There’s a phenomenon that was discovered sometime in the 1970s called inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness (also called perceptual blindness) is the failure to notice something that is completely visible, because of a lack of attention. Inattentional blindness occurs when someone fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits. You’re frantically searching for your glasses, and only after patting all your pockets do you finally realize—after initially failing to notice—they are sitting on top of your head.

 

And this phenomenon of inattention blindness was made famous during research leading up to a 2010 book on the subject called “The Invisible Gorilla,” by Christopher Chabris, a psychologist at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and Daniel Simons, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

The book was based on a video the authors made to conduct their research called “The Monkey Business Illusion,” designed to prove their hypothesis about the reality of inattention blindness, which now has over 14 million views on YouTube. The video shows 6 actors walking around in a circular pattern, 3 wearing white shirts, 3 wearing black shirts, each passing 2 basketballs among each other. It begins with the words and voice-over of one of the author’s asking the viewer to count how many times the players in white pass the basketball. And as the players are moving and passing the basketball, someone in a gorilla costume walks right through them stops in the middle, pounds his chest a few times, and walks off screen.

 

Then the voice over gives the correct number of passes: 16. And then he asks the question: “Did you spot the gorilla?” You might be thinking, of course the viewers must have, but then then the shocking and fascinating text flashes across the screen, that according to their studies in testing viewers who watched the video, for those people who had never seen or heard of a video like this before, about half of them—50%—completely missed the gorilla. And for those that did notice the gorilla lest they think they passed the test, more words flash across the screen questioning whether they noticed the curtain subtly and progressively change colors from red to gold as the game goes on, or one of the players on the black team leaving the game—many of which, did not! The video concludes by saying, “when you’re looking for a gorilla, you often miss other unexpected events…and that’s the monkey business illusion.”

 

And though everyone has differing abilities in how well they can focus their attention—the results of this study and others like it brings to light the inescapable evidence of the reality of inattention or perceptual blindness—in which our innate human nature and the senses through which we experience and perceive life and things in life—including the one perhaps most association with perception, sight, are fallible, they can fail us.

 

It’s possible for us to be staring at something—looking at someone straight in the face—and simultaneously miss something about that thing or person in the experience of that moment, that is nevertheless absolutely true, real, and firmly rooted in reality. And the reason we can miss what is hiding in plain sight is because our attention is distracted or divided, or better—we’re not paying enough attention—we’re not trying hard enough to focus—we don’t care enough to focus—or worse—we don’t want to see what is right in front of us, so we willfully turn our gaze and turn a blind eye to the reality of what is right of us…

 

And that is precisely what we see once again with the people and religious leaders of Jerusalem in this text, as Jesus continues teaching on the final day of the Festival of Booths. Some think he is a prophet—even the eschatological prophet that God promised would come like Moses—yet he is much more that. Others think he might be the Christ—the promised and anointed Messiah that God promised of old, yet he is still much more than that.

 

Some recognize his unparalleled mastery of Scripture and never before heard powerful exposition and oratory of it, and yet still are unable to see his identity. And others—like the chief priests and Pharisees—are so in-attentionally blind, to use that term anachronistically, that the only thing they can see/perceive about Jesus is what they want him to be—a deceiver, imposter, and phony.

 

And so the question that we are forced to wrestle with again this morning as we finally finish this scene and story on a climactic note through a powerful pronunciation of Jesus—and as your eyes once again behold Jesus as he is described, depicted, and revealed on the pages of Scripture in John’s Gospel—the question is:

 

Can you see the Jesus that is right in front of you? Can you see Jesus as he’s revealed himself to you in his word, on his terms, and in his time, on the pages of the Bible, in this Gospel, and in this story? Can you see him the way he wants you—demands you to see him—as Word and Son of God made flesh, God of very God, Lord of every lord, Savior of sinners, and king of the universe? Or are your senses and perception blind to him—and he’s just a man—a good man—even a prophet—a kind of anointed-messiah figure in Israel’s history who did some wonderful things for his people. Or is he even less than that—a fake, a phony, an imposter.

 

If any of these are the picture of Jesus you see and believe, then like the people and religious leaders in the story this morning, whatever you think you may know or see about Jesus, demonstrates your inattentional spiritual blindness to him and that you don’t know anything about him at all—not enough to save you, at least, but just enough to condemn you.