What do you see?

RCL Easter 2C
11 April 2010

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC

One of my favourite Peanuts comic strips begins with Charlie Brown, Lucy and Schroeder lying on their backs and looking at the clouds overhead. Charlie Brown asks the other two what they see. Both Lucy and Schroeder ‘see’ great works of art, including Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, one of the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “What do you see?” they ask Charlie Brown. “I was going to say a doggie, a horsey and a piggy,” Charlie says, “but I think I’ll just keep quiet.”

“What do you see?” This question comes to us with many different connotations. This past week I underwent eye surgery to replace the cataract-obstructed lens of my right eye. At various points since then I have been asked, “What do you see?” When a child brings a piece of recently-created art work to a parent or a grandparent or some other adult with the command, “Look!”, we are often at a loss for words. What we see may be so far from the intent of the child that the wise adult says to the child, “Tell me about your picture.” In this way we avoid the brief but horrible mistake of seeing the wrong thing. When we are in the midst of a discussion, perhaps a very serious one, we speak about differing points of ‘view’ and might well ask our conversational partners, “Do you see what I am saying?”

We tend to understand vision or sight to be a concrete process determined primarily by the laws of physics and neurology. Light enters the eye and by means of the structures of the eye is translated into the electric impulses required by our optic nerve. This information is transmitted to the visual centre of our brain where it is ‘interpreted’. Let me repeat this: the nerve impulses are transmitted to the brain where they are ‘interpreted’ and then ‘translated’ into images. Our brains even fill in the ‘blind spot’ that all of us have in our eyes.

Throughout our lives, but perhaps most importantly during our childhood, we learn to interpret the information sent to our brains. There is a fascinating link between language and sight. If you give a book to a child, even a book with pictures and no words, he or she can not truly ‘see’ the book, until they learn what it is that they are looking at. You can show me a picture of something that I have never seen and I do not ‘know’ what it is until you give me the language to understand it. When someone says to me, “Words cannot describe what I have seen,” our further conversation about the experience is handicapped until we either find some common language or I have the same experience.

Sight is not simply a physical process. It is a sense that is nurtured from birth and relies upon many other dimensions of our bodies and our culture. If I have been raised in a culture that sees women as inferior or people of other ethnicity or religions as dangerous, I will ‘see’ women as less than human and other people as threats. I remember travelling with a family member who lived in a very crowded part of the world. We took a number of trips into the mountains and prairies of Colorado where I grew up. I was trying to show him the beauty of my home, but at the end of our travelling, he said something to me that indicated we had seen different things. Where I saw beauty and openness, he saw wasted space, land that could be used to ease the crowding he experienced at home. No matter that the land I had shown him did not have the resources to bear the load of a growing population, he only saw open and wasted space. What we ‘see’ is the product of our nature, our nurture and our present perspective.

“We have seen the Lord,” the other apostles tell Thomas. But Thomas cannot ‘see’ the Lord. He is not equipped by nature, nurture or present perspective to share the same vision. His eyes have not seen, his religious upbringing has not prepared him nor his present profound disappointment and fear can bring him to see what the other apostles have seen. But he is still willing to participate in the life of his friends, to join them a week later on a Sunday, not a typical day of gathering for a Jewish religious group. On that Sunday, this Sunday, Thomas ‘sees’ the Lord and his life is changed. It is a dramatic moment that has captured the imaginations of many artists, visually and musically. Some may think that this moment of ‘sight’ is the purpose of the story. But I do not.

“Jesus said to [Thomas], ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’” With these words the evangelist gives us the point of the story. You and I and all the generations that have preceded us have not seen with our natural eyes what the apostles and Thomas saw: the resurrected Jesus. We have seen and have been raised to look for the signs, the ripples, that this appearance has left throughout history. We look and look with our eyes, both the eyes of our heads and the eyes of our hearts, searching for the signs that the risen Christ has come among us. The Welsh poet and Anglican priest, R. S. Thomas, writes of this in his poem, ‘Via Negativa’:

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Today’s gospel reading gives rise to the familiar phrase, “doubting Thomas’, but if that is the only image we take away, then we have missed the central point. This is not a story about Thomas’ doubt but a story about the community’s continuing witness to the resurrection of Jesus. This witness nurtures us and helps shape our perspective on the present so that we can live into a future whose outlines often seem unclear to us.

“What do you see?” This is the question addressed to all of us who bear the cross of Christ upon our foreheads. Our natural eyes may only perceive decline and doubt, but we have been nurtured on the footsteps and echoes of the risen Christ who walks just ahead of us, just beyond our sight. We might be tempted to look only back rather than look forward in order to track the path that those footsteps trace, to hearken to the sound that those echoes leave.

“What do you see?” I see a community that continues to witness to the risen Christ. I see a community that welcomes the stranger, those who doubt and those who desire a community of faith. I see a community that reaches beyond itself, financially and personally, to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. My eyes see this every time I am with you in worship and in service. My sight has been trained to see this by the story of this parish. My belief that we have a role to play in God’s continuing work in the world today gives me a hopeful perspective.

“What do you see?” I see God’s people, people who have not seen but believe that God is doing more here than may meet the eyes of the casual observer. When it comes, may we have the eyes to see it. Amen.