April 3, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

What It Takes to See

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
1 Samuel 16:1–13
John 9

“For the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

1 Samuel 16:7b (NRSV)

“Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’”

John 9:39 (NRSV)

I do not know if I will ever encounter God,
So I live as though divine sounds and smells are enough.

Val Webb
Like Catching Water in a Net

The story of the man born blind and healed by Jesus is, without a doubt, a story of miraculous healing. In this way, it is like many other stories in the New Testament that tell of Jesus’ deeds. That is, however, not the only purpose it serves in the Gospel of John. As biblical scholar Robert Kysar tells us, the Gospel of John has an additional purpose: that of distinguishing the kind of perception that faith in God requires (John: The Maverick Gospel, p. 87). Throughout his Gospel, John develops a whole theory of perception, a theory of what it takes to see reality as it truly is.

In order to develop his theory, John begins this story with a man who has been blind since birth. As the story indicates, there are already definite ideas about sight and blindness current in John’s day. Unfortunately, the physical condition of blindness was associated with the moral condition of sin. Specifically, blindness was considered to be caused by sin. At the start of the story, John gets that notion out of the way. The disciples of Jesus name it, and immediately Jesus dismisses it. Responding to the disciples’ question, Jesus simply says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” In the rest of this story, as well as throughout his Gospel, John’s theory of perception puts down conventional religious notions of sight and blindness and puts forth a new theory of what it truly means to see. There are, as we find in the dialogue between Jesus and the Pharisees, qualitative distinctions that John makes between kinds of seeing.

John is not alone in distinguishing among different kinds of sight. Making such distinctions runs throughout our Judeo-Christian tradition. Take, for example, the story that Vicky read this morning. In it, human perception is distinguished from divine perception. When Samuel is sent forth by God to anoint the person whom God has selected to be the next king over Judah, Samuel has no idea exactly whom God has in mind. Receiving direction from God, he goes to Bethlehem to meet a man named Jesse and his sons. Immediately upon meeting the eldest son, Samuel assumes this must be the one. “Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord,” he says. Basing his expectations on cultural conventions, Samuel assumes that God has chosen the eldest of Jesse’s sons to become king. To his surprise, God says, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks upon the heart.” In this story, God departs from convention. The person whom Samuel is to anoint is, as we know, David: not the oldest, but the youngest; not the first whom Jesse brings out, but the son who must be brought in. God reminds Samuel that divine vision is different from human vision.

One of the main differences, of course, is that God can see that which is invisible to us. Honesty has always compelled us to recognize that no matter how much we might desire it, we cannot see God. Unlike idols of human making, God is too great to be seen, and furthermore, God will not allow himself to be seen.

In his book No One Sees God, theologian Michael Novak writes about the desire of mystics to see God, to feel God close at hand, to be in communion with God, and the disappointment with which many mystics have struggled when they come to realize and accept that “you cannot see God, even if you try” (p. 3). God is “outside our range” (p. 4). “That is to say,” Novak writes, “our senses cannot touch God. Neither sight, nor sound, scent nor taste, nor touch, either” (p. 5).

That God so transcends our reality, rendering our senses incapable of knowing him, is not a new idea in our religious tradition. It is what forms the basis of negative theology, that is a theology that assumes that the only way we can know anything about God is to know what God is not. The via negativa is, however, not the only approach one can take to know God.

On the basis of creation and the incarnation, the church has also always sought to know God through the material and physical world. Recognizing God’s goodness manifest in creation and God’s love embodied in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, theologians like John have appreciated sensory experiences in their attempts to know and relate to God.

As we find in his Gospel, John has a profound appreciation for the way sensory experiences lead a person to faith. Faith, John is convinced, requires our senses. Faith is not some interior, subjective state of mind. It requires interaction with an objectively real, physical world. Specifically, John wants the followers of Jesus to see the Son just as the Son sees the Father.

Of course, John is writing not to a generation of Jesus’ eye-witnesses, but rather to Christians, like us, who have never laid eyes on Jesus. That doesn’t matter so much to John, because he knows what we know: That reality is multidimensional. There is more to reality than meets the eye. Yes, reality consists of rock, water, bread, and wine; it also consists of the church built on rock, baptism by water, communion in the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps more than any other Gospel writer, John develops a theology based on symbols. The world that he describes and that Jesus reveals is other than the way we literally see it. It is much more than the way we see it whenever our vision is confined to one dimension. If we perceive reality only through some narrow lens, whether it is a lens narrowed by human convention (as in Samuel’s case) or by dogmatic defensiveness (as in the case of the Pharisees) or by literal interpretations, we risk missing dimensions of reality that Jesus seeks to reveal to us.

In her fascinating book A Natural History of the Senses, which I could read over and over again, Diane Ackerman devotes a chapter to each one of our five senses—the sense of smell, taste, touch, hearing, and sight. In the postscript of her book, Ackerman writes that even a full account of our five senses is too narrow a lens through which we experience reality. “We say there are five senses,” she writes. “Yet we know there are more. . . . People who dowse for water are probably responding to an electromagnetic sense we all share to a greater or lesser degree. . . . We are as phototropic as plants, smitten with the sun’s light” in a way different from vision (pp. 302–303). We have a “vibratory” sense as well as a “muscular sense that guides us when we pick up objects” to “know at once that they are heavy, light, solid, hard, or soft,” and we have a sense of gravity (p. 303). Don’t forget that we also have a “proprioceptive sense, which tells us what position each component of our bodies is in at any moment.” Ackerman explains that with all these senses and more, human beings have evolved to be able perceive the world in unique ways (p. 303).

I’d like to take her argument further. In addition to all these fascinating senses, there is surely yet another sense by which human beings have come uniquely to know reality. It seems to me that, unlike other creatures, we have been endowed with a symbolic sense. Having developed a symbolic sensibility, we are able to perceive multiple dimensions of reality, and that is what enables us to relate to and know something, though not all things, about God. As human beings, we are made not only to sense reality, but to make sense of it. We are symbol-making and symbol-using creatures. And only because of this can we relate in faith to a God who, though he created the world, transcends it; though he acts in history, is eternal; and though he draws near to us, is invisible. Only because of our symbolic sensibilities can we, through ordinary materials of bread, wine, and water, become members of the body of Christ.

In this season of Lent, John wants us to see Jesus as Jesus sees God. While Jesus is still with us, John wants us to know him not just literally, conventionally, or dogmatically, but with all our senses and in all dimensions. Only then can we come to have faith in Jesus as one who bore the weight of the world, suffered its pain, and died for its sin. When we are rinsed by the cool water of baptism and when we taste the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, we come to appreciate the sacramental value of all for which Jesus lived, died, and was raised. For Christ makes special ordinary things of the world and ordinary people like you and me.