Seeing All That's There

“Seeing All That’s There”—January 22, 2019

“On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded.  They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offense at him.” [Mark 6:2-3]

Sometimes, it is possible to be staring at something straight on and still to miss it.

Anyone who remembers those “Magic Eye” computer-designed images that were so popular in the 1990s will tell you the same.  Stereograms, they were called—and they’re still around today as a quirky visual artform.  On a two-dimensional surface would be printed a pattern—and if you stared at it intently, you would see nothing more than the repeated pattern as a flat image on the paper.  But if you sort of let your eyes relax and unfocus, a new image would appear to “jump out” in three-dimensions.  It was there all along, and the old pattern didn’t disappear—it’s just that there was more there the whole time, and your eyes had to take a while to recognize it.  But that means that in the mean time, while you are learning to let your eyes see the “hidden” image, you can be staring straight at the deeper picture and be completely oblivious to it.

When Jesus goes back to his hometown, all of a sudden, he is the living stereogram in their midst, and the folks back home can only see the flat pattern.  And of course, they start to sound like those people who can’t see anything more in a “magic eye” image than the plain two-dimensional pattern that becomes the background for the “real” image.  “I can’t see anything more in this Jesus…” they say.  “I know what I’m looking at—and it’s just the carpenter.”  “We know his story—this is the kid whose brothers and sisters are all still around, who never left town, and there’s nothing more to be said about this Jesus.”  They can’t believe that Jesus has the gall to talk to them like there’s anything more to him than meets the eye.

That's the driving question of all the gospels, particularly of Mark's:  who will recognize the truth of who Jesus really is?  Most of the time, it is a surprising and motley group of persons who recognize that Jesus is the Son of God—a group that includes demons, tax collectors, Roman centurions, and only sometimes includes Jesus’ own hand-picked disciples!  But the people you would expect to recognize Jesus—the religious experts or his closest neighbors and family members—these people keep missing the truth about Jesus.  He had been staring them right in the face all those years in Nazareth, or in encounter after encounter with the Pharisees and religious professionals, and they are missing the truth that Jesus is none other than God-with-us, the Son walking around in a human life.  It’s not that Jesus isn’t really human—it’s that in the midst of his humanity, Jesus is at one and the same time fully God in the flesh.  The religious experts can’t see that, even though the fuller picture is right in front of them.

I wonder if we suffer from the same troubled vision sometimes, too.  Not that we don’t recognize Jesus—no, at least for most of us who have spent anytime in the church at all, we have learned the right technical terms and liturgical formulas to recite to show we know that Jesus is the Son of God.  We know the Creed, perhaps, which insists that Jesus is God’s Son, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God… of one Being with the Father.”  We know that the “right answer” about Jesus is that he is God’s Son.  And yet when we look for the presence of Jesus, and of the Kingdom he brings, right in our midst, we miss these things that are right in front of us.  It is hard sometimes for us to see that Christ shows up right among us, in our skin.

Here’s what I mean, or at least an example.  Ask someone to tell you about the Kingdom of God, and chances are, most church folk are going to start talking about heaven—some place, other than here, where we will go when we die.  But we have a much harder time recognizing the Kingdom, the Reign of God, in moments and people and actions around us, right here right now, where God is reigning and creating a community full of overflowing joy and genuine love.  We church folk easily miss that Jesus really is present whenever two or three are gathered in his name—even if that is in a hospital intensive care unit as tearful prayers are spoken.  We can easily miss that God’s Kingdom is there in the serving hands of disciples washing dishes together in the church kitchen… or the soup kitchen… or in your kitchen.  We can miss that the Reign of God “happens” as strangers who were told they were unacceptable by someone else... are welcomed.  We so often miss that it’s a Kingdom moment when we are given the opportunity to listen to someone whose heart is heavy, or to forgive someone you had just settled for estrangement from.  We often miss that Jesus insists on showing up, as he said, in the presence of “the least of these.”  And so we miss that there is a deeper, fuller picture going on all the time in the midst of the flat patterns on the surface of things.  We miss seeing that no less than the living God is breaking into our daily routines, right where we are.  

Today, let us refuse to miss out any longer. Today, let us be willing to look for Jesus as he has already been there among us, staring us in the face, and see the fuller picture awaiting us in this day.

Lord Jesus, don’t let us settle today for seeing only surface things.  Let us see you here in our midst, and let us recognize the fuller picture of who you are and where you choose to show up.