2 Corintihans 5:16-21 Seeing Through God’s Eyes March 18, 2007
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Lent 4
J. Shannon Webster
How we see or understand things depends almost entirely on the context, or the lenses through which we see a thing. For example, and you’re going to think I made this up, but it really did happen, this past week I was driving to church, going south on 22nd. As you know, that is a one-way street. A car turned onto 22nd going the wrong way (north) in my lane. He saw me in time to avoid any mishap, and turned off.
My first thought was, “What an idjt!” But when he passed, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw what was very possibly the single other New Mexico license plate in all of Jefferson County. So I had my second thought, which was, “Mi primo! Lo pierdan en la ciudad!” (“My cousin! He’s lost!”)
Events and people make sense to us through the lenses of our own experience. Some years ago there was a movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, which I commend to you if you haven’t seen it. It is the account of an encounter African bushmen have with Western society, told through the eyes of the Africans. In one scene our narrator is looking at a tall, Nordic-featured willowy blond woman – at that point of the movie scantily clad, as I recall – and he thinks: “That’s the ugliest woman I ever saw. Why, a man would have to hunt for an entire day just to feed her!”
Literary critics write about what they call social location – a set of factors that distinguish one group of readers from another, in the way they respond to a story. Young may differ from old, Anglo women from Native American women, and so forth, in what they hear in a given text. Seminary professor Mark Allen Powell conducted an experiment with different groups of seminary students, and how they read this parable we usually call the Prodigal Son. (You can read this in “What do They Hear?” Abingdon Press, 2007)
Listen to these few verses, and what is it you hear?
“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
We usually hear this in this way: “The younger son squandered his inheritance in loose living, ended up herding the swine, was so hungry he wished he could eat pig chow, and then came to his senses.” When Powell did this, 94 out of 100 students recounted the parable pretty much that way. Only six also picked out the line which says, “there was a severe famine in that whole country.” All 100 of those respondents were Americans. They were of different genders, races and ages, but the dominant social location factor seems to be a cultural one, in this case.
Powell later had a chance to do this with students in St. Petersburg, Russia. He had half as many respondents – 50 – but 42 of them noted the famine mentioned in the parable. A surprise? Not when you remember that in 1941 the German army laid siege to that city and 670,000 people died of starvation before it was over. 25% of the population. While few of the Russian students in his poll were alive then, that experience is deep in the culture core of that city, and will be for generations. They read that parable through their lenses.
In percentages it goes like this: 100% of Americans mentioned squandering, 6% mentioned the famine. 34% of Russians mentioned squandering, 84% mentioned famine. Both thought the Prodigal Son had done something wrong, but the Americans thought he was immoral and wasteful, and the Russians thought he was foolish for not preparing for a famine.
And when Powell ran this same test with students in Tanzania in East Africa, again with about 50 seminary students, 80% of them said this – Why was the younger son hungry? “Because no one gave him anything to eat.” Powell was taken aback; he hadn’t thought that was an option, and he asked why someone should have given him something to eat. The Tanzanians said: “He was an immigrant in a far country, and sometimes those people lose their money. They don’t know how things work, and people think they’re fools. But the Bible commands us to care for the alien among us, and so it is poor hospitality not to feed him.”
All three of those things are in the parable, and all contributed to why the younger son ended up living in a pig pen. He squandered his inheritance, there was a famine, no one gave him anything to eat. And the one we fix on is the one that makes the most sense to us through our own lenses. That is always going to happen. We make sense of the world the best way we can.
What are we to do then, to create any sort of redemptive community, in a world where cultures, values and stories are mingling as never before? Paul says it this way: “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
For Paul, life in Christ is a different reality. Possibilities exist that we could not imagine apart from Jesus Christ. And that makes possible reconciliation between any who are divided. That becomes our charge as Christians, to be reconcilers, or as Peggy Hoppes says, to look at the world through “Jesus-colored glasses.” That is our reflection for this Lenten season – that God does not return evil for evil, act for act, or Old Testament eye for an eye, but through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus turns reality itself upside down, giving us life through death, breaking down the walls that divide us.
At least one commentator has realized that we skew the meaning of the text with our human lenses, and has started naming the parables by their first words, and calls this one “A man had two sons…”. The scriptural context for this parable is this – that the religious establishment had become proprietary about the Kingdom of God, and either knew too much or thought that they did, and Jesus is explaining to the Pharisees why he eats with sinners. He tells three parables in a row: the man who leaves 99 sheep in the field to go find the one lost, the woman rejoicing over the lost coin, and the lost son – the Prodigal – coming home. All three parables are about redemption for the lost, how God cannot bear for anyone to be lost.
It is true that the younger son put himself in the way of grace by going home, but the father remains in character with both children. The relationship of the father to both children is restored by the grace of the father, and not by any action or bargaining of the sons.
How do we bridge the gaps between our experience and anyone else’s? Look at the world, look at another person, through God’s eyes, and not our own. Insofar as we can.
In a church I served in Albuquerque we ran an exercise in the congregation called “Seeing People Real.” It was simple. You get quiet, and empty your mind. Then close your eyes, and in your mind call up a picture of the face of the person you are going think about. And you think of them this way: “How does God, as I am struggling to understand God in Jesus Christ, how does God see (Frank, or Mary, or…?)
What I discover in that exercise is, good as though my intentions may sometimes be, God loves people a whole lot more than I do. And it changes how I feel about them when I think on that.
Christ takes to his cross all of our hubris, all of our self-righteousness and all our sense of superiority. Christ takes to his cross all of our sense of inferiority and all our fear. If we see others through God’s eyes rather than our own, through Jesus-colored glasses, we will know what is most true about them, about ourselves, about life.
What is the most true thing about a person, even a scurrilous rascal? That he or she is a scurrilous rascal? Or that she or he is one of God’s beloved children? And what is the most true thing about you? The most true thing? Is it what the world has told you? Or is it what the One who made you says it is? We Calvinists know we are a mess – original sin and all that. But we also know this – the most true thing about you is that you are a beloved child of God. The one the loving parent runs to welcome home. God’s dear child.
- Not you might be if you ever get the right understanding
- Not if you work hard and become a good person you could be
- Not if you go to church and quit sinning you will be
You are. Beloved of God. One for whom Christ died and rose and changed everything.
Be kind to yourself.
Be kind to your brothers and sisters, all of them
For Christ’s sake.