SEEING JESUS
Charlie Trimble, who invented one of the first hand-held GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) devices, told about traveling in Africa on the road coming north out of Nairobi, Kenya. I've been there several times, and somewhere have a picture of me at that very spot in 1983. There's quite the commercial operation there -- souvenir stands, food, and a big sign saying you've reached the equator. Anyway, Charlie's friends were taking a picture of him with the new GPS when he looks down and discovers they're not at the equator! The GPS is showing that it's up the road. So they find the chief of this little hamlet, and they explain about these satellites going around the earth, etc., and tell him that the real equator is a mile up the road. The chief says, "Oh, we knew that, but the parking up there is terrible. This works better for us."
How often do we settle for something that we know is off only because 'it works better for us'? 'Better' is always a relative term. We'll settle for what we know until we see something better. This is about seeing something better.
The fine actor Albert Finney does a great job of playing the cameo role of John Newton in the recent film 'Amazing Grace', an excellent film in my opinion. Newton is perhaps best known in history for composing the hymn for which the film is named.
Newton's journey to composing hymns was one of fits and starts. His mother was a close friend of Isaac Watts, one of the great hymnodists of his own day. She raised John to know the stories and sing the songs of Christian faith. She died when he was six. His father remarried, and young John was sent off to live with his stepmother's father in order to get an education.
He turned out to be a fine scholar, excelling in Latin and mathematics, but not a good classmate. He frequently got into fights and was verbally abusive. An alternative was needed, and war with the French provided the opportunity. Going to sea was an option and his father arranged a commission in the Royal Navy as a Midshipman. John made a fine sailor but a poor shipmate. He was drunk whenever possible, was abusive and profane, and he reserved his greatest scorn and violence for Christians. He was known as a consistent blasphemer of God and a relentless persecutor of Christians on ship.
In time, he was too much for even the Navy and was transferred to the merchant marine. On a voyage back to England from the West Indies he found a Christian book and began to read. While underway, a monster storm arose that began to break the ship apart. Men are washed overboard before Newton's eyes. All provisions gone and the ship barely afloat, they make port in Ireland. Within hours a fresh gale arises that would certainly have broached their ship and sunk it.
Newton begins to realize that he has been thinking about God wrongly. Instead of constantly questioning why his life is so troubled, he begins to question why he has been shown mercy. He commits himself to Christ, a path that will eventually lead him into the ministry of the Anglican Church and a new calling as a popular preacher and hymn writer. The first verse of his best-known composition is:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
I was was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.
John Newton had a revelation of the risen Jesus. That is what I needed in my younger days.
Like Newton, I lost a parent at an early age after being raised to love Jesus and serve God. My father, who was a pastor and my hero, died of cancer that was fast and nasty. I never quit believing in God, strangely enough. But I hated him. To me, God was either to be pitied for not being able to do a better job of creating the world (a view expressed in sophisticated form in Rabbi Kushner's famous 'When Bad Things Happen to Good People') OR to be despised for being powerful, yet capricious and even mean.
I remember my first magnifying glass, a cheap piece of plastic from a cereal box or something similar. I found out that I could set things on fire, and remember trying it on an ant that burst in to flames. God was rather like that, to my young mind. One never knows when he might turn the lens on you and give you a disease or a disaster. That is how I saw God, much like John Newton.
In other words, I was well off the mark in understanding God, but it worked for me until I encountered the risen and living Lord and found out where the problem was. It wasn't with him. That revelation changed the direction of my life forever, and I am forever grateful.
Lately I've been fascinated with the 9th chapter of Acts, in the New Testament. The 8th chapter ends with an African court official meeting Jesus and seeing him for who he is. Chapter 9 begins with Saul "breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples." Saul is on the way to the city of Damascus with warrants to arrest followers of Jesus and imprison them. He has already arranged the murder of Stephen, and perhaps others. Saul hates Jesus and anyone having anything to do with Jesus. He believes that Jesus was a fraud, and that his followers need to be exterminated. He is the 'terminator' pursuing the early Christian movement, and he is a formidable foe.
On the way to Damascus, he meets Jesus beyond doubt. He is blinded by the encounter, but receives his sight when prayed for by a disciple named Ananias. Paul quite literally could say, "I was blind but now I see." He begins to preach Jesus as the Son of God, to the amazement of all. The fiercest foe of the Faith became its proclaimer, totally sold out for Jesus. He had seen the Lord, and nothing would ever be the same and nothing could cause him to fear death. Having given his life to Christ, it could not be taken from him and nothing anywhere could separate him from the love of God he'd come to know.
Acts 9 continues with Peter, who brings healing to a lame man in the name of Jesus and then raises a woman from death by the same power. What is amazing about this is Peter's journey to get there.
Peter was the first to get the revelation from God that Jesus was beyond a doubt the Messiah, the Son of God. In response, Jesus informs Peter and the disciples of his mission to suffer and die in Jerusalem. Peter says, "Never, Lord…." In my house, that would be, "No way!… I don't THINK so!… Uh UH!" Something like that. And I would deserve what Peter got: "Get behind me Satan… you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." Peter had been given some understanding, but it was incomplete.
On the night of Jesus' death, at his last meal with his disciples, Jesus announces that he will be betrayed and abandoned. Peter declares that he will die before he ever denies Jesus. A short time later, they go to the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus asks Peter and two others to watch and pray with him. In the darkest hour of prayer Jesus ever faces, Peter falls asleep. When awakened by the posse coming to arrest Jesus, Peter cuts of the ear of one of them. (I sometimes wake up cranky from interrupted naps, too!)
A short time later, Jesus is on trial for his life. Peter is outside and in earshot. Someone accuses him of being a follower of Jesus. Peter curses and denies knowing him. This happens three times. After the third time, according to Luke, Jesus looks straight at him. Uh oh… Peter breaks down in shame and guilt and fear and runs for his life. Back when my two sons lived with me, there would be bad days when one or the other would look at me and say, "Sucks to be you." I think it was that kind of day for Peter, to say the least.
But Jesus understood. In the Gospel of Mark, most likely the closest account to Peter's own, Jesus says on the morning of his resurrection to the women who come and find him risen from the grave, "Go tell the disciples AND PETER…. " (emphasis mine). In John's account, Jesus appears after his resurrection to the disciples at the Sea of Galilee. There Peter has the opportunity to declare his love for Jesus, and Jesus tells him, "Feed my sheep." Peter saw the risen Jesus and nothing would ever be the same.
The fearful failure became a faithful communicator of the love of God in word and deed. People heard him preach and accepted Jesus as their savior and lord. He became an instrument of the healing power of Jesus, even to the point that his shadow seemed to carry the Lord's power. Peter did the same works Jesus had done, and became one of the greatest men in human history, even dying on a cross rather than deny his faith.
Seeing Jesus made the difference and still does. Our eyes are blinded and our vision veiled until we turn toward him. As Saul would later write about this veil, now as Paul, "only in Christ is it taken away….. whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 2: 14-18, NIV).
We are not transformed so that we can reflect his glory. We are transformed AS we reflect his glory. We reflect what we are turned toward. I want to see Jesus in such a way that his reflection becomes a focused reflected beam of incredibly powerful love that changes the world on which it shines for good.