Overview:

Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time

“Let no one deceive you in any way.” (2 Thes 2:3)

Find today’s readings here.

Tweets, emails, chatbots, billboards, podcasts, PTO meetings, group chats, books, TikToks, homilies, phone calls, Instagram stories, concerts. 

Have you ever inventoried all the different modes of communication by which you’re influenced? We are bombarded with information all day long. We are also constantly context-switching between different media: Maybe I am the only person who has sent a text message while talking on the phone while a large zoom meeting is happening, but I doubt it. 

Paul had a shorter list in his second letter to the Thessalonians: 

We ask you, brothers and sisters,
with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ…
not to be shaken out of your minds suddenly,
or to be alarmed either by a “spirit,” or by an oral statement,
or by a letter allegedly from us
to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand.
Let no one deceive you in any way.

A spirit, an oral statement or a letter. Each of these modes of communication carried a certain level of authority, an authority that makes it all too easy for a hope to be exploited. The Christian community in Thessalonica were an apocalyptic people: They hoped for and expected the second coming of Jesus to happen sooner rather than later. (Paul himself thought this.) So if someone impersonating Paul came to tell them that the end was at hand, you might see why some were swayed by the message, even if it was a lie. Because when you want to believe a lie, it is easier to fall victim to its spell. Paul’s message in response: Let no one deceive you in any way.

Today, fewer of us expect the second coming to happen any minute, but we long for other things that make us subject to deception: to be smart, in control, attractive, well-liked, healthy and up-to-date on everything. 

And many of the messages we consume work to exploit those hopes. But even if we were only consuming “good” content (whatever that means) across all our devices and contexts, the sheer amount of information itself, alongside the many different forms that it comes in, creates conditions ripe for deception. If Marshall McLuhan is right that the medium is the message, the message of our current age is: distraction. 

Political actors know this. (After all, “flood the zone” is the president’s media strategy.) So do our tech overlords. I don’t have an easy piece of advice to resist this now-ordinary aspect of modern life. But McLuhan thought that even acknowledging the power of a medium was the first step in resisting it. 

“For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary,” McLuhan wrote in his book Understanding Media. “But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.”

God loves you. Jesus Christ has saved you. Let no one deceive that message for you in any way. 

Zac Davis is an associate editor and the senior director for digital strategy for America. He also co-hosts the podcast, Jesuitical.