Psychologists have a video that they use in experiments to illustrate something about how humans observe things. They assemble a group of people to watch this video, but before they show it, they tell the group that the point of their watching is to notice people in the video throwing a ball to one another, and their assignment is to count the number of times this happens, the ball changing hands. After the video, they ask people what number they counted, and most people have a pretty accurate number. Then, the person showing the video asks everyone, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” People inevitably think he’s crazy — What gorilla? Then he shows the video again, and of course, there is a gorilla, appearing in the scene several times, but since everyone was preoccupied with the ball being thrown, no one saw it.
So the point of this experiment, of course, is: What gets our attention? What do we notice? The answer apparently is: What we’re looking for is what gets our attention. What we are expecting to see, what we want to see, we see. What we are not looking for, we don’t see.
In a way, it is the same lesson as this gospel reading about the rich man and Lazarus. Lazarus is someone the rich man had stopped seeing a long time ago. He was still there, sitting on the street every day outside the rich man’s house, but invisible, part of the furniture. It isn’t hard to picture the situation of the rich man, charging out of his house each morning, thinking about business, maybe doing a deal on some primitive Blackberry, headed for the train. What he’s looking for are all the things he’s interested in, whereas what he needs to see on his doorstep, but isn’t part of his world of accomplishment and prosperity, he isn’t seeing.
This problem might hit home for some of us, but if we’re looking for the way out of it, we might get it wrong. For example, we all have a tendency to blame time, the pace of life these days, for our inability to notice everything that is going on around us. We tell ourselves we spend too much time trying to multitask, so we think the solution is that we need to slow down, which of course we’ll do some day, at which point we’ll increase our capacity to see what we need to see.
Maybe. But let’s think of another way that we can think about changing what attracts our attention, and what we notice. For that, we have to realize that this isn’t a gospel that is just about the way we are. This is a story about the way God is. Because for God, there is no barrier between the things that God is expecting to see, wants to see, and the things God doesn’t. Everything, to God, is worthy of love and attention — every person, including us; and everyone individually, not in the abstract.
In fact, God’s desire for us is so unlimited that God lavishes it on people and places that normal people like us wouldn’t imagine. If we learn anything from the Bible, it’s that God took special pleasure in reversing what we think of as success and accomplishment, all the things we think of as the way things should happen. There’s no other explanation for appointing the young and runty David as King instead of his strapping older brothers, in choosing a succession of old women and giving them children, in bringing an executed prisoner back from the dead to lead us into the Kingdom. And so still today, God’s presence is with the unsuccessful worker who annoys us, the poor on the street who don’t seem very deserving, the difficult sick person who needs constant help. All of these are people and places we would not be looking for, so busy are we looking elsewhere, and if we’re not looking, we don’t see them, and if we don’t see them, we will miss God’s presence, alive and thriving there, and not, perhaps, in our usual neighborhood, or our usual job.
Getting down to seeing not just the surface, but all the layers of the world, the way God does, is hard work. It’s not just a question of adding some new things to our to-do lists. Some people find they need the old daily discipline of taking a moment each evening and reviewing our encounters of the day, looking for the voice and the love of God that we failed to notice at the time. For others of us it is just a constant attempt to remember how God is present in all the places the world fails to look, all the places where there is not as much of the success and happiness and intelligence we think we need. We usually don’t notice Lazarus on of the edge of our vision, but still he is there. And like the gorilla, you won’t ever see him if you’re not out there looking.