I have a terrible time keeping up with my glasses. I’ll often say out loud to no one in particular, “I can’t find my glasses!” A voice from the other room will respond, “Try your head.” When I reach up, I usually find more than one pair, and then find another one tucked in my shirt and a fourth pair in my lap.
I needed them all for the many different things I look at every day until I got a pair with progressive lenses—they were a game-changer. Instead of providing just two lens powers like bifocals (or three, like trifocals) progressive lenses are true “multifocal” lenses that provide a smooth, seamless progression of many lens powers for clear vision across the room, up close, and at all distances in between. They helped me to look at the world and the people in my world differently, which is good because they are all different.
It could be said that seeing through the eyes of Christ, looking at people the way He did, is a bit like progressive lenses for the soul. Each individual is unique in experience, in personality and understanding, and requires something different of us in response.
In Luke 7:36-50, a woman enters a dinner party to meet Jesus. She doesn’t belong but she doesn’t care, all she knows is that He does. She braves the hostile environment to bring the only hope she has to the only One who can offer any hope and anoints Jesus feet from her alabaster jar of perfume. The assembled guests look on, scandalized. I love that Jesus can respond to both the grumbling crowd and the sobbing woman with understanding and compassion because He alone knows where they are coming from. One needs a lesson, the other needs love—Jesus offers both in the tender form of mercy.
The dinner guests looked at this woman with pity, but Jesus saw her through a very different lens—a merciful one. Author Henri Nouwen puts it like this, “Showing mercy is different from having pity. Pity connotes distance, even looking down upon. Mercy comes from a compassionate heart; it comes from a desire to be an equal. Jesus didn’t want to look down on us, He wanted to become one of us and feel deeply with us. That is what He desires for us to do as we interact with the people in our life. To see them as He does.”
If we are going to follow Jesus, we need to be careful which lens we are looking through. The lens of our own experience, judgment, or immediate reaction, or the lens of grace. With His help we progressively, as we breathe deeply, pause, and pray, notice things we don’t naturally see and respond to with His compassion.
I have been asking God to show me what He sees as I pray for the difficult people in my life, and it has softened me. I can relax in the face of sin and patiently wait for God to act while remembering the words of 1 Sam. 16:7, “The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” This has nothing to do with my own ability to see clearly and everything to do with asking God to lay His view over mine. To keep me from seeing what I expect to see and to see with His expectancy instead.
The woman in Luke 7 is referred to by Simon as “that” woman as if to say she’s different from us, an outsider. However, after her very brief encounter with Christ, He calls her “this” woman as if to say, I see her differently and she is mine. He looks at her through the lens of His love and forgiveness and tells her to go in peace. I believe because of how Jesus looked at her, she did and so can we. When faced with a challenging person, I am learning to whisper to myself, “I can’t find my glasses!” then pause and ask God to help me find my progressive lenses, so it is well with my view.
