SEEING JESUS

"There's none so blind as they that won't see!" - - Jonathon Swift

Our local newspaper recently published an account of the image of Jesus appearing on a tortilla and its owner offering opportunities to view this "miracle" in exchange for a fee. The willingness of some believers to pay to view such an oddity seems to reflect their desire to witness Jesus in a present-day setting. Further, the occurrence of His image on lowly tortilla perhaps also seemed to symbolize His accessibility to be source of readily available miracles. Therefore reinforcing the idea as viewing Jesus as a "fixer" and readily available to fix your marriage, your finances, your health and any other ailments regardless if your predicament resulted from your own acts. Although this is a nice comforting thought, seldom does it work. Until we stop regarding Jesus as the "Great Fixer" in the sky and begin to view Him as provider of guidance for us in the way to live to help bring forth His Kingdom here on earth, we will tend to see Him as HE was in biblical times and not how He is in the world today!! Unless we start to look for evidence of Him in our everyday life, we will be blind to His presence. The here and now is where He operates through each and every believer and provides a rich source of blessings for all mankind.

There are numerous accounts of Jesus referring to "blindness" in both its physical and spiritual senses in the Gospels even though some Christians prefer to view His restoring of sight only in its physical sense. However, if we only view the accounts of His healing "blindness" strictly in their physical sense, we may have difficulty in seeing the Lord at work in the present-day world. Yet acts of Jesus can be witnessed in our everyday life if we choose to view it through spiritual eyes. However, frequently our vision is clouded and we tend see loving acts as just good deeds happening when people are being nice. If we continue to regard these acts just as social or personal niceties, we will be blinded to the presence of God living and working all around us.

The Apostle Paul emphatically asserts that the natural environment reveals the majesty of God and we therefore have no excuse to dismiss the Source of its wonders (Romans 1:20). Surely, even the most visually impaired among us have sensed at least a bit of His majesty in a spectacular sunset and other natural phenomena. Visualizing God's presence in such awesome events is quite easy but what about situations in our in everyday life?

In order to gain the spiritual vision to see Him at work in our current environment, we must begin to abandon our concept of love as being conditional. Most people accept that much of "love" in our society is conditional and designed to get something or to secure the affections of another person. But can one really love and not be concerned about gaining any advantage? Let me cite a few examples: We attended a church with a limited number of parking spaces and each Sunday one of the members would push his invalid son's wheelchair for two blocks in order to provide parking for other members or the young man slipping a couple of dollars to person in line at the check- out to facilitate her being able to have her selections even though she didn't have enough money to pay for all of them or maybe the person who gives up his space in line when waiting at a restaurant in order to help an older person with a walker get seated and settled in before returning the end of the line or the person who is able to notice glimpses of sadness and concern in a fellow church member and is willing to supply a bit of cheer through kind words or a loving note. One can question the "why" of each of the activities or numerous others that occur every day and maybe even cynically assign an alterative motive, but I would claim that such acts of love are done not to curry favor of strangers but rather to express the love of Christ which dwells in each believer and thereby motivates loving acts. Further, I believe such acts will be recognized some day by His words, "Well done, good and faithful servant".