Lucia Lloyd’s Sermon: The Invisible Gorilla
May 5, 2019
Easter 2, Year C
John 21:1-19
Your task is that you are to watch a one-minute video in which six people, three in white shirts and three in black shirts, pass basketballs around. Your goal is to count accurately, in your head, the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. If you get the correct answer, which is 15, you will have achieved your goal.
What makes the study unusual is that while the six people are passing around the basketballs, a man in a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the action, looks directly at the camera, and thumps its chest. The gorilla then strolls off again, after having spent nine seconds on the screen.
If you were watching this video, would you see the gorilla? Almost everyone answers, “yes, of course I would!” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when researchers did this experiment at Harvard University, they found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
There is a website called www.invisiblegorilla.com and you can watch this video yourself. Since you’ve already been told that the gorilla is there, you can’t really take the test yourself, but you can see that the gorilla is really, really obvious.
The experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what is right in front of us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.
We see what we expect to see. And as these researchers discovered, if something we do not expect to see strolls right in front of us, the chances are fifty-fifty that we simply won’t see it.
I call this the “gorilla principle” and it makes a huge difference in understanding today’s gospel passage and in how we approach our life of faith as individuals and as a congregation.
A bit of background, and then we’ll get back to that. Although we are spending most of this year reading through the Gospel of Luke, we are reading from the Gospel of John during these seven weeks, from Easter Sunday until Pentecost Sunday. Our gospel passage today is from chapter 21, the very last chapter of the gospel, often regarded as a sort of epilogue. We have already read in chapter 20 that Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb at dawn and found it empty. She runs to tell Simon Peter and John the beloved disciple, and they see the tomb is empty and John believes. Mary stays at the tomb weeping, and has a conversation with the angels. Then she turns around and sees Jesus standing there, but she doesn’t know it is Jesus, and supposes it’s the gardener. He calls her by name, and she recognizes him. She tells the disciples she has seen the risen Christ. Then that evening as the disciples are together in the upper room, Jesus shows up again, shows them his hand and his side, commissions them, breathes on them so they receive the Holy Spirit. Then eight days later they’re together again, and this time Thomas is with them, and Jesus shows up again and invites Thomas to put his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side, and Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!” and Jesus says “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet believed.”
So after all these experiences of seeing the risen Christ we get to today’s passage, and the disciples have been fishing all night and have caught nothing, and then, John tells us, “Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach, but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” And the question we might ask is, “What is going on with that? Why don’t they recognize Jesus? Why don’t they see that this is the person they’ve devoted their lives to following for the past three years?” The answer to that question is the gorilla principle. If we don’t expect to see something, we simply don’t see it. Even if it is standing right in front of us.
The disciples don’t expect to see Jesus standing in front of them, and so they don’t recognize him when he’s right there.
They keep talking to this person they think is a stranger, and when he tells them to let down their nets on the right side of the boat they figure they might as well, and they get the enormous catch of fish. And then, one disciple, the disciple Jesus loved, recognizes that this is Jesus. He exclaims to Peter, “It is the Lord!” And at that point, Peter is able to see for himself that Jesus is there, and being impulsive leaps into the water, and all the other disciples are able to see it too.
What I love about this passage is how easy it is to relate to the disciples here. We see what we expect to see, and so we have no idea that there is anything other than what we have seen.
People are sure that if a gorilla walked right in front of them and thumped his chest, they would see him. But half the time they don’t, simply because they don’t expect to see a gorilla. And since they don’t expect to see him, they don’t see him; they are too busy counting passing balls.
Do we too get busy with the tasks we think we’re supposed to do, so much so that we miss the extraordinary when it walks right in front of us?
There are so many voices in the society around us that tell us that our goal in life is ball-counting. If we focus only on what we expect and keep an accurate count we can often succeed at ball-counting.
But then there are people like the beloved disciple who are not so distracted by the ball-counting, and see the gorilla walking right in the middle of the action, the people who see the extraordinary. And who have the courage to say so. And when they say so, that enables other people to see it too.
The disciple this gospel refers to as the disciple whom Jesus loved, or the beloved disciple for short, is the one who is able to see that it’s the risen Christ standing in front of him. There is something about the awareness that he is loved by Jesus that enables him to see all of what’s happening in front of him, rather than assuming that what he expects to see is all there is.
In the middle of all the voices that say that our goal in life is ball-counting, I thank God that we also have the church, a place where we have an opportunity to come across people who are aware that they are beloved by God, a place where we have an opportunity to come across people who see more than ball-counting, who are able to see God moving through the seemingly ordinary events of our lives, and to say to each other, “God is here.”
This is my role as your preacher and as your priest. But clergy are not the only people Jesus loves. You too are beloved disciples. The beloved disciple is St. John, and you are the people of St. John. This community of faith exists to be a place of gorilla spottings, a place where we can see the ways in which God is here, God is active, and can name that, and each of us can help each other see it, as St. John does with the other disciples. It is, to put it in other words, to make Jesus known.
All of us can use some reminders from time to time that God is here among us, that we are infinitely beloved, and that God is at work within us and among us, leading us in the way of love.
There is work ahead. The risen Christ goes on to tell Peter to feed his lambs and tend his sheep. There is a journey ahead. The risen Christ goes on to tell Peter to follow him. Still, before we get to the work ahead, before we get to the journey ahead, it is valuable to pause to simply take in the awareness that we are in the presence of God, the sacredness of this moment. That God is already active here.
As the disciples stand there amazed in the presence of God, in the presence of the miracle, in the presence of the risen Christ, I get the feeling that it is one of those times when anything they might say think of to say would feel so insignificant that it’s pointless to say anything at all. And Jesus has compassion on them and doesn’t ask them to make conversation. He simply says, “Come and have breakfast” and they share a meal in the simple joy of being together. The disciples have their blind spots and weaknesses and flaws, as all of us do today. And yet nothing is more important to Jesus than that these flawed disciples know that God is real, and that they are beloved. So he feeds them.
And Jesus feeds us too. The words of scripture and preaching are valuable and we need them. And we also need what goes beyond words, that God is present with us in physical objects and that the sacred and the physical are one, which we experience as sacraments. That this primal experience of being fed and being loved express to us God’s care for us. And so we pray that Jesus is known to us in the breaking of the bread as we share the Eucharist together. And then after this sacred meal, we can see the sacredness of other meals too, the celebratory meal that the Marthas have been making. Isn’t it interesting that what they’d decided to feed us is fish?
As it turns out, what we are here for isn’t ball counting. What we are here for, all of us beloved disciples, is to see that God is here, and to rejoice together in God’s love. Alleluia!
What makes the study unusual is that while the six people are passing around the basketballs, a man in a gorilla suit strolls into the middle of the action, looks directly at the camera, and thumps its chest. The gorilla then strolls off again, after having spent nine seconds on the screen.
If you were watching this video, would you see the gorilla? Almost everyone answers, “yes, of course I would!” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when researchers did this experiment at Harvard University, they found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
There is a website called www.invisiblegorilla.com and you can watch this video yourself. Since you’ve already been told that the gorilla is there, you can’t really take the test yourself, but you can see that the gorilla is really, really obvious.
The experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what is right in front of us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much.
We see what we expect to see. And as these researchers discovered, if something we do not expect to see strolls right in front of us, the chances are fifty-fifty that we simply won’t see it.
I call this the “gorilla principle” and it makes a huge difference in understanding today’s gospel passage and in how we approach our life of faith as individuals and as a congregation.
A bit of background, and then we’ll get back to that. Although we are spending most of this year reading through the Gospel of Luke, we are reading from the Gospel of John during these seven weeks, from Easter Sunday until Pentecost Sunday. Our gospel passage today is from chapter 21, the very last chapter of the gospel, often regarded as a sort of epilogue. We have already read in chapter 20 that Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb at dawn and found it empty. She runs to tell Simon Peter and John the beloved disciple, and they see the tomb is empty and John believes. Mary stays at the tomb weeping, and has a conversation with the angels. Then she turns around and sees Jesus standing there, but she doesn’t know it is Jesus, and supposes it’s the gardener. He calls her by name, and she recognizes him. She tells the disciples she has seen the risen Christ. Then that evening as the disciples are together in the upper room, Jesus shows up again, shows them his hand and his side, commissions them, breathes on them so they receive the Holy Spirit. Then eight days later they’re together again, and this time Thomas is with them, and Jesus shows up again and invites Thomas to put his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side, and Thomas says, “My Lord and my God!” and Jesus says “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet believed.”
So after all these experiences of seeing the risen Christ we get to today’s passage, and the disciples have been fishing all night and have caught nothing, and then, John tells us, “Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach, but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.” And the question we might ask is, “What is going on with that? Why don’t they recognize Jesus? Why don’t they see that this is the person they’ve devoted their lives to following for the past three years?” The answer to that question is the gorilla principle. If we don’t expect to see something, we simply don’t see it. Even if it is standing right in front of us.
The disciples don’t expect to see Jesus standing in front of them, and so they don’t recognize him when he’s right there.
They keep talking to this person they think is a stranger, and when he tells them to let down their nets on the right side of the boat they figure they might as well, and they get the enormous catch of fish. And then, one disciple, the disciple Jesus loved, recognizes that this is Jesus. He exclaims to Peter, “It is the Lord!” And at that point, Peter is able to see for himself that Jesus is there, and being impulsive leaps into the water, and all the other disciples are able to see it too.
What I love about this passage is how easy it is to relate to the disciples here. We see what we expect to see, and so we have no idea that there is anything other than what we have seen.
People are sure that if a gorilla walked right in front of them and thumped his chest, they would see him. But half the time they don’t, simply because they don’t expect to see a gorilla. And since they don’t expect to see him, they don’t see him; they are too busy counting passing balls.
Do we too get busy with the tasks we think we’re supposed to do, so much so that we miss the extraordinary when it walks right in front of us?
There are so many voices in the society around us that tell us that our goal in life is ball-counting. If we focus only on what we expect and keep an accurate count we can often succeed at ball-counting.
But then there are people like the beloved disciple who are not so distracted by the ball-counting, and see the gorilla walking right in the middle of the action, the people who see the extraordinary. And who have the courage to say so. And when they say so, that enables other people to see it too.
The disciple this gospel refers to as the disciple whom Jesus loved, or the beloved disciple for short, is the one who is able to see that it’s the risen Christ standing in front of him. There is something about the awareness that he is loved by Jesus that enables him to see all of what’s happening in front of him, rather than assuming that what he expects to see is all there is.
In the middle of all the voices that say that our goal in life is ball-counting, I thank God that we also have the church, a place where we have an opportunity to come across people who are aware that they are beloved by God, a place where we have an opportunity to come across people who see more than ball-counting, who are able to see God moving through the seemingly ordinary events of our lives, and to say to each other, “God is here.”
This is my role as your preacher and as your priest. But clergy are not the only people Jesus loves. You too are beloved disciples. The beloved disciple is St. John, and you are the people of St. John. This community of faith exists to be a place of gorilla spottings, a place where we can see the ways in which God is here, God is active, and can name that, and each of us can help each other see it, as St. John does with the other disciples. It is, to put it in other words, to make Jesus known.
All of us can use some reminders from time to time that God is here among us, that we are infinitely beloved, and that God is at work within us and among us, leading us in the way of love.
There is work ahead. The risen Christ goes on to tell Peter to feed his lambs and tend his sheep. There is a journey ahead. The risen Christ goes on to tell Peter to follow him. Still, before we get to the work ahead, before we get to the journey ahead, it is valuable to pause to simply take in the awareness that we are in the presence of God, the sacredness of this moment. That God is already active here.
As the disciples stand there amazed in the presence of God, in the presence of the miracle, in the presence of the risen Christ, I get the feeling that it is one of those times when anything they might say think of to say would feel so insignificant that it’s pointless to say anything at all. And Jesus has compassion on them and doesn’t ask them to make conversation. He simply says, “Come and have breakfast” and they share a meal in the simple joy of being together. The disciples have their blind spots and weaknesses and flaws, as all of us do today. And yet nothing is more important to Jesus than that these flawed disciples know that God is real, and that they are beloved. So he feeds them.
And Jesus feeds us too. The words of scripture and preaching are valuable and we need them. And we also need what goes beyond words, that God is present with us in physical objects and that the sacred and the physical are one, which we experience as sacraments. That this primal experience of being fed and being loved express to us God’s care for us. And so we pray that Jesus is known to us in the breaking of the bread as we share the Eucharist together. And then after this sacred meal, we can see the sacredness of other meals too, the celebratory meal that the Marthas have been making. Isn’t it interesting that what they’d decided to feed us is fish?
As it turns out, what we are here for isn’t ball counting. What we are here for, all of us beloved disciples, is to see that God is here, and to rejoice together in God’s love. Alleluia!
