My sister Trudy has been visually challenged her entire life. A good friend who had perfectly fine corrected vision until a few years ago, is experiencing the center of her field of vision slowly fade away due to macular degeneration, while another friend has a difficult to treat form of glaucoma so her peripheral vision is disappearing. With these people constantly on my mind, I never take my eyesight for granted. Rather I give thanks daily, often when I’m out walking, that I can see the extraordinary beauty of the world around me. The blue sky, green grass, the shrubs, trees and flowers that are in bloom this time of year - what an extraordinary gift to be able to see and appreciate it all. At the same time, I’m acutely aware that what we see is only partly informed by the light waves that strike our eyes which in turn send signals to our brains that register as blue sky, green grass or whatever. The reality is we only see a fraction of what passes before us largely because we tend to see what we expect to see while failing to notice everything else. This can be problematic for law enforcement personnel trying to find out what happened during an accident or when a crime was committed when what witnesses to the event claim to have seen doesn’t agree.
One of the things that influences what we see at any given moment is what we’ve been taught over a long period of time to expect to see. I’m sure you’ve all heard some version of that rhetorical question, If you encountered Jesus on the street today, would you follow him? This is immediately followed with, Well of course you would, if you knew it was Jesus. But how would you know? What does Jesus look like after all? I know I’m not alone when I tell you I grew up looking at countless images of what I call the Scandinavian Jesus. You know who I mean, that light skinned fellow with the sandy hair in kind of a page boy and light brown eyes. The man was Semitic!! I can’t help but think that images like those I just mentioned were at least partly responsible for an exchange I witnessed during a multigenerational education time in a small church I attended decades ago. We were studying the catechism I believe and I don’t remember what triggered the question but suddenly this very precocious six year old exclaimed, Wait, Jesus was Jewish?!? Well yes, replied the vicar. Huh, Christopher gasped… I always thought he was British! Spoken like a true Anglican, responded the vicar. But really, if in every picture of Jesus he’d ever seen Jesus looked like Sir Lancelot, why wouldn’t Christopher have leapt to that conclusion? For once I can assure you this is not simply a Caucasian issue. My two favorite images of Jesus, of all the paintings and other artwork I’ve seen during my life anywhere in the world, are two pictures that hang in the diocesan center in Cuernavaca. In one Jesus is laughing, and in the other he’s looking down at a baby in his arms. In both cases Jesus is moreno, that is, he has dark hair and brown skin. I’ve read that in many churches in Africa Jesus is portrayed as black. This is not illogical when you think about it. We’re taught all our lives that we are created in the image of God. If we understand that to mean we look like God, then it’s only reasonable to conclude that God looks like us. The issue then becomes, how narrowly do we define us?
So considering all of this, I would argue that the most important seeing that occurs in our lives doesn’t rely simply on the light that strikes our eyes, but on what we see, or rather experience, with our hearts. Consider the disciples on the road to Emmaus whom we heard about in today’s Gospel reading. They spent hours, hours! walking with Jesus without ever realizing with whom they were walking. Think about that. These were people who walked the earth with Jesus. While it doesn’t sound like they were from the inner circle of twelve, they’re referred to as disciples so they surely had listened to Jesus teach, probably had seen him heal the sick, perhaps had been part of one of the crowds that he had miraculously fed. Yet they had no idea they were walking with Jesus. Why not? Because there was no way it could be Jesus. Jesus had died two days before on the cross. They hadn’t dared get too close but they’d seen him up there, they knew he’d died, that his body had been taken down from the cross and buried. Oh sure, they’d heard what the women - there’s the issue! - had reported, that when they went to the tomb this morning Jesus’ body was gone and angels told them that Jesus was alive, but come on! Everybody knew Jesus had died. Not until at their invitation Jesus joined them for the evening meal, and then during the course of the meal took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them did they recognize Jesus for who he was. Only then, in retrospect, did they remember that their hearts had burned while Jesus had been teaching them as they walked together. In other words, their hearts had recognized something that their minds didn’t consider possible and because they relied on their minds rather than their hearts they were unable to recognize who was right there with them. They say seeing is believing, but maybe sometimes we have to believe in order to be able to see.
So what does all of this have to do with living in today’s world? For starters it means if we have any desire at all of convincing others that being a Christian is a worthwhile way of life, we can’t rely on words alone to do it. After all, that didn’t work for the risen Jesus. Besides, the world is beyond tired of Christian rhetoric. Indeed, what is being passed off as Christian teaching by some these days is such a horrible perversion of the teachings of Jesus it makes my skin crawl. None of that is going to inspire people to become followers of Jesus. No, people need to experience behavior that touches them in a way that convinces them at the deepest level that being a Christian is not about separating oneself from those who are different, or about lording it over people deemed inferior for one reason or another, but rather that being a Christians really and truly is about loving one’s neighbor. They need to experience first hand that it’s about helping those who need help, defending those who are frightened, raising up those who have been beaten down.
Paradoxically though, sometimes living our faith doesn’t have to be about what we do, but instead can be something as simple yet powerful as taking time to be, just be, with someone who feels utterly alone. In one of his midwinter meditations Retired Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning describes being at home in New York City with his wife Patti as a blizzard raged outside. They were enjoying being cozy and warm indoors when the daughter of a friend called from Connecticut. She had given birth way too early, the baby weighed less than a pound and wasn’t expected to live. Could Bishop Browning come and baptize the baby. They went. He said that he didn’t know a human being could be that small, that he could easily have held the child in the palm of his hand. A nurse gave him a paper medicine cup of water and he baptized the baby. He said in that moment he knew he saw Jesus. He said that he had done baptisms in some pretty magnificent places, but he had never felt the presence of Jesus more clearly than he felt it that night. He added that the little boy lived, and as he wrote the meditation was a bright and busy toddler. “He does not know,” Bishop Browning wrote, “that he was Jesus to me when he was born.”
The idea of being Jesus to someone sounds pretty daunting, so we need to keep in mind that tiny infant. He didn’t do anything, he simply was. I’ve said many times that anyone who has looked into the eyes of a child has seen the face of God. It’s that sort of wordless heart to heart connection that the world is dying to experience from us. It is the spirit to spirit connection that occurs when the Jesus in us is truly able to connect with the Jesus in another person. Once that connection forms, it can carry us past a whole host of superficial differences. This doesn’t mean we’ll never again experience interpersonal conflicts. Keep in mind that Jesus lost patience with even his closest followers, was downright angry with Peter at times. He was frankly rather nasty in some of the things he said, like when he implied helping the Syrophoenician woman would be like giving the children’s food to the dogs. But he didn’t stay angry with Peter. He acknowledged the faith displayed by the Syrophoenician woman as she continued to seek help for her daughter even after he initially rejected her plea. In other words Jesus let go of momentary anger, he looked past cultural differences, in order to ultimately see and respond to the intrinsic value of every person fortunate enough to cross his path. We may or may not be able to do that, but we can at least try. Even when we fail, and we will - none of us can connect with everyone - if we sincerely look for the Jesus in other people at least once in awhile we’ll succeed in finding that holy inner being. When that happens, when the Jesus in us finds, perhaps sets free to be seen for the first time, the Jesus in another person, we will have succeeded in showing the world in a way that truly matters, what it means to be a Christian.
Amen.
