Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 31, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have a motorcycle. I sometimes even ride my motorcycle, although not as much as I used to. I sometimes think it is the one out of character thing I ever do. It’s good to do things out of character, to do the unexpected, from time to time. It keeps people from getting complacent, from thinking that they really know you when we can never truly know all there is to know about another person. There’s one thing that every motorcycle rider knows, or at least should know. Car and truck drivers don’t see you. They really don’t. You may have illegally loud pipes, and you may have your headlight on high beam; but they don’t see you, they don’t hear you, they don’t know you’re there. At the very least you have to assume that they don’t. Assuming that they do know you’re there is a very good way to get yourself killed.

I think I know why car and truck drivers so often don’t see motorcycles. I think it’s because human perception is nowhere near as simple, straightforward, and reliable as we usually think it is. I learned back when I was a trial lawyer how unreliable human perception is. Trial lawyers and psychologists know that if you have ten people witness an event you’ll get ten different accounts of what happened. That’s just how it is with human perception.

Human perception is affected by all sorts of things. One of those things that I think is particularly important, and the one that I think explains why car and truck drivers don’t see motorcycles, is that we all tend to see what we’re looking for and not to see what we’re not looking for. We see what we expect to see and not what we don’t expect to see. Car and truck drivers are looking for cars and trucks, which is mostly what they see. Sometimes they don’t see even them, but far more often they don’t see motorcycles. They aren’t looking for motorcycles, they aren’t expecting motorcycles, so they don’t see them.

And you may be wondering why I’m talking about car and truck drivers not seeing motorcycles because they aren’t looking for them and don’t expect them. It’s because—wait for it—it reminds me of a story in the Bible. We just heard it. It’s the story of Zacchaeus and Jesus. In that story Zacchaeus is a chief tax collector. As we learned about tax collectors last week, that means that he’s a big sinner. He collaborates with the hated Romans in the exploitation of his own people. He lives in Jericho, and Jesus is passing through that ancient town, the site of the famous tumbling walls. Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was “trying to see who Jesus was.” Notice. Not that “he was trying to see Jesus” but he was “trying to see who Jesus was.” That’s an important difference. Keep it in mind as we go along here.

Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was, but something was preventing him from doing so. Luke says it was that Zacchaeus couldn’t see through the crowd because he was short. That certainly would have prevented Zacchaeus from seeing Jesus, as any of us rather short people who’ve ever been in a crowd can tell you. It shouldn’t, however, prevent him from seeing who Jesus was, which I take to have more to do with understanding Jesus than with merely seeing him physically. So we’re left with a question. The great Bible stories always leave us with questions. That’s one of the things that makes them great. The question here is: What was preventing Zacchaeus not from seeing Jesus but from seeing who Jesus was? And I think that the rest of the story suggests an answer to that question.

All sorts of things happen next in the story, and it seems to me that Zacchaeus must have found every one of them totally unexpected. Jesus tells Zacchaeus that he must stay at Zacchaeus’ house that day. Surely Zacchaeus, who knew that every Jew hated him because of his collaboration with the Romans, never expected this Jewish prophet, whom some were even hailing as the Messiah, to stay at his house. And I’m sure Zacchaeus never expected to hear himself say that he would give half of everything he had to the poor and that he would repay the people he had defrauded fourfold. It probably didn’t surprise Zacchaeus that the crowd grumbled about Jesus going to stay with him; but I’m sure he didn’t expect this Jesus, whoever he was, to say that salvation had come to Zacchaeus’ house and that, despite his collaborating with the Gentile enemy, he too was a Jew, a son of Abraham as Jesus put it. I’m pretty sure Zacchaeus didn’t expect to hear this Jesus guy say “the Son of Man has come to seek out and to save the lost.” All of that must have been totally unexpected to Zacchaeus and to all the others who witnessed it.

All of those unexpected things are about who Jesus is, which is the thing that Zacchaeus couldn’t see. He couldn’t see them, he didn’t see them, until he was presented with them in unmistakable clarity. He couldn’t see them because he didn’t expect them. When the story opens Zacchaeus can’t see who Jesus is because Jesus is so unexpected. Jesus is so unlike what the Jews of his time expected a prophet, much less the Messiah, to be. Only when Jesus was plainly and unmistakably there before him could Zacchaeus see past his expectations to who Jesus really was. Zacchaeus couldn’t see the motorcycle that Jesus was because he was looking for a car. The motorcycle had to run into him before he saw it.

Like all great Bible stories this one is about a lot more than something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. It is about the dynamics of faith, and it is about us. The Gospel invites us into this story, and it invites us to ask: Are we like Zacchaeus? Is there something that is keeping us from seeing who Jesus is?

Of course there is. At least I think there is, or you can be pretty sure I wouldn’t be asking the question. And I think that what is preventing us from seeing who Jesus is is pretty much the same thing that kept Zacchaeus from seeing who Jesus is. We see Jesus as what we expect Jesus to be, not as the wildly unexpected and complex reality that he is. Maybe we don’t all expect Jesus to be the same thing so we don’t all see him the same way. Here are some of things we might expect him to be and therefore see him as being, and some of the things that we don’t see when we see only what expect. Maybe we see him as the Son of God Incarnate who came to earth for the sole purpose of dying as a sinless sacrifice in atonement for human sin. That certainly is a way a great many Christians see him. But if we see only that expectation in him we miss who he was as a human being, and we miss seeing his life—not his death—as a revelation of what human life can be and what God intends it to be.

Or we expect him to be, and so see him as, the proponent of bourgeois morality and of social and political stability, the buttress of the existing social and political structures that we take as the human norm and that we take as good because they are good for us. That’s another very common way Christians have seen him over the centuries. If we see only that expectation in Jesus we miss how revolutionary he is, how he turns the expectations of human society upside down. How he calls the poor blessed and the rich cursed. How he includes the outcast and puts mercy over obeying the law and over conventional morality in every single circumstance. How he absolutely rejects violence and calls us to lives of radical nonviolence.

Or maybe we see Jesus through another expectation, this one being one we may have gotten in Sunday School. This one is sweet Jesus meek and mild who was more than anything nice and who calls us to be more than anything nice. If we see only this expectation in Jesus we miss how angry injustice made him, how he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple and called the Pharisees a brood of vipers. We miss the righteous anger in him, righteous anger that we are sometimes called to share.

Or maybe we see Jesus through yet another expectation, this one created by secular humanism and the modern world’s rejection of mystery and spiritual reality. For this expectation Jesus is a very good man, a great moral teacher, a role model for a good life. If we see only this expectation in him we miss the mysterious, awe-filled, spirit-stirring sense of the ineffable but real presence of God in him that has inspired and sustained countless generations of Christians. We miss the divine sanction that Christians experience in him for his ways of justice, nonviolence, and peace.

Or maybe we see him only as a prophet of justice, nonviolence, and peace. That’s an expectation of him that is common in the UCC, with its long and storied history of being on the cutting edge of peace and justice issues. If we see only this expectation in him we miss his meaning for individual Christians, the way he touches us personally with God’s word of comfort, reassurance, peace, and hope for our individual lives.

We all tend, I think, to try to lock Jesus up in a box of our own expectations. When we do our lives and our faith are poorer for it. As this review of the expectations people have of Jesus and of some of the problems with those ways of seeing him suggests, Jesus is a very complex and multifaceted reality. So this morning I ask you, and I ask myself: What is keeping us from seeing who Jesus is in all of his complexity? Are we seeing in him only what we expect to see? Here’s my challenge for you and for myself: Look for what you don’t expect to see in Jesus. Look for the ways he shatters our expectations and does something totally new and totally unexpected. Look for the many different aspects of the human and the divine that unite in him. If we can do that we might actually be able better to see who Jesus really is and what he can mean for our lives and for our world. Amen.