“Seeing With the Heart”

 A Sermon Preached at First Presbyterian Church

By Dr. James R. Henery

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Other stories come out of Rome besides news about priests and a few weeks ago it was about the Sistine Chapel.  Researchers now believe that hiding in plain sight for 500 years in Michelangelo’s painting, this one The Separation of Light from Darkness which is one section of a ceiling fresco at the west end, depicts God perhaps with a brain stem, eyes, optic nerves and now, supposedly, a spinal cord.  In other words, very human.

These researchers are neuro-anatomy experts and they conjecture that God who is clothed shows a bumpy neck and the clothes cover neural networks and a spinal cord.  And that theory has angered the Vatican because that could mean that God endows intelligence and communication directly to humans without needing the church.  So perhaps in plain sight Michelangelo was challenging the church and their teaching with his masterpiece.  But it has taken 500 years to see it.

Vision and seeing become a theme in Matthew chapter 12 and extends to chapter 13 when the Pharisees, say to Jesus, “We want to see a sign.  We want to see you do something,” and Jesus refuses and says, “I’ll just teach you parables.”  But then that confuses his disciples, and going into the thirteenth chapter, they want to know why he teaches in parables, and they respond, “We don’t know what you’re doing.”  So at the beginning of the thirteenth chapter he incorporates one parable, told in two different ways:  it’s the “Parable of the Sower.”

“Why do you speak in parables?” the disciples ask.  Jesus begins to explain what he is doing, but he recites portions of Isaiah 6 as you heard earlier:   “Their hearts have grown dull, and they have closed their eyes.”  

Seeing.

There are twenty words for seeing/vision in Greek, and the ones we are so familiar with include optic, ophthalmologist and optometrist, but not the word the gospel writer chooses to use here which is the word blepo, meaning “insight.”  “You see with insight.”  It is not about sight. 

What seems to be an illustration about vision – about being able to see clearly – the gospel writer avoids vision as in “being able to see.”

Thus, this scripture I’m going to read isn’t about the physical eye and seeing, but opts for a particular kind of vision integral to understanding, to realization, to perception, or – even more literally, in the Greek meaning insight.  The word we’re going to be hearing momentarily is more spiritually demanding than it is in an optometric way.

“Jesus said, ‘This is why I speak to them in parables: because seeing, they do not see; hearing, they do not hear; nor do they understand.  With them, indeed, is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which says, “You shall indeed hear, but never understand; and you shall indeed see, but never perceive.  For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.”  But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.  Truly, I say to you: many prophets and righteous men long to see what you see, and did not see it; and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.’”

Seeing with the heart.

This man who was a hunter bought a puppy that was bred to be a bird dog.  He trained the dog and thought, “This may be the best bird dog I’ve ever seen!”  So he invited a friend to go hunting with him one day.  This friend was always critical of others who had something he didn’t.  The first duck is shot, falls in the water and the dog takes off and just simply runs across the water, retrieves the bird and brings it back.  The friend said absolutely nothing.  It happened two more times – each time: shoots the duck, the dog takes off, goes on top of the water!  The friend says absolutely nothing.  When it’s over, the dog’s owner asks his friend, “Did you see anything unusual about that dog of mine?” and the friend says, “Yeah.  He can’t swim.”

“You shall see,” Jesus says, “but you won’t understand.”

On a daily basis I make routine inspections of my plants and gardens looking for growth, blossoms, insects, fruit and so forth.  It’s almost an obsession to go from plant to plant deadheading or weeding or pruning.  We added a water garden with plants and now I inspect the frogs, four gold fish and one turtle when it shows up.

So how is it in my orchard all spring that I could completely ignore and not see the one small apple tree that was apparently dying?  I watched the trees to the left and right that looked great with fruit forming and missed the smaller one in the middle.  The tree has been there for some time and I just ignored it

So this parable informed me in a practical way.  I have learned that’s just about the way it is with many of us every day.  We sometimes just don’t see when it was right in front of us.  We look at people;  we look past people;  we look around people;  we look at issues, concerns, conflicts, and we miss something;  we look with a type of seeing that is only connected to our own sort of 20/20 prescription.  Typically, we look at people with eyes focused on only what we know or what we understand.  Not focus or visual corrections.  But our vision, our insight – our blepa, in the Greek – is off, based on our understanding, or – shall I say? – lack of. 

We sometimes just don’t see the total picture because either we don’t want to or conclude on the basis of what we know based on what we are capable of accepting, and, often, capable of what we believe or, at least, believe to be correct. 

Understanding issues is frequently based on what we know or understand, not completely on what is.  We debate issues and we see conflicts on the basis of where we are and where we live and what we think, regardless of our vision – be it clouded, and not with cataracts, but with opinion and bias, sometimes even calculated ideologies.  The truth is, we don’t see the whole panorama, and we don’t understand things we don’t approve or support.  Insight is often forfeited due to lots of agendas.

Seeing with the heart.

It’s kind of lamentable to me that it took all spring to find that apple tree.   I only have nine trees and how could I miss it? I wonder how many years and decades it has taken me, sometimes, to find and see even people more clearly – to see where people are and who people really are, and what they are really about.  I wonder if we all share that myopia.  It isn’t any less similar to our Christian faith as a process wherein we are not bound to just seeing things or each other from “my” position or “my” viewpoint, but rather how we see each other, holistically; how we see each other genuinely, respectfully.

            Last week was eye examination time.  When an optometrist or an ophthalmologist knows you’re a Presbyterian pastor, they love to quip, “How is your ‘presbyopia?” And of course I’ve learned (beyond the funny connection) that presbyopia is a health condition where the eye exhibits a progressively diminished ability to focus on near objects with age usually after 45.  I qualify.

But that isn’t my problem—I can see things close up—without my glasses which is another problem because sometimes I can’t find my glasses after I have taken them off.  Can’t read my sermons sometimes.  Books.  Magazines.  Labels on cans.  Bi or tri focals would help or hold my hands out here because everything is really fuzzy, and so forth.

No joke or humor about being Presbyterian will suffice.  But the difficulty of being able to see things closely is not exclusive to Presbyterians.  We see our own world, up-close, differently.  We have to stretch our arms out, sometimes, to grant distance.  We don’t have all it takes to fully grasp where others are;  we sometimes do not see the quiet lives of struggle and desperation.  We see others make mistakes, and because we do not understand, we forget – and even deny – our own.  We see others who are happy and comfortable and satisfied, and we do not understand because our circumstances are not as content, and we become critical and negative and cynical. 

We see, sometimes, and determine only one way to do something, or have only one idea or one opinion, and it dominates our lifestyle and our psyche, and we do not understand how others could not agree with us.  We see others in their spiritual or faith walks who don’t act or believe like we do, and we don’t understand how God could love them as much as God loves us.  We see people in our every-day existence – work, neighborhoods, social, business, school – and they don’t always measure up to our own standards that we have created for others, and we wonder why they are so wrong, so disgusting at times.  Why can’t they be like us?  We see people and we wonder, “Why can’t they be more like me?”

We attempt to see with eyes, although Jesus doesn’t use the word eye; the word is insight, which then becomes translated, almost literally, as “seeing with the heart.”

We see with eyes that, oftentimes, have too little moral focus.  We attempt to see with hearts that have too little love, and with spirits that have too little depth.  We see, but do not understand.

I’m fond of the children's story The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  This pilot is stranded somewhere out in the desert, and he wakes to see this little fellow, who has fallen out of the sky from some distant planet.  This little prince from another galaxy is now traveling planets, comes and wants to ask questions all the time.  He finally gets to earth, and he meets up with a fox.  The fox wants to be trained to become a “civil fox.”  Toward the end of their relationship on earth, the fox one day shares a secret with the little prince.  He says:   “One sees clearly only with the heart.  Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Scripture calls it seeing with the heart.

So, one day I’m out looking at my grapes and peach trees and one dying apple tree that maybe I could have saved if I had seen it close up earlier this spring and even then it appeared to have blossoms and small apples.

I find this a potentially somewhat embarrassing parable of my own spiritual life – that in looking, sometimes, for the most brilliant and the most colorful, the most spectacular, the most green, the most abundant, the loudest, but I miss sometimes the smallest, most intricate, quiet, and hidden bloom and smile and tear that is visible only when one sees with the heart, that is focused not so much on what is in front of us, but what exists around us.

“You shall indeed see, but not perceive, for this people’s heart has grown dull, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts.”  Amen.