Easter retuning…..

We all perceive through filters. While this has a specific technical meaning, the technicalities needn’t detain us for too long; the general point is easily understood. Take vision (or seeing) as an example. Technically, because our visual system is designed to work in a particular visual environment (or if you prefer, it evolved in a particular context), it has assumptions built into its structure. Another way of saying this is that visual information comes to us through a number of filtered channels. Provided these remain appropriate, everything works fairly well and we can see what we need to see to do the things we have to do. Of course, in order to tease out exactly how this all works, sneaky scientists find ways of tweaking the circumstances in which a participant's visual system has to work (‘tweaked circumstances’ is essentially what an experiment is) to trip it up. This, it turns out, is not hard; it is the basis of visual illusions – stimuli that induce misperceptions. You can find lots online with which you can fool your own visual system. Personally, I rather like the “change blindness” phenomenon (although technically this is more an attentional than visual type of illusion). You can find a classic example here; see if you can spot what is changing as photographs are presented to you. If you can’t work it out (most people do eventually), the answer is at the end of this post. The general point is that we easily miss things that are different from our usual experience and expectations, that violate the assumptions we inevitably make about what is going on around us. Rather, we tend to assume that we are very aware of everything that is going on around us, and certainly that if anything important was going on, we’d certainly notice it.

Not surprisingly, what applies at the relatively low level of perception also occurs in different, arguably more complicated, contexts. Consider all that Peter and the other disciples of Jesus of Nazareth had seen and heard as they followed Jesus all over first century Palestine. Let’s take the shortest of the Gospel accounts of the experience they accumulated over a period of about three years, the one composed by Mark. Early on they are sufficiently impressed by Jesus and what he has to say to respond positively when he calls them to follow him. It’s unclear what they thought they were getting themselves into. Perhaps a private club or religious society? Perhaps they initially hoped that this would eventually develop into a larger popular movement of national revival. And yet from the outset this was a rather strange grouping (particularly in its membership), being told strange things by Jesus. They heard and saw Jesus’ explicit and implicit claims to be God! He claimed to be able to forgive sin and claimed authority over their holy day, the Sabbath. In a wilderness setting, just like the one they would remember from their national history as recorded in Exodus, he did the impossible and provided bread for thousands, something their history told them God had uniquely done in the past. Jesus healed the excluded and delivered the spiritually enslaved. He even restored the nearly and newly dead, as well as raised the thoroughly dead. What did they make of this? Not much at the time is probably the answer, as they, along with the crowds that Jesus often encountered, reacted in astonishment time after time. Much of what Jesus was saying and doing seems to have been as foreign to them, as out of kilter with their usual daily experience, as it is to ours.

But as well as publicly observable demonstrations and teaching, the disciples had personal time with Jesus that was way beyond what was accessible to the crowds. They could, and did, ask questions and for explanations. Jesus went out of his way to explain to them what he was saying, and indeed describe what was going to happen to him before it happened. Three times in Mark, and at particular points, he explains that he is going to be rejected, abused and killed, and that he was going to rise from the dead. Mark records that particularly this last point was completely lost on the disciples. It obviously was not to be taken literally; Jesus could not mean that having ceased to be alive he would return to life in any real sense. Like us, they understood the basic realities of life and death, how the universe worked – we live and we die, end of. There might be notions of some sort of existence after the point of death, but that was a matter of philosophy or complicated theology; it belonged with talk of spirits and collective memorialising of the dead. It wasn’t a real sort of thing, at least not really real. So, obviously Jesus had to be dealing in metaphors and pictures. But what could they mean? Eventually, as Jesus became ever more explicit about both his impending death and his rising from the dead, the disciples just stopped asking him what he meant.

So what were their expectations as they eventually arrived in Jerusalem, the location where Jesus had been telling them he would die and rise again? Perhaps they were swept up in the excitement of the welcoming crowds who thought they knew exactly what Jesus was about. Perhaps they hoped that Jesus’ talk of rejection and death was just that, talk. Things seemed to be on a more promising track. Here they were in at the religious and civil heart of their people, and it seemed Jesus was indeed about to lead a popular movement, with perhaps the disciples playing the role of trusted lieutenants. But then Jesus goes and messes it up. He seems to go out of his way to outrage the religious and civil authorities. In an apparently monumental miscalculation he even turns one of his own intimate circle against himself, such that one of his followers called Judas is prepared to conspire with the authorities to have Jesus arrested. The rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps you have been rehearsing some of it today on “Good Friday”. The tragic end to a promising beginning. And yet, had they really listened they might have known that things were not as they seemed. This was not a tragedy unfolding, not an ending, and more of a continuation than a beginning.

But then what was going on was so beyond their experience and expectations that inevitably they were no more able to understand it than we are today without external intervention. Their filters were on the wrong setting as it were. Their starting assumptions were wrong. And still today there is something about the way we are constituted that makes it hard to see and hear what's going on with Jesus. Even if we think it is worth trying to, it is hard to get beyond the mere rehearsal of historical events to a transforming understanding of the what and the why of his death in those appalling circumstances of rejection, betrayal, mockery, abuse, suffering and death. Fortunately the same help is available to us as would eventually allow Jesus’ first disciples (or at least eleven of them) to process the raw material of what they had seen and heard and understand what was going on. It takes nothing less than God himself, through his own word, by means of his own Spirit, to cut through our natural way of thinking and the expectations it generates, to retune our filters, so we can know, understand and respond to Jesus. Fortunately for us, he has always been happy to do exactly this. Just try asking.

And if you still don't get what changing in the 'change blindness' demo, pay attention to the engine under the wing of the aircraft in the pictures. Imagine not seeing that!