The Invisible Gorilla—Seeing Past the Clutter of Life to Recognize the True Message of Jesus, A Morning Prayer Reflection

It’s called the Invisible Gorilla.

In a Harvard experiment, a group of people is brought in to watch a video of six people passing around a basketball.  I should pause and add that this experiment has been duplicated and adapted a number of times by others, but for today, we’ll stick with the Harvard version.

The group watching the video is asked to keep track of how many times the team in white shirts passes the basketball.

As you can imagine, everyone’s eyes are glued to the screen as they try to not miss a single pass.  

We’re all competitive in nature so you can imagine everyone watching the video is thinking the same thing.  Be the one who counts the passes perfectly.

The video ends, but instead of asking the group about those passes, the Harvard researcher asks one bizarre question.

How many of them had noticed the gorilla?

You see, at some point in the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks out in the middle of the basketball players, beats its chest for a full nine seconds and then exits.

It would seem an impossible sight to miss.

And yet fully half of the group watching the video admitted they had seen no gorilla.

They had been so focused on counting passes, they had become literally blind to a gorilla.

Think about how many gorillas we are blind to every day.

Hopefully not literal gorillas—that would be an entirely different message, but the figurative gorillas, the important things we miss because we are too focused on the trivial things, the meaningless things.

Think about the society we live in today.

I was having lunch the other day with an old friend and at some point, during our meal, I realized we were both being a little loud, which really wasn’t all that surprising considering how much time the two of us had spent teaching eighth graders.

But as I looked around the restaurant, I noticed something.  It was spring break so there were a lot of families, a lot of parents with children, but no one was talking.  Both parent and child were sitting at their tables staring at their phones.

Every morning, I drive past kids, sitting on the corner waiting for the school bus.  No one is talking.  Everyone is on their phone.

This is our society today.

A world where we are incapable of simply sitting and being, of sitting and talking, of sitting and paying attention to the things that really matter.

All the while someone else decides for us what’s important, blowing up our phones with the latest news, with alerts, with chimes and beeps and vibrations.

In the musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas asks Jesus why he chose that particular time to enter the world.  He says, “If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation, Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication.”

But I’ve always wondered if that’s true.

Would Jesus have been able to reach us in the time of Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and Twitter?  Or would he have been lost among the trolls and bots, drowned out by whoever the world’s next angriest man is?  Would he have been lost in a twenty-four-hour news cycle that doesn’t allow us to linger on any story for longer than a minute?

If Jesus came today, would we notice him at all?

Or would he have been the invisible gorilla, lost to us, among the trivial clutter of this world?

I don’t know the answer to that.

But I do know that Jesus had similar problems two thousand years ago.

In today’s Gospel reading, the Sadducees are testing Jesus.  In a sort of Riddle-me-this-Batman moment, they present Jesus with a question of death and divorce and law.  If you are a Sadducee, it is the perfect question to trip up a man they believe to be a charlatan.

But not only does Jesus not answer their question, the answer he does give is this—basically, to the Sadducees—you are missing the point completely, he tells them.  You don’t know God at all.  You know rules and you know law, but you do not know God.  You do not see Him.  If you saw Him, then you never would have asked such a question.

Stop counting the number of times the people in white shirts pass the basketball and stop and acknowledge the giant gorilla that has just inexplicably entered the picture.

Who should a man marry when his brother dies?  Who cares?

And then Jesus answers with one of the most beautiful lines in Mark 12:27, saying, “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.”

Think, for a second, the implications of that one line.

For starters, such a declaration means the laws that the Sadducees and others depended on to hold their society together—were meaningless.

And then secondly, when Jesus quotes God’s words to Moses that God is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, men who have been dead for a very long time and Jesus declares God the God of the living, not the dead, Jesus is naming God, the God of the resurrection. 

And what does Jesus do in John chapter 11 and Luke chapter 8?  He raises Lazarus from the dead.  He raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead. 

And in Matthew 27:52, what happens immediately after Jesus dies?  “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”

Do you see what Jesus has done here with the Sadducees?  He has wiped clean the slate.  He has destroyed the foundations that they so depended on and begun construction on a new foundation.

Do you understand why the Sadducees and others were so afraid?

Many of Jesus’ followers thought the Messiah would lead a military revolution.  They were disappointed when Jesus did not.

But Jesus absolutely started a revolution, just of a different kind.

And yet, you just know that after Jesus left them, there was at least one Sadducee that said, “Yeah, but he didn’t answer our question.”

And you know that with that Invisible Gorilla experiment, that after the researcher explained the gorilla in the video, at least one person said, “Yeah, okay, but how many passes were there?”

Don’t be like that.  Don’t be so caught up in the trivialness of this world, the clutter of society, that you lose sight over the true message of Jesus.

God is the God of life, not death.

Amen.