“God doesn’t look at things
like humans do.” This is what the
prophet Samuel hears from the Lord when he is in Bethlehem searching for the
next king of Israel. God has already
found this future king; Samuel is merely trying to see who that is. But it’s impossible to do unless you are
seeking to look through the eyes of God.
Last Sunday in worship we
practiced the Examen, where the intent is to look back over your day with God’s
eyes. Inviting God into the process
gives us eyes to see what we couldn’t see before, showing us new ways of being,
making transformation possible. In the
texts we are examining this week, vision is the theme running through
both. The stories of Samuel’s anointing
of David and Jesus’ healing of a man who was blind from birth both have
something to tell us about what it is to really see, and what it means to be
blind.
We look for clues, just as
Samuel did in his hunt for God’s chosen one, and we are likely to get
confused. The text warns us against
looking on the outward appearance because God looks at the heart. But then we wonder why the text bothers to
tell us how handsome David was. If God
is looking only on the heart, why does his outward appearance matter?
It may or may not matter to
God. But your outward appearance
certainly does influence how others see you and interact with you. We know that attractive people tend to be
more successful by conventional standards.
We get classified, categorized, on the basis of those qualities others
can see.
And we know that the young
blind man in John’s gospel had been categorized as an outcast – a sinner. His imperfect appearance was believed to
reflect an imperfect heart. When Jesus
healed him of his imperfection, this clearly upset the order of things. He is a changed man. How will the community relate to him now?
In general, I think people
only like change that starts with them.
We don’t like it when change is forced on us by others, and when people
in our orbit change, very often we resent it because it forces us to change too. In our discussion at the roundtable, we
became very interested in the question of how David’s brothers felt about his
anointing. We assumed that they would be
resentful, for a variety of reasons – one being that this upset the family
order.
In the same way, I think
the Pharisees were upset not only because Jesus broke a Sabbath rule, but
because he was messing with what they regarded as the natural order of
things. We don’t have to strain too hard
to see the parallels between John’s story and the reality of first-century Christians
who were struggling to redefine themselves in relation to the Jewish
synagogue. And it’s not too much more of
a stretch to see our present-day efforts to effect transformation in the
church.
How does God redefine
us? By what God sees in our hearts,
perhaps. The potential for being
changed, conformed to God’s image, and then the possibility of becoming an
agent of transformation in the community. We see it repeatedly: the Samaritan
woman who tells the whole city to come and see this man Jesus; the formerly
blind man who tells the Pharisees about Jesus, “One thing I know – I was blind
but now I see.”
It’s a simple thing,
imperceptible to the eye, that can have dramatic effects.
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