It takes a mature spirit and maybe a compassionate heart to look at the world through Jesus' eyes. Half of this great divide happening in the soul of the United States is precisely the same divide that has existed since before Jesus' time.
Jesus was no stranger to the cruelties and domination of government powers. No stranger to religious competitions to establish authority and judgment over others. He knew and witnessed the harm of social class, the abandonment, and disgust for those deemed "sinful, broken, too poor, too lame, or less than."
Jesus' eyes were not pulled into that world. God has always stood with one foot inside and one outside our humanly created reality. God stands in a universe far, far bigger than our wee bowl of Cheerios problems. But in Jesus, something dramatic happened in the universe as big as any supernova. God put that over-lording perspective aside to become human and to experience for God's Self what helplessness felt like against the earthly powers of humankind. God stuck to that commitment throughout Jesus' life through all the torments that empires and religious authorities put him through unto death.
He came through an earthly mother, born useless and helpless in the borrowed manger of farm animals. He departed useless and abused at the hands of fearful, angry, abusive, and hard-hearted humans. What do discerning persons capture of the Jesus Love light? The love he showed his followers, his dinner guests, his disciples, his healed ones, and his huge extended family?
First, this world is busy daily poisoning our eyes, causing them to see opposites of love as virtuous life goals. There is daily fighting over scraps, clawing in money, and using any means to acquire wealth and power even if it means high body counts across the globe. Viewed daily, it hardens our hearts, and we shrink into self-comforting, avoiding the hungering looks in the swollen eyes of the useless. Everyone but those closest to us become useless, commodities, or worse - a monster preying at our doorstep. Soon we find ourselves cheering for the arrests, the executions, the promises of strong men, and the bombs that take out our fears.
But we are fearful of our own uselessness. We are lost because we have lost Jesus' eyes, and he is no longer our way or of use to us. So we put him on the shelf on a pretty little crucifix as a lingering crossed-finger hope that he might still have a spare blessing even as we vote for his antithesis.
This Advent, may we each experience the healing hands of Jesus touching our eyes and taking from them the scales he took from the blind man's eyes*. Let us not give up easily because our eyesight will be blurry at first. But as our vision clears, may we recognize the Risen God with the eternal light of Love that has shown out into the darkness throughout the eons, claiming us, proclaiming our value, our significance, our worthiness, and see our key spot at God's table is not ours only but all of humanity's too.
*Acts 9:10-19
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