4 Lent A
Today’s lessons are all about seeing – about people who should be able to see
and cannot and people who see more clearly than those around them.
First, we have the story of Samuel choosing David to be king of Israel. Samuel is
sent by God to Jesse the Bethlehemite, with the promise that one of Jesse’s sons
will be king. Now we all know what a king looks like. He’s tall and handsome,
with a strong jaw and broad shoulders. So Jesse lines up his sons, but one by one,
Samuel says no to each of them. God has told him that he will recognize the one
who is to be king, and even though these young men are all good-looking enough,
none of them seems right. Finally, Samuel asks if there isn’t another son, and
Jesses says that, well, yes, there is the youngest, out tending the sheep. And even
though this boy seems too young, and certainly doesn’t look like a king, this son
is David, who will become a great King of Israel, and, of course, the ancestor of
Jesus. Samuel can see deeper than the surface, and with the eyes of his heart, he
recognizes the one God wants as king.
The story from the Gospel is about seeing and not seeing as well. At first it starts
out like a straight healing story, but as the story unfolds we realize that the only
person in the whole story who can really see is the blind man. The people who
have walked by him as he begs on the street have never really looked at him,
never really seen him, so that when his sight is restored, they don’t know who
he is. All they ever saw was his blindness and his begging. The parents of the
blind man see him, but they are unable or unwilling to tell people how his sight
was restored. And, of course, the Pharisees are the blindest of all. All they see
are the rules which give them their power and keep them in power. They cannot
see what Jesus has done because it would threaten that power. They have seen
God acting right in front of their noses, and they cannot see it. But the blind man
knows from the beginning that God has acted to heal him. He is the one who has
the courage to face down the Pharisees and, when Jesus tells him that he is the
promised one, the blind man immediately believes him. The blind man sees with
the eyes of love and faith, and he sees more than anyone around him.
Things haven’t changed. We all tend to see what we expect to see. It’s called
a “cognitive bias,” and there are dozens of them – belief and behavioral
biases, social biases, biases of memory. It’s why, when police take stories from
eyewitnesses at the scene of a crime, they get such differing reports. We see
through a curtain of expectation and bias. Learning to see what is in front of
us without that curtain of bias changing the picture is very difficult. But what
the story of the choosing of David and the story of the blind man tell us is what
Antione de St. Exupery said in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one
can see clearly. What is most true is invisible to the eye.”
The challenge of faith is to learn to see with the heart. And when I say that, I want
to be clear that I am not talking about sentimentality. Romantic biases are just as
deceptive as any other. To see with the heart is, above all, to see truthfully. We
need to see situations for what they are. It may mean naming injustice or hatred
instead of walking by without seeing those who suffer from them. We need to
see people for who they are, both good and bad. We need to see ourselves for
who we are as well. Telling the truth may mean admitting our own limitations or
ignorance.
And seeing with the heart also means seeing with the eyes of compassion. And
make no mistake – compassion takes courage. How much safer it is to walk past
the person begging on the street without really seeing them or, if we do look at
them, how much more comfortable to judge them as lazy or stupid. To look with
the eyes of compassion means taking them seriously – as a human being just like
us – and imagining what we might feel if we were in their situation.
Learning to see with the heart – learning to see with truth and compassion has
consequences, and not just for the people and situations we are seeing. It also
has consequences for us. The biases through which we see the world shape our
behavior and the behavior of others toward us as well. One of my favorite stories
about that is this:
A man was moving to a new town, and at the edge of town, he saw an old woman
sitting on her porch, so he decided to stop and ask her a question. “What kind of
town is this?” he asked, “What are the people like? Is it a good place to live? Will I
be happy living here?”
The woman paused and then asked him, “What kind of town did you come from?
What were people like there?”
The man replied, “Oh, it was an awful place. People were mean and unsocial and I
never made any friends there.”
The old woman said, “Well, then, I think you don’t want to move here. You’ll find
that this town is just like the one you left.” So the man thanked her and drove off.
A few days later, the old woman was sitting on her porch, and another car pulled
up, and another man got out. He asked her the same kinds of questions, “What is
this town like? Are the people nice? Would I be happy living here?” And again, the
old woman asked the same questions about where he had come from. This man
answered, “Oh, I was very happy in my last town. People were kind and friendly,
and I loved it.”
“Well,” said the old woman, “I think you will find this town much the same. You
will find friends here and I think you will be happy.”
We shape our lives by what we choose to see and what we don’t. To see with the
heart opens us to love and intimacy, and when we are open to those things, we
have a very different experience of the world. We will see possibilities for hope
and healing and new life that we would never have imagined. And we will find
ourselves making choices that we would not have believed possible. Because
while seeing in this way takes courage, it also gives us courage – and not just
courage, but creativity and imagination. We will see things that we never thought
of before. We will dare things we never dared before.
So may God give us new eyes so that we may see from the heart, and, for the first
time, see clearly.
Amen
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