylward’s real fear, of course, was of being wrong. She might have said she was seeking to avoid the appearance of evil, as the King James Bible renders it in 1 Thessalonians 5:22, but the real fear is of being wrong and meriting judgment for that wrongness. G. K. Chesterton addressed the issue best when he said, “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” The fear was paralyzing, but she was enabled in prayer to rise, take up her palate, and walk away from paralysis.
A pivotal moment in the movie Risen is when Tribune Clavius meets the Risen Lord Yeshua. Yeshua asks him what he fears the most. He answers, “I fear being wrong.” Yeshua takes him into the community of believers and Clavius commits the rest of his life to seeking not protection from error but participation in truth.
The fear of being wrong is the principal idol in our culture today. We tend to be more concerned about stumbling into wrong than leaping into right. Nowhere is this bondage more glaring than in the Body of Christ.
The Klein family, of Portland, Oregon, are forced to pay a $137,000.00 fine for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Where are the Christians who marched for civil rights and against a war in Vietnam our politicians had no intention of winning? The Pledge to Stand in Solidarity in Defense of Marriage was signed with great fanfare a month prior to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell Decision brutalized the Constitution. Their web site is still up and seeking signers, but what has done since then? The Centers for Medical Progress videos unmasked the butchery-for-profit that is Planned Parenthood and the makers of those videos face felony indictments for telling the truth. Where are the Christians who ought to be demonstrating in Houston?
It was people set free by faith who transformed America into America with the Great Awakening of the 1730s. It was people of character molded by the Great Awakening of the early 19th Century who restored families, created a culture of sobriety, and destroyed slavery. And it was the young people set free by supernatural grace from the drug and sex culture of the 1960s who took us to the moon, the internet, and authentic racial equality in the Third Great Awakening – the Jesus Revolution. All these people of faith colored outside the traditional lines. They risked being wrong because they were far more interested in becoming right – whatever that might mean and at whatever cost.
Jesus lambasted the Pharisees at every opportunity, but what was wrong with them? They were the guardians of the Law in their culture; they were the constituency most dedicated to avoiding wrongdoing. That is precisely their undoing.
More concerned about avoiding the wrong than discovering the right they submitted to the bondage of legalism cum paralysis. They turned their backs on the poor, the sick, and the demon possessed for whom their Messiah appeared. When He confronted them with their idolatry they jeered Him as He was crucified by the Romans they hated. Christians who hold themselves aloof from the cares and injustices of this world – the dying unborn, the self-destructive addicts, and the inchoate rage of those who would destroy a culture in order to avoid facing themselves – are in the very bondage of the Pharisees that destroyed Judah and missed God-with-them two millennia ago. But there is hope and it remains for now.
The hope is in changing our focus now. The hope lies in concentrating our attention on the riskier proposition of becoming right – entering into righteousness would be another way to say it – instead of the seemingly safer posture of being “not wrong.”
It is well documented that the problem with American involvement in Vietnam was not in the men and women who fought for their country. Our leaders so feared Chinese and Russian intervention that might trigger worldwide conflagration if we did too well they dedicated themselves to “not losing” rather than to victory. That meant no initiative could be undertaken that might upset the balance of power. It meant sixty thousand Americans and a million Vietnamese died for a cause lost by executive decision. Status Quo – not being wrong – was the idol for which they died. That idol begins at the level of one person at a time and it just as crippling.
A friend of a friend of mine was involved in car crash in Kansas. He stopped on the side of the road to change a flat tire. He had good visibility for miles in any direction and was sure the car coming toward him from more than a mile away could see him as well as he saw the car. It was a shock when the oncoming car hit him, drop-kicked him some fifty feet actually, and even more of a shock to find he was unhurt beyond a few bruises. The other driver – a registered nurse – examined him to confirm this. When he told her how surprised he was at her not seeing him and his car she replied she had seen him. “What is so strange is it seemed the more I focused on avoiding you the more inevitable it became that I would hit you.” What both failed to recognize – as they contemplated how the situation unraveled – was the miracle of his deliverance from serious injury. In order to see such things we have to concentrate on the adventure of being right to the exclusion of the fear of being wrong. It is called repentance.
Gladys Aylward learned the lesson and reaped the fruit. So did Ingrid Bergman.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships, The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@charter.net
