The late Indian Jesuit teacher Rev. Anthony de Mello once told a story of a journalist who wanted to write a book about a certain spiritual leader. He visits the teacher and begins with a question: “People say you are a genius. Are you?” “You might say so,” the guru answered none too modestly. But the journalist—who was not particularly shy either—immediately fired back with another question, “And what makes one a genius?” The guru responded, “The ability to see.” With this response the journalist was at a loss and helplessly mumbled, “To see what?” The teacher quietly answered, “The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person.”
De Mello told this story to illustrate the nature of love, particularly God’s love. To love with a God-like/Christ-like love is to be able to pick up what is hidden in the other and is able through this loving way of looking to call it forth. And what is hidden in the other is the image of God in which that person was created.
Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, an international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities, once wrote that love is “to reveal to a person his or her inner beauty.” As we read the Gospels we see that Jesus had a special gift for this. Wherever he went he seemed to be able to create a climate in which people could see themselves, in which they discovered the value they carried in themselves. Whether it was a the leper, the “sinful” woman, the religious zealot, the up-tight super pious, righteous religious leader, they were able to see that, in the eyes of Jesus, they all had value and dignity. Unfortunately, not all accepted that picture of themselves.
Jesus’ way of looking at others is so different from our normal understanding of love and so different from the way that many Christians often look at the world around them. In recent months there has been a lot of talk about Rev. Harold Camping’s prediction that the beginning of the end of the world will take place on Saturday, May 21. While I think I’ll go with Jesus on this one – where in Matthew 24:36 Jesus makes it clear that he doesn’t even know the date of the end, that the time is known only to the Father. But I am concerned that many people who seem to be attracted to this sort of doomsday movement are Christians who have given up on the world. I just don’t see this in Jesus. The first century world had its wickedness and hatred and injustice – what is the Cross if not the height of cruelty and injustice – and yet Jesus never stopped loving. Admittedly, that love was not always returned, but that isn’t the purpose of real love. Inter-personal love, in the New Testament sense of agape love, is always focused on the object of the love and the hoped-for-transformation of the other rather than on how the person doing the loving feels or what he/she gets out of the relationship. One loves because the other needs the love and deserves the love based on who he or she is – one created in the image of God. This is why those end-of-world bumper stickers that say “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned” rub me the wrong way. I envision driver-less cars running into people (“lost people” who seem to have been abandoned by God) without any regard for them. I just don’t see Jesus’ love in this.
What I think Jesus calls us to do as we come to have his heart and mind as his followers is to see beyond appearances and the superficial to what is hidden within the other, in particular the image of God that is in them. It is not easy – both because we fall so far short of aligning our hearts and minds and lives with the Jesus we profess to follow, and because the image of God is so often hidden beneath so much garbage that has accumulated in the other person’s life that it takes some deep excavation and patience. But if we are followers of Jesus we have no other option – “As I have loved you, so you are to love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35). And if Jesus’ life is any indication, this love doesn’t begin and end with those who in the family of God.
This is why I can’t give up on the world – “For God so loved the world, …” (John 3:16). My goal should be to pick up on what is hidden in the other and through my love hopefully draw it out. Because when the other becomes alert to his/her dignity and honor as one created in the image of God and loved into existence by this God and shown the heights of this love in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, they become fully alive.
So don’t write off this world just yet. Instead, with the love that God’s Spirit has poured into your heart (Romans 5:5) show that love to each person you meet. It means looking beyond the external and picking up on what is hidden within, but when we do, we continue Jesus’ ministry in the world.
