By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Teachers often use multiple choice exams to test students’ knowledge because they can cover a wide array of facts and, frankly, because they are easier to grade than essay exams. Multiple choice quizzes are also the staple of magazines that wish to attract readers by promising to evaluate your personality, your sex appeal, or your economic savvy with a simple test. “Why spend years in therapy,” the magazine trumpets, “when you can figure out the answers to all of your problems by taking our ten question self-scored quiz?”

Whether found in a Biology class or in the pages of GQ, multiple choice exams are based on the proven tendency of our human brains to organize our world into categories, or what psychologists call “schema”. Because we are constantly being bombarded with information, our brains have developed the ability to create mental maps of our world that help us to sort, organize, and classify our experiences, thus giving us the ability to walk through our day without collapsing from sensory overload. We sift and sort what we are seeing into categories such as trees, traffic, or people, and then even sub-sort into smaller useful groups like stranger or friend. It is such a natural process that we don’t realize how amazing a process it is but just think for a minute about a favorite childhood game that exploits this ability to categorize: the game “Twenty Questions”. In “Twenty Questions”, one person chooses an object and everyone else is given the opportunity to ask 20 questions that will allow them to correctly guess the object. Think about how incredible this game is: The first player can choose anything in the entire world as the target object, anything from an amoeba to a fork, from Alpha Centauri to a dust mite, and the other players are given only 20 questions in which to narrow the possibilities down from billions upon trillions to one. A skilled player accomplishes that feat by applying schema: is it an animal or a vegetable? (Animal) Does it have 2 legs or 4? (2) Is it bigger than a bread box? (No) Is it perching or ground foraging? (Perching) Does it migrate or winter over? (Winters over) Is it a chickadee? (Yes!)

Now, for you avid Twenty Questions fans, I know that you are only allowed to ask ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions but I simplified the process for the sake of my point, which preachers are allowed to do, and the point is that our brain’s ability to create categories or schemas to represent our world is an amazing ability that we take for granted, but without that ability, we would barely be able to step foot out the door without being overwhelmed by everything we are seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling because, not being able to categorize those experiences, we would have to learn the purpose of every single new object we encountered. You might see a chickadee at the feeder but have no idea of whether you were looking at an object to be admired or at something that could be used to hold open your door because you couldn’t distinguish between the category ‘doorstop’ and the category ‘songbird’. And even after you discovered that chickadees make lousy doorstops, you wouldn’t be able to transfer that information to the red two legged feathery thing that also visits your feeder which would mean that you’d have to try the experiment all over again with a squawking cardinal before you learned that cardinals also make pretty poor doorstops. Now, this may sound like a ridiculous example but in fact, there are people with a certain type of brain damage who actually experience this problem. They are able to see an object and even describe it, but they can’t identify the meaning of what they are seeing. One writer says, for example, they might look at an apple and say, “It’s round and red with a small hard brown thing sticking out of the top..... Do you use it to comb your hair?”

Our ability to organize our world into recognizable categories, helps us navigate through our day, manage new experiences, and accelerates our learning but there is a downside to it. When we encounter something that doesn’t easily fit into our mental categories, we become flummoxed. Our brains don’t know what to do with this unclassifiable encounter.

Imagine for a second that I ask you to play another game, this one a call-response game in which I will call out the name of a plant and you respond with either “fruit” or “vegetable”. We’d easily dash through the beginning of the list: peas - vegetable, peaches - fruit, beets – vegetable, potato – vegetable, apple – fruit; but when I call out “tomato”, the room would erupt in stumbled uncertainties and a gaggle of arguments. “Are you categorizing it according to botany”, you might ask, “which would make it a fruit, or are you categorizing it by function, which would make it a vegetable?” Our categories crash into one another and can even have ugly consequences if say, the botanist who insists on listing the tomato as a fruit, is assigned the task of bringing a fruit salad to brunch. And I won’t even get started on the duck-billed platypus.

O.K. enough fun with the way our brains work. What does any of this have to do with Jesus? That reminds me of the story of the minister who was doing Children’s Time and he asked the children, “What’s brown, has a bushy tail, and loves to eat nuts?” One little girl raised her hand and hesitantly said, “I know the answer must be Jesus but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me.” Well, you know that we have to get to Jesus eventually but so far this sure sounds like a psychology class to you. But, in fact you see, our innate impulse to order our world into recognizable categories has everything to do with Jesus and how we understand him, and that is exactly what is going on in these first few chapters of the gospel of Luke. Here in these chapters, Luke presents his readers with this multiple choice quiz: Who do you think Jesus is? Is he a) a spiritually enlightened man or is he b) God?

The most reasonable choice for someone who is first opening the book of Luke is that Jesus must be a spiritually enlightened man. People have encountered spiritual leaders before and it is a familiar category and so Luke explores that idea. “You all know John the Baptist,” he says. “and we can all agree that here was a spiritually upright man.”

And so Luke begins a step by step comparison between John the Baptist and this new lesser known figure of Jesus:

John’s mother had been old and childless, long past the point when any ordinary woman would hope to give birth, and so John’s conception was extraordinary. And so was Jesus’.

John’s birth was predicted by Gabriel who visited Zechariah to tell him the good news. Gabriel also announced Jesus’ birth to Mary.

John was not given his father’s name as was traditional but his name was revealed by the angel, who also revealed Jesus’ name to Mary.

John would grow up to teach, preach, make disciples, and even die for the sake of the faith to which he had committed his life. Jesus would grow up to teach, preach, make disciples, and even die for the sake of the faith to which he had committed his life.

In every way he can, Luke draws the comparison between John the Baptist, a man accepted by his readers as the very best and most godly man anyone knew, and this new figure of Jesus. But just as Luke’s readers are about to circle A on their multiple choice quiz for “Jesus was a spiritually enlightened man,” Luke deliberately muddies the waters. “Oh, and did I mention that while John’s father was human, Jesus’ father was divine? John ate locusts and honey but Jesus ate and drank with sinners. John told people to share their extra coat with the needy; Jesus told people to give both their coat and their shirt away. John died for his faith and was buried by his disciples; Jesus died for his faith but rose again to new life.” In Luke’s gospel, Jesus starts out like John but consistently goes him one better, and so the readers say, “OK, if John was the best humanity has to offer, but Jesus consistently does him one better, than what does that make Jesus?” And we move our pencils to the second possibility in our multiple choice quiz: “Jesus must be God”.

But Luke’s not ready to make it that easy. “Wait,” he says again. “Before you mark your paper, consider this. Maybe Jesus’ conception was miraculous but then he was born to a mortal woman in a smelly barn. Jesus suffers real hunger in the wilderness, bleeds real blood when he is beaten by soldiers. His friends betray him, the soldiers crucify him, and his death is stark and brutal and painful and real.” A God who gets hungry? we ask. A God who bleeds? None of that sounds very god-like at all and our pencils waver again. “Spiritually enlightened man or God? The best humanity has to offer or divine? A or B?” Which should we circle?

For Luke, there is only one right answer on this multiple choice quiz and that answer is C. Not A, not B, but C. What is C? Well, the early church theologians understood C to be “all of the above” – fully human, fully divine. The Christian mystics understood C to be “none of the above” – “We do not have the language to explain our experience of Christ”, but both interpretations say essentially the same thing: Jesus simply does not fit our categories.

And frankly, we hate that answer. Our brains insist that there’s got to be a way of fitting everything, including Jesus, into the boxes that we create to organize our experiences but we have to remember that those categories are ultimately human-created and somewhat arbitrary. The tomato is still a tomato whether you choose to call it a fruit or a vegetable: your category doesn’t change the essence of that tomato. Our categories only affect our response to it, which is why, I suspect, it is best that Jesus confounds our brains and refuses to fit into our tidy boxes. Luke understood that when we become too certain of our ability to categorize something, we become certain that we have understood everything we need to know about it. We even risk no longer paying much attention at all to it. But when there is something new, when there is something that we cannot easily understand or quickly fit into what we already know, we will keep coming back to it again and again, looking at it, watching it, listening to it, trying to grasp this thing that so eludes us.

Luke says to his readers – says to us, “You want to know whether Jesus is a) a spiritually enlightened man or b) God? Well, the answer is “c” so pay close attention. In Jesus you will experience something you have never seen before, someone completely different from anyone you have ever known. And if he confuses you, rejoice and be glad, because it is his ability to confound our categories that will keep bringing us back again and again to listen and to learn.