The Obvious Traitor: Why We Overthink Life’s Biggest Truths

The Celebrity Traitors has certainly captured people’s imagination—mine included! My daughter and I savour every moment, sitting wide-eyed and incredulous at the guessing Faithfuls. But how do they get it so wrong? 

These intelligent, perceptive celebrities persist in misjudging each other. It’s maddeningly delightful. Of course, it’s guesswork; they’re grasping at reactions and careless sentences, all loaded with imagined meaning. The media reminds us it's just an elaborate game of wink murder. 

Yet, I wonder if this reliance on guesswork characterises more of our lives than just magical TV moments. Do we play "wink murder" with the big questions of life, too? This might be fair if we didn't have a multitude of signposts pointing to God through Jesus. 

My favourite part of the show is when a Traitor is finally identified. A celebrity has compelling, even irrefutable evidence! But then the "Oh, that’s too obvious!" kicks in. Another name is mentioned, and the answer in plain sight is lost in the subtleties and nuance of other clues. 

These moments are so telling! We all want to be cleverer than the stark, obvious truth. Truth and light can sometimes be unattractively accessible. Mystery attracts us, complexity fascinates us, and our brilliant brains bend toward the baffling and away from the ordinary—the obvious. 

I was once struck by this during a visit to a care home, celebrating communion with a severely disabled man named Mark and his family. Though he could not speak, see, or move, his inescapable joy whenever Jesus’s name was sung or said was profound. Whatever life had denied him, he could still love and know Jesus. 

That afternoon taught me that the Gospel is necessarily simple. Despite my years in theological college and my eagerness to complicate things, I don’t need to. I should delight in its simplicity and reach. 

Today, I fear we make the same mistake. Despite creation's fine-tuning, the claims Jesus made, and the compelling evidence for the resurrection, we love to make things more complicated than they really are. Jesus wasn’t a guru with a secret code. He came to save sinners and made it simple enough and complicated enough so that whoever believed in him would have eternal life. We don't need to second-guess or overthink it. We just need to believe what is in plain sight. 

Rev’d. Howard W. Davenport, Pastor of Eldad Church, St Peter Port