Faith in Action Week 2
SEEING THROUGH JESUS’ EYES
By Mother Ellen
I. Jesus’ vision
So here we are at Week 2 of FAITH IN ACTION – a program to help us to become more aware of the opportunities in our daily lives to put feet to our faith, to act in accordance with what we say on Sunday we believe. Last week we looked at the subject of DETOURS, and how God puts opportunities in our path to help others as Jesus would do, and we looked at the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate how helping a person in need might require us to take a divine detour off our normal path and schedule. I happened to hear a remarkable story about someone who had a chance to take a divine detour last week, and I’ve asked her if she would tell us about it. Please welcome Pat Vine.
Last Wednesday night, after studying the story of the Good Samaritan, our Faith in Action small group prayed together for God to provide a person for each of us to help this week.
The next morning when I arrived at St. Michael’s for work, I noticed an unfamiliar woman in the parking lot. She walked over to my car, introduced herself as Susan, and asked if she could come inside the church to get warm. She said that she had made a mistake in coming up north from Georgia to try to make it on her own, was broke and homeless the past few nights and in need of sleep. She had tried all the township resources to find food and shelter but was not eligible. As she talked, I realized that for me, Susan was God’s answer to the prayer that our small group had prayed the night before.
So I invited her to follow me into the building and I found her a coat to keep her warm. I offered the couches in the upper room so she could sleep. She had a cold, so I found a can of chicken soup that she heated up. As she ate, she expressed the desire to return to Georgia as she wasn’t making it here. She needed a bus ticket back home.
I decided to take her to Newark and buy a bus ticket for her to go back to Georgia. On our way down to Newark I had an opportunity to tell Susan that she was an answer to prayer. She looked at me quizzically and asked me to say more. I told her that we were studying the story of the Good Samaritan and had prayed for God to provide someone in need for each of us to help, and her response was, “Well, I’ll be damned—only kidding, of course!” When we got to the bus station I bought her ticket, and she gave me a big hug and thank you as we said goodbye, and said that she would always remember this.
After this experience with Susan, I reflected on the story of the Good Samaritan again and saw several things. When I became aware in the parking lot that Susan was a “detour” in my day sent by God, I was freer to help her. I also saw that the Samaritan didn’t give his money to the one beaten and robbed, but gave it to the innkeeper to make sure his money would be used to help the stranger get better. It was important for me to take her to the bus depot and buy the ticket to Georgia so she could get home.
I am grateful to God for Susan and for providing this opportunity for me to put my Faith in Action.
Notice that a key to Pat’s putting her faith into action was what she saw. Just as the Good Samaritan wouldn’t have helped the man lying half-dead by the side of the road if he hadn’t seen him, Pat wouldn’t have helped Susan if her eyes hadn’t been open. In the course of a work week, Pat sees a lot of different people coming and going in our parking lot. But Thursday, she was alert to the needs of others because she had asked God to make her so. What we see is key to what we do.
So today we’re going to talk about eyesight – how we see the world around us. Of course, it’s very common to have flaws in your vision that distort your perception. For example, some people are color blind – they can’t distinguish between some colors. That can make shopping for clothes kind of difficult. Other people are myopic – they can’t see distant objects clearly. If they don’t get glasses or contact lenses, they’ll never be able to get a driver’s license. Yet others are hyperopic – they can’t see near objects clearly – like we all find as we have to hold the paper further and further away to be able to read it.
And just as our physical lens can be flawed, causing distortion in our vision, so can our spiritual lens be flawed, causing distortion in our spiritual perception of the world around us. Spiritual color blindness, for instance, may cause us to be insensitive to the plight of some people because of their race. Spiritual myopia may cause us not see the pain of people in faraway places, whether it’s South America, Africa, or Asia. Spiritual hyperopia, on the other hand, may blind us to the pain in our local community right around us, the things we “see” every day but really don’t notice. In other words, we all have a spiritual “lens” – made up of our assumptions, our responses, our judgments about people – that influences how we see the world and other people.
Now if your physical lens is flawed, you go to an eye doctor so your vision can be corrected. But if your spiritual lens is flawed, you need to go to the Great Physician Himself. All of us need to let Jesus correct our flawed vision so that we can see the world and other people the way He did. Only then will we be able to treat others the way He did, and out of the same motivations He had.
The Bible shows us that the secret to Jesus’ vision – His lens on the world – was His mission. Let’s look at a passage where Jesus clearly announces what His mission is. Please turn in the black pew Bible to Luke 4:16; got a page number? Before we start to read, let me set the scene for you. After His baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus had returned to his hometown of Nazareth, and like all good Jews on the Sabbath day He goes to the morning service at the synagogue. It was the custom to invite any visitor to read from the Scripture passage appointed for the day (like our Layreaders do). So during the service Jesus gets up and walks to the podium in the middle of the room, and the attendant gives Him a large scroll containing the writings of the prophet Isaiah. Follow along beginning at verse 16:
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21 and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
“Today this scripture is fulfilled” – wow, that was a slam-dunk statement. When Jesus said that, it set people buzzing, because they knew that this passage applied to the Messiah! Jesus was saying that He was the one Isaiah was writing about, He was the Messiah, and this passage was His mission statement. So what was Jesus’ mission? First, it was to preach good news to the poor. People thought that being rich was a sign of God’s favor and being poor was a sign of God’s judgment. But Jesus turned the tables and gave the poor the good news that they were actually favored by God. Second, Jesus’ mission was to proclaim freedom for the prisoner. Whether literally in jail or imprisoned by circumstances, Jesus came to set prisoners free.
Third, Jesus’ mission was to give sight to the blind. In the first century people thought blindness was caused by sin. But Jesus came to heal and show mercy to people who were physically blind or spiritually blind as well. Fourth, Jesus’ mission was to release the oppressed. Jesus came to set wrongs right, to help the helpless, to bring justice to those suffering from injustice. And finally, Jesus’ mission was to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. This refers to the Old Testament Year of Jubilee, when slaves were freed and debts were cancelled. Jesus came to announce that if you are enslaved by sin and in debt to God for all your wrong-doing, then Good News! His death on the Cross will set you free and pay your debt, so you can be right with God.
So we can see that Jesus’ mission was focused on people – people who were in need – and that His attitude toward people – His lens – was one of compassion and mercy. The Bible tells us that Jesus felt compassion when He encountered the sick (Mt. 14:14), the blind (Mt. 20:34), the demon- possessed (Mk. 9:22), the grieving (Lk. 7:13), the hungry (Mt. 15:32), the lonely (Mk. 1:41), and the bewildered (Mt. 9:36). His lens of compassion guided his action, reaction, and interaction with everyone he met. When we let Jesus correct our spiritual vision problems – to open our eyes to see the world the way He did – it makes it possible for us to begin to treat people the way He did – with love, compassion, and mercy.
Song: “Give me your eyes”
II. The lens of compassion
When we see people through Jesus’ lens of love and compassion, we see them differently. For example, when my husband looks at me, he sees beyond all my faults (thank God) and sees the goodness in me, which may sometimes be invisible to someone who judges me only on my actions. And my husband’s love for me makes me want to be the kind of person he sees me as. (It reminds me of the dogowner’s prayer: “Lord, help me to be the person my dog thinks I am.”) And that’s true with our children, too, isn’t it? I remember when my son Patrick was in high school and dyed his hair black and dressed like a goth. If you looked at him only with eyes of judgment, you’d dismiss him as just another horrid teenager. But because I loved him, when I looked at him I saw the goodness, the kindness, the vulnerability hidden under his exterior. And I like to think that parents’ vision of their child helps him/her become that person.
The trick is to learn to see everyone through the lens of love and compassion, not just our family and friends, to see through to what is hidden under the surface. And Jesus did that better than anybody ever has. Watch Him in action in this story from Chapter 7 in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is at a dinner party at the home of Simon the Pharisee, and to the shock of all the guests, a local prostitute named Mary Magdalene crashed the party:
Video: “Mary anoints Jesus”
Jesus and the Pharisee looked at the same person, but they weren’t seeing the same thing. The Pharisee looked at Mary Magdalene through the lens of judgment and saw only a sinner who was unclean and to be avoided by religious people. Jesus looked at Mary through the lens of compassion, and saw someone who had gotten stuck in her sins but had something better inside her. That was what motivated Him to treat her with kindness and acceptance. Unlike the Pharisee, He didn’t base His actions on whether Mary was “worthy” or not; He looked at her as someone who was suffering because of her sins, and His reaction was compassion and forgiveness.
And as we know from the rest of Mary Magdalene’s story, the compassion and acceptance Jesus offered her enabled Mary to leave her sins behind and become the person of faith and goodness that Jesus saw. She became part of the inner circle of Jesus’ followers, and was the first person to spread the Good News of His Resurrection. Compassion changes people, it changes them from being objects of “charity” to being persons of dignity and value who are loved by God. And that enables them to change their behavior – to let their better nature prevail.
You and I can be part of Jesus’ ongoing mission to seek and save the lost by letting Him correct our vision, so that we see others through His lens of compassion. And then we will be able to love as He did. We will not have to first judge whether people are “worthy” of our care or not; we will take Jesus’ mission of compassion and mercy as our own and make serving others a top priority in our lives.
III. Compassion changes us
To me, one of the most important and challenging aspects of the FAITH IN ACTION program is that we will be serving people in our community not based on who they are, and whether or not they are “worthy” of our help, but because of who we are, as little extensions of Jesus’ mission of compassion and mercy in this time and place. And here’s the thing – compassion changes the giver as well as the receiver. Expect that serving the world in Jesus’ name is going to change the way you see things.
During Faith in Action Weekend, St. Michael’s people – kids and adults – visiting the residents in nursing homes are going to find that it’s a different experience when you look through the lens of compassion. Let’s face it, nursing homes can be pretty sad and depressing, but when you look at that person in the wheelchair with the lens of compassion – asking not “how soon can I get out of here?” but “how can I show you God’s love?” – it’s a whole different ballgame.
Likewise, St. Michael’s folks who will be lending a helping hand in people’s homes – maybe the single mother whose house needs small repairs but there’s no one to do it; or the elderly person who can’t see the small print on the medical paperwork; or the handicapped person with a yard full of leaves and no extra money to pay someone to blow them – they will be looking at these people too with the lens of compassion. And that will enable them to give the most valuable commodity any of us has – their time – and to show God’s love by serving.
My prediction is that we are all going to come away from Faith in Action Weekend with a new appreciation of Jesus’ words “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” So as we prepare to serve our community in Jesus’ name, ask God to touch your eyes so that you can see others the way Jesus did. If you can see people through the lens of compassion, you will discover practical ways to show them God’s love. And as our compassion-led actions shine the light of God’s love into our world, bit by bit, person by person, then we will become the LIGHTHOUSE CHURCH God has called us to be.