Eyes of the Beholders

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is just another way of saying that beauty can be subjective. Jesus of Nazareth taught us that the eye is the “lamp of the body” and insuates throughout his life that the eye is somehow connected to these hearts of ours in order for us to figure out truth as well as beauty. One day his disciples asked him why he taught in parables, and he replied that they [his hearers] are blind to the truth that is right before them. “The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” They just don’t get it!

And who can forget his allusion to the way we see the speck in the neighbor’s eye but cannot see the log in our own eye. He really got to us with another kind of eye altogether when he said it would be easier for a camel to go through the “eye” of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven. Now, he’s really meddling with the filthy rich who continually pray “Lord, help me shove this camel”.

“You have heard it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth… but I say to you, ‘Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also… You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies…” We get it, Jesus, but we can’t admit that in the synagogue or church or the public square. Sounds like socialism or something.

Back in the early 1970’s, my mission in a Mississippi congregation was to help us through the racial tensions that were ripping at the fabric of community, state and nation. One day, my old Baptist preacher friend, Will Campbell, dropped by my office to check on how things were going. I opened up and let him listen to my frustrations: “I am working so hard to reconcile this racism with reality, but I seem to be butting my head against some wall!”

“Your job is not to reconcile the races,” Will calmly explained. “God has already done that; your job is to make the announcement as best you know how.”

When someone wipes your blackboard clean like that, we refer to this as an “epiphany” in the religion industry. Brother Campbell showed me clearly that it all depends on your point of view. Your perspective. I was looking at the issue from the dark side of southern racial reality, while he saw the possibilities in the light of the larger gospel truth that this was a done deal to which many turn a deaf ear or a blind eye.

Our worldview might be as different as day and night. We may not see eye to eye, but the cockeyed truth about the dark side of prejudice and bigotry has been exposed as a shame and a sham by Jesus himself. If the childhood song still sings true: “Jesus loves the little children,/ All the children of the world./ Red and yellow, black and white,/ they are precious in his sight….”, then he might just be the sight for sore eyes that can help the likes of us behold the beauty of all God’s children.