Things Seen and Unseen

Things Seen and Unseen--March 6, 2018

"When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God." [1 Corinthians 2:1-4]

There is more light than our eyes can take in with every night sky, and it is streaming in all around us all the time.

Yes, of course there’s the light pollution from street lights, lamp posts, front porch lanterns, and the faintly orange glow of city lights off in the distance.  And yes, there are cloudy nights, which are common enough where I live, which also block star light when I want to show my kids how to look for Orion’s Belt.  But even on the clearest night in the country, even when I can go up on a hilltop between farmers’ fields and look out on an inky black sky without a cloud or a street light to be found, there is more light out there that my eyes are simply not able to perceive.

Scientists have given these kinds of light names like “infrared,” or “ultraviolet,” and then there are radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, and more.  They are all, technically speaking, kinds of light—flavors, if you like, or colors beyond what our eyes can see.  Human eyes are simply unable to perceive those wavelengths outside the spectrum that we call “visible light,” and that means that there is an awful lot going on around us all the time, both here on Planet Earth and in the infinite reaches of the universe, that we are missing.

Again, scientists, clever folks that they are, have figured out how to build devices that can see those wavelengths of light that we can’t.  Some of them are big exotic telescopes that can detect microwaves or gamma rays, and some of them are more familiar devices you and I know, like infrared camera (we sometimes call it “heat vision,”), x-ray machines at the hospital, or the way a black light (which shines in ultraviolet) can make phosphorescent paint glow in the dark.  These are reminders to us that there are ways of seeing the world beyond what our eyes can see on their own.

In fact, if you are so inclined, you can go searching for pictures that NASA and other space agencies have taken of distant celestial objects—a spiral galaxy, or a billowing nebula, or the remains of a violent supernova—and you can often see what they look like in visible light, side by side with how they look if they adjust the images for infrared or gamma rays or what-have-you, and sometimes they are stunningly different.  Something that looks dark and empty to our eyes in terms of visible light might be humming with activity in a different wavelength, because there’s “stuff” there, but it isn’t giving off the kind of light we can see. What you thought might have been big and important in one image turns out to be small and insignificant compared to the unseen truth behind and around it when you add in infrared or x-rays.

The universe, it turns out, includes things that are unseen as well as seen.

Well, if you and I can wrap our minds around that kind of reality—that there are ways of seeing what is really there, but which our eyes cannot see—then maybe we can begin to understand what Paul has in mind when he talks about seeing the world in terms of the cross of Christ rather than the world’s forms of power and wisdom.  To the naked eye, there are certain “obvious” truths out there—things like, “might makes right,” or “the richest are the winners, and the poor are the losers,” or “Real power is when you can coerce or cajole or threaten people to do what you want,” or “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, so you have to get the other guy or else they’ll get you—either I win and you lose, or you win and I lose.”  The world calls these things "power" and "wisdom" or "the way business is done" or "common sense."  And if all you have is a narrow little band of visible light, perhaps that seems to be "how things really work."

But the message about the cross changes our vision.  Paul says that the message of the cross transforms how we see the world, and "the way things work."  The cross opens us up to see that in the end, God accomplishes God's own goals--what we sometimes call "the Kingdom"--not through force or threat or saber-rattling or one-ups-man-ship, or killing enemies.  But rather God's way of getting what God wants done--the reconciliation of all creation and the redemption of us sinners--is through the suffering love of a Roman cross.  Paul says that realizing this will affect the way we see everything else--rather like discovering you had only been seeing a tiny sliver of what was really there when you only had "visible light" to illuminate the view.  Paul says that in the light of the cross, things look very different, and what seemed like "defeat" turns out to be "victory."  What seemed to be weakness is in fact God's upside-down kind of strength.  What seemed to be power turns out to be empty bluster.  What seemed to be the tragic end of the story in death turns out to be the turning point of history in resurrection.

Take Jesus' own death--the actual, literal cross--for a moment.  In "visible light," that is, in the terms that Rome and its empire used to see things, Jesus' death looks like Rome's victory over Jesus.  Here, he is a threat to their unquestioned rule, a troublemaker upsetting the balance of things, and a disturber of "the way things are," and when Rome crucifies Jesus, it looks to them (and they want everybody else to see it this way, too, mind you) like the triumph of the empire over the would-be "king of the Jews."  Rome sees this death as evidence that they are the winners, that their way of doing business is the right way, and that their use of violence and brutality is "just how you get things done" in this life.  Jesus--and his followers after him--see the cross in a whole other kind of light.  The cross is not Jesus' defeat!  The cross is the way God breaks the power of death itself!  The cross is the way that suffering love triumphs by outlasting even the worst that violent bullies like Caesar and Pilate can throw at them.  The cross, all the way down to the plea, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," is how Jesus exposes that Caesar, and every other petty tyrant after him, is wholly inadequate, and how Jesus offers another way.  But in order to see the cross as God's sign of victory, one has to see with more light than our eyes can naturally take in.  We must have our vision adjusted to see what really matters, and what turns out to be quite insufficient.  To see through the cross of Jesus allows us to see that our picture of "how things get done" had been woefully incomplete before, and that ultimately, real power doesn't look like insisting on your own way, bullying others to get what you want, or scaring people into submission.  Real power, true wisdom, doesn't crucify to get its way; real power and true wisdom are seen in the One who lays down his life--gets crucified--even for those who are holding the hammer and nails.  With such power and wisdom, the insecure "power" and the foolish "wisdom" of the empire are broken.

The reason, in the end, that the church takes the time each year for forty days to get our attention turned back to the cross is because it takes such a long time to get our heads and hearts out of the old ways of empire and the narrow vision, the "visible light" picture, of what power and wisdom and success look like.  We have to unlearn an old way, and then learn a new way, of seeing everything.  And it means learning to look through the cross of Jesus to see how everything else changes in light of what happens there.

We Christians don't retell the story of Jesus' suffering and death on a Roman cross because God needs us to wallow in the gory details to make us feel sad enough or guilty enough to start behaving better.  We retell the story of the cross to change our vision--so that we can see, as it were, radio and infrared and ultraviolet and x-rays and all the rest as well as what our eyes were taking in already.  We retell the story of the cross to let it change our way of seeing everything else.  Like C. S. Lewis put it once, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."  That's what the cross does to our vision as well--it reveals that the world's usual way of describing "winners" and "losers," the "strong" and the "weak," is inadequate, and that God has always had more going on through things that look weak, foolish, and defeated than we could have ever perceived on our own.

Jesus, our crucified and risen Lord, give us the courage to see the world and our selves through your lens of suffering love, and to reject the old, insufficient way of seeing power and wisdom on the world's terms.