Michael Shermer, a famous skeptic and psychologist, has popularized the insight surrounding pattern recognition. Humans, he suggests, are pattern recognition machines. With any set of inputs—sight, sound, taste, touch—the human brain is set to identify patterns.
Amidst the noise and chaos of everyday life, humans are amazingly adept at picking out patterns. That’s why parents in a crowded McDonalds can distinguish the scream of their child amid the screams of a herd of other children.
It’s why when you’re driving faster than you’re supposed to and you look in the rearview mirror and you see a silver vehicle and the distinctive grille of a Ford Taurus in the rear view mirror, you automatically take your foot off the gas pedal.
Babies, for example, at one day old will focus on edges and stripes. Within a relatively short period of time, they are able to distinguish the face and voice of their parents from other faces and voices in an already crowded world.
From an evolutionary standpoint pattern recognition is essential to survival. If you’re stumbling about in the African Savanah and you hear something in the bush, you have a choice to make.
Shermer says that if you choose to believe it’s a predator, but it turns out to be the wind, you haven’t really lost much except a little extra adrenaline.
On the other hand, if you choose to believe it’s the wind, and it turns out to be a tiger … well, your genes have to get out of the pool.
Consequently, humans have developed a keen ability to find patterns everywhere, since the cost of being wrong about danger is too high. Unfortunately, while this kind of super-tuned threat detection is helpful for survival in an environment where the chances of being eaten are genuinely great, it doesn’t serve us nearly so well when most of the threats we face day-to-day aren’t real aggression, but passive aggression—when the threat isn’t that we’ll be eaten, but that the yogurt we left in the fridge for our afternoon break will be eaten by Janice—who apparently finds it impossible to leave her hands off other people’s stuff.
In modern life we’re much more prone to pattern recognition that ensures not our safety, but our comfort level. I take it that that’s why most of us are so ill-disposed to change.
Change represents a break in the pattern, and therefore, a potential threat—if not to my safety, then to my sense that the world is a hospitable place, and basically designed to provide me a disruption-free existence.
Jesus, the man who graduated from Nazareth High, bumps into this problem with pattern recognition in our text for this morning.
If you recall from last week, Jesus has been accosted by the big religious muckity-mucks, who’re uptight about some of the ritual hygiene practices of his disciples, who don’t follow the hand-washing purity rituals.
Jesus makes the case that the thing that’s dirty and needs cleaning isn’t on the outside of the body, but on the inside. Moreover, he argues that treating our personal customs as divine mandates can lead to people—who are already at the top of the heap—treating those at the bottom of the pile like gatecrashers.
In other words, religious customs that at one time had been a way of throwing open the doors to make it easier for everyone to practice faith, have come to be the very mechanism by which those doors get slammed shut—often keeping out the people who most need to get inside.
But, as I say, after this run-in with the Pharisees, Jesus is apparently disgusted enough that he needs a break—and not just a short little breather, either. According to our text today, Jesus hit the road and didn’t stop until he got to Tyre. Tyre, as we say in the mountains is a “fur piece” from where Jesus had been in the region of Galilee.
We pick up our text for this morning as Jesus is approached by a Gentile woman, a Syrophoenician, whose daughter is stricken by an unclean spirit. The woman falls on her feet and asks Jesus to cast out the spirit.
How does Jesus respond?
I don’t know how you read it, but it seems pretty clear that he insults her by calling her and her daughter dogs.