The Art of Seeing Others

Yesterday we reflected on the story in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus returns to his hometown. Things did not go so well. The town’s people say, “Is this not the carpenter?” And Mark tells us, he could do no deed of power there.

True, learning carpentry did not normally prepare someone to be such a wise man. Typically, rabbis would have received an entirely different education.

It seems as though the townspeople, not only see him as he once was, but also based on his trade, they have put him in a box, and given him a label.

Is this not the carpenter?

Have you ever had someone do that to you?

I remember a number of years ago now when I first met my neighbor Barbara at a neighborhood party, she asked me what I did for work. When I said, I’m a pastor, she scowled at me and said, “You have no right to tell me what to do with my body!”

I said, “Barbara, I have no interest in telling you what to do with your body.”

You know what she was doing. She had totally put me in a box. She was making the assumption that all Christians come down in the exact same place on a very complex moral and political question…

I don’t know about you, I do not like being put in a box!

But then again, I think about how often I do this to others. How often we all do: He’s a Trumper. She’s woke. Boomer. Old white guy. Socialist.

Labels.

Leo Tolstoy once wrote, “One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way…”

On the other side of this, the author Zadie Smith said that when she was growing up, she would try to imagine what it would be like to live in the homes of her friends. She wrote, “I would rarely enter a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian, or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold these politics… Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.”

What a beautiful way to train your imagination in the art of seeing others.

Let us pray: God of grace, at this time when the social fabric of our nation is torn, at this time when so many are lonely, starved for connection, hungry to be known, empower us to be the kind of people, who are curious about others, quick to listen, slow to judge. We look to Jesus, who shows us the way. Amen.