The Ultimate Troll

The other Saturday morning at men's group I ran into yet another one of those juxtapositions (I like that word! It has such a unique collection of letters!) that I love to see between a narrative penned 2000 years ago and the events happening in real time around me. In this case, our group of men were again looking at the waves that Jesus was making as he moved around in Palestine as recorded Mark 11 and 12. He was alternately thrilling the populous and irritating the ruling religious elite. He would go right into their inner sanctums, the temple itself, and make himself available for interviews and questions and answers. And it was not some closed, secretive dialog. Everyone around was apparently able to hear the arguments and all had their reactions to the discussions detailed in the report-outs that Mark included in his Gospel. Even in these days before Twitter, his words were reaching a broad segment of the population: the children, the deathly sick, the everyday street people, the foreigners, the Roman ruling class and of course the religious leaders who felt that they alone were able to interpret God's Word to the people. But Jesus, armed with the true knowledge of the will of God, was able to take on all questioners and mete out the kindest words (to the poor widow: she, out of her poverty, gave everything) or the most caustic criticism (to the teachers of the law: you devour widows houses); harsh judgement (to the vindictive teachers of the law: these men will be severely punished) and kindest encouragement (to the honest teacher: you are not far from the Kingdom). In Jesus, we see a man totally purposeful in fulfilling his mission and completely unimpeded by political correctness (although sensitive to it, as can be seen if one explores his use of the "Messianic Secret"). 

Positioned up against these thrilling tableaus of Jesus taking on the establishment, were the words from a Fox News interview that I had been listening to on the way to breakfast that morning. Tammy Bruce was talking about the interview that Trump did with the New York Times reporter in Mara Lago just before New Years. When asked about why Trump would go into enemy territory with a "Failing New York Times" reporter and do an interview with the media that has roughed him up so badly, she says, "Look, he's the world's best troll. I love it when I saw what he said. I laughed out-loud. Since 2016, the media has been out to get him and we have been assessing the impact that the media has had on his success. Clearly what we are finding out is that they are not having any impact on him. He's loving this job, he's committed to it and he's realized that he has been able to get his message out and beyond them and above their heads. So this is really the ultimate trolling in telling the media that, in their obsession with him, they are only hurting themselves, and they are actually helping him by exposing themselves and their bias. So he is accomplishing things on multiple fronts. In addition, he is reminding people that the media is not what they used to be. They used to control the narrative; control what we thought was reality, and those days are over. So I think it is pretty funny and that he is doing a great job in it."

Now, far be it from me to be impious and call Jesus the ultimate troll, but a case could be made that he far surpassed Trump in his ability to stir up the establishment by throwing their hypocrisy back in their faces to the wild delight of the on-lookers (the large crowd listened to him with delight). And he did something that Trump has, as of yet, seemed incapable of doing. In this passage in Mark, and at several other places in the Gospels, it says that Jesus answered the onslaught of attacking interviewers so well that "no one was able to ask him any more questions". That seems like something for Trump to aspire to.