Spiritual Hiccups - Expectations

Many of us are familiar with the phrase "from the wrong side of the tracks."  In the South where I grew up, you could see this quite literally in some small towns.  A train track often bisected the town, and it was pretty obvious that there was a more desirable side and a side that was less so.  Jesus was from that side.

In today's gospel reading,  Jesus is gathering followers.  He calls Philip who in turn recruits Nathanael.  When he tells Nathanael that they have found the promised Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael replies, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"  Fortunately Nathanael went with Philip to see for himself.

It is nearly impossible to go through life without developing ideas about how things are.  Such notions are necessary for organizing our lives, but they are also problematic at times.  These notions let us make quick judgments and respond quickly.  They allow us to look at an array of choices and quickly refine the list down to manageable size.  But as necessary as they are, they often mislead us, and when the become fixed and rigid, they form prejudices of all shapes and sizes.

Our notions of how things are lead to expectations.  When someone says she's a lawyer, people already have a set of expectations about what kind of person this is.  When I tell someone I'm a pastor, I can often see the wheels his head turning and those expectations registering.  Often I engage in a preemptive strike of sorts, quickly clarifying that I may not be the sort of pastor they expect.  And I when people find out I drive a motorcycle, some of them have great difficulty reconciling that with their expectations.

Most of us have expectations of lawyers or pastors that aren't really accurate for large numbers of either group.  And I suspect that most of us have notions and expectations about Jesus that aren't terribly accurate either.  Jesus is an extremely well known figure in our society, but people seem to know a lot of different Jesuses.  There is meek and mild Jesus, Jewish rabbi Jesus, kindly healing Jesus, sword wielding warrior Jesus, and more.  Often these different Jesuses have little in common with any pictures of Jesus we find in the Bible.  They are more the result of what different people are hoping for.  Very often Jesus becomes the embodiment of our expectations about God.  Jesus becomes the embodiment of our religious hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations.

But if the Bible is clear about anything, it is clear that God is not like us, that God acts in ways that are not our ways.  And so it would seem impossible that God would not regularly defy our expectations, act contrary to those expectations, and seek to transform those expectations so that we become more like God.

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