When I was in junior high, I had a global studies teacher named Mr. Force. Mr. Force was a quintessential teacher of seventh and eighth graders — a little bit kooky, a little bit absent-minded, and totally devoted to kids. He was the kind of teacher who had friendly rivalries with other teachers in the school, and often involved students in playing pranks on his colleagues. Mr. Force used an overhead projector in his classes, and sometimes he'd forget what he was doing and put the ink side of the overhead marker in his mouth. One day, he accidentally stuck a marker in his mouth and turned part of his tongue red. Then, to our absolute delight, he opened a closet where he had a small mirror and proceeded to draw blue and green stripes on his tongue to complete the look. We loved Mr. Force.

At one point during eighth grade, when we were learning about some global movement — maybe boycotts against apartheid, since this would have been the mid-1980s — my class got it into our heads that we wanted to stage a protest over an assignment, I think, to ask for a later due date. So we conspired with another teacher to let us hide in his classroom instead of going to Mr. Force's room. We sat at our desks with the lights off, giggling to ourselves and wondering what Mr. Force would think of our boycott.

He was such a jokester. I think we expected him to come in and applaud our little prank. I don't remember how long it took for Mr. Force to figure out what was going on, though in retrospect, he probably had much more knowledge of our plan than we knew. But he came into our classroom with a serious and almost hurt look on his face. He turned on the lights and quietly began handing out detention slips. Whatever we thought would happen, it wasn't this. One of my friends started to cry. She'd never had detention or been suspended, and neither had I. We were the good kids, just having a little fun. We never expected him to take us so seriously.

The details of what happened next are a little fuzzy in my mind, but I do remember two things. First, Mr. Force turned our protest into a lesson about the consequences of civil disobedience. He didn't tell us we were wrong, or that he was angry, or that he thought it was funny. Instead, he taught us that choosing to break rules to make a statement includes preparing for the consequences of our actions — whether or not he said those words. What I heard that day was that part of what it means to act against the status quo is to believe in what you're doing, to understand why you're doing it, and to recognize what it might cost.

The second thing I remember is what happened next. In the stunned silence of that classroom, Mr. Force collected our filled-out detention slips as the bell rang, and he walked out the door. He ripped them in half and dropped them in the garbage can. Whatever it was I expected to happen that day, it was not that.

I remembered that experience this week because I've been thinking about expectations. So many stories in the gospel are about Jesus subverting expectations, going against the status quo, breaking the rules. In many of our churches, it's common to talk about God's upside-down kingdom and its reversal of values, or how Jesus resisted cultural and social norms. Today's gospel story from Luke sets the reader up for exactly that expectation. Jesus is going to a meal with religious leaders, and they are watching him, presumably because he is expected to do something unexpected, shocking, disgraceful. The irony is that stories like this — healing and dinner — have become routine for us. We expect Jesus to subvert expectations. We're ready for it. We know who the righteous and the unrighteous are in these stories. Jesus will best the religious leaders at wordplay, and they will come out on the wrong side yet again. Those silly leaders value their rules and their hierarchies and their rituals more than caring for the people.

So Jesus has to come in and upend the status quo. Jesus is so subversive, it's predictable. In fact, maybe we don't even need to hear the whole story to expect the ending. What I read just now is more than what is scheduled from Luke, according to the lectionary. The lectionary editors left out the healing story of the man with the swelling, which is verses two through six, to focus on Jesus's conversation with the religious leaders at the Sabbath meal. Maybe the lectionary editors thought we didn't need another story of healing on the Sabbath, because the previous lectionary reading from Luke is the story of the Sabbath healing of a woman who'd been bent over for eighteen years. Maybe we are already inclined to expect Jesus to heal on the Sabbath, just as we expect the Pharisees and religious leaders to object. So there was no need to mention it again — except in this story, the leaders and the lawyers don't object to the healing. They actually don't say anything. They just watch.

Maybe they were also watching that other time when Jesus healed the woman who was bent over. Maybe they're still turning over that idea in their minds. Maybe they're pondering what it all means. Maybe they are in the process of conversion. We expect them to be the villains. But what if instead they're watching and learning? This gospel story actually leaves a lot of room for interpretation beyond our expectations.

The writer tells us that Jesus is going to dine with some religious leaders for the Sabbath. These invited lawyers and Pharisees are already watching Jesus, and they are present as the healing scene plays out. In verse two, we hear that a man with an abnormal swelling — edema — was there. The text is not precise about what "there" means, especially since the lawyers and the Pharisees are also there. Is this somewhere on the way to the dinner? Is it in the house? Could this man be a guest? Well, probably not — it's unlikely the host invited the man with edema to the dinner, especially not with all these fancy religious leaders. That's why Jesus turns to the host and encourages him to invite blind people, crippled people, poor people to dinner in the future, right? Maybe. But the host did invite Jesus.

So let's imagine together for a minute: what if the host had invited the man with edema to come to dinner? Or what if the man showed up because he had been there for a meal in the past, or had been offered Sabbath kindness by the host before? That would change the story, wouldn't it? It could mean that the words Jesus says to the host were not a reprimand, but encouragement — affirmation.

Let's imagine something else. Jesus notices how the guests are jockeying for the best seats. Seating arrangements were important for determining and reinforcing social status. The prime spots at dinner were those closest to the person held in highest esteem, whoever that might be. Jesus was specifically invited to dine with these leaders, and they were intrigued enough by what he was doing that they were watching him. Let's imagine, then, that trying to get the best seats is not due to an abstract sense of self-importance, but is instead an effort to be seated near Jesus. That would change how we understand these leaders, who perhaps eagerly and earnestly want to see what Jesus is doing.

What happens next is that Jesus offers commentary on what he is observing. The writer of Luke calls Jesus's words a parable, but it sounds like tips on how not to embarrass yourself at a wedding. I have heard this story interpreted as a rejection of prestige and a call to humility, where God is the host who will bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly. But the story seems like a strange way to subvert the expectations of a bunch of high-status dinner guests who are certainly already attentive to honor and shame. None of them is likely to embarrass their host or themselves by seating themselves improperly at a wedding. And anyway, the lowest place — where Jesus says they should sit — would likely be set aside for the host and his family. So why would anyone sit there?

This is an odd parable to tell if the dinner guests are truly just snooty elites who care only about appearances. On the other hand, if the dinner guests are actually trying to be seated near Jesus, the parable becomes one not of chastisement and shame for selfish behavior, but of freedom from binding social constraints. If these leaders are trying to impress Jesus by playing the typical status game so they can be near him, Jesus subverts their expectations by releasing them from those rules. He is telling them they don't need to worry about impressing him, because he doesn't care about their position in society — he cares about their concern for others. The parable is still about humility and about how little status matters to God. But Jesus has helped the gathered leaders imagine themselves as part of a new world in which they no longer have to fight for the best seats, because that's not what brings honor, and it's not what gets them close to Jesus. What a relief that must have been. What liberation.

We don't expect these stories of Jesus to evoke sympathy for the religious leaders, or to paint them with complexity, as if they were actual humans and not just foils in the hero narrative of Jesus. In much of our interpretation, Pharisees are the perennial antagonists, the ones who never understand what Jesus is about. We get used to thinking of them as one-dimensional caricatures: the ego-driven narcissists, the vain and selfish elites, the posh and judgmental, holier-than-thou.

I learned recently about a phenomenon called affective polarization — that's affective with an "a." It comes out of political science. Affective polarization is about how our divisions impact our feelings about other people as humans in society. We can be divided over issues or ideologies without hating each other. But affective polarization is the degree to which we actually no longer like or trust those on the other side. It's the difference between seeing someone else as an opponent or as an enemy. When affective polarization takes hold, we come to see others only through one-dimensional stereotypes and caricatures, as unworthy of empathy or moral consideration, and as something less than the full humans we are. In the worst situations, the threat others pose becomes the justification for violence against them.

Today's gospel text, and its interpretation over time, are a reminder of how easy it can be to follow where our expectations lead — like how oblivious those Pharisees were, how untrustworthy, how unfaithful. Sadly, the Christian tradition has a long history of demonizing the Jewish religious leaders of the gospels, a demonization that has been lived out in anti-Semitic discrimination and violence for generations. The perceived supremacy of Christianity has also been invoked to support centuries of colonial conquest and occupation, the genocide of indigenous populations, the kidnapping and enslavement of generations of Africans, and a hundred other horrors. Today, white Christian nationalists are using a similar playbook to sideline or even eliminate those who do not subscribe to their political and religious ideology. At the root of so much of the terror humans have wrought on other humans is the choice to stop seeing someone else as fully human, as made in the image of God.

Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber tells about a time she was ranting about the stupidity and wrongness of people with whom she disagreed. And a friend said to her: "Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it." This is the right idea — that when we draw those us-and-them lines, Jesus is on the other side. But I'll add a caveat: Jesus is on the other side too. Jesus is always alongside all of us. That is the subversion of expectations. Jesus subverts the idea that anyone is disposable, or unimportant to God, or beyond redemption. I like to hope that Jesus keeps accepting these dinner invitations, because he sees these religious leaders as complex and real humans who can listen and who can change — subverting all our expectations.