HELP US TO SEE
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
February 02, 2020
I spent a
few hours this week going through a big box full of old photographs that were
recently delivered to me by one of my sisters. The pictures were passed on to
us after our parents died, and they depict all kinds of family members from 40
and 60 and 80 years ago. Some of them are people I recognize and remember
personally. Some of them are just names that I’ve heard stories about over the
years but I never knew them. And there are a number of baby pictures in that
box. The vast majority of those are cute little faces that mean absolutely
nothing to me. I’m sure many of those faces belong to babies whom I eventually
got to know as adults, but I can’t tell one from another in the pictures. But
every so often I came across a baby picture and I was able to say, “Aha! I know
this face, even if the picture was taken in 1930 and the child was only a year
old—I know exactly who this is!” Some faces don’t change much over a lifetime.
But I’m only
able to make that identification by looking backward in time. Beginning with
the grown up face that I know, and recognizing it in the child who once was.
So how did
Simeon and Anna do it in the gospel today, when the face of baby Jesus appeared
in the Temple in Jerusalem? They both made essentially the same exclamation:
“AHA! I know exactly who this is: It’s
the Savior we’ve been waiting for!”
But they
weren’t looking backward from the vantage point of Jesus’ life and ministry and
passion and death and resurrection. They never knew the adult he’d become. For
Simeon and Anna, it was exactly the opposite. All they saw was the face of a
baby, a Jewish boy who probably looked like a whole lot of other ones whose
parents presented them at the Temple. If Jesus’ face had any family
resemblances they would have been those of Mother Mary, or of Grandpa Joachim
and Grandma Ann. Jesus had not yet uttered a word, and the Sacred Scripture
tell us elsewhere there was nothing physically exceptional about him to make us
notice him.
So how did
they know? What exactly did Simeon and Anna see in this baby image to convince
them about who Jesus was, and what would be his fate? And why, apparently,
didn’t anybody else in the Temple recognize anything special?
Luke is very
clear in answering those questions for us in the gospel, and the answer is the
Holy Spirit who had filled their hearts all their long lives. The Holy Spirit
does not provide us with exotic visions or marvels of nature in order to awaken
us to the God who is ever-present. No, the Holy Spirit gives eyes to see, at
least for those of us who are open to welcoming that gift. We are given the
grace to see our Lord’s presence in what can seem the most ordinary of
circumstances, in the people who cross our life path every day or every week.
And we are
given vision to discover Jesus present especially in those situations where
that seems to be most doubtful or hard to believe—
—in the faces of the poor, the immigrants, the homeless, the criminals, the disabled,
the obnoxious, the sinners, and even our families.
With the Holy Spirit’s gift of sight we can be made able to look out over the
same troubled world that everybody else sees; we can gather with the same
imperfect and flawed Christian community where everybody else gathers too; and
we can recognize in all that not something different, but something deeper.
Maybe we
make it harder on ourselves in trying to recognize Jesus in the here and now
because we look for him in the exceptional or eccentric or mystical or peculiar
events of life rather than in the face of an ordinary looking baby.
He’s right
here, always and everywhere, if only we would welcome the vision that the Holy
Spirit offers to us with which to see him.
That vision
typically doesn’t come in a moment (although for some it does). It is rather
the fruit of prolonged time spent in prayer, worship, service, justice,
peacemaking, reconciliation, and hospitality. It is not an accident that Simeon
and Anna are elderly, having learned how to see the way God does during the
course of many decades of life, readying themselves for the day they long
awaited, the moment of, “AHA! I know exactly who this is!” Where others saw
only a baby’s face, that day these two holy people saw God in the very same face.
And as they
also had come to see, the moment of “AHA!” was not and still is not entirely a
moment of sweetness and light, at least not while we live in this world. Simeon,
immediately after singing out the praises of God at the sight of Jesus, began to
speak to his astonished parents about the struggle and opposition and suffering
that would mark the adult life of this baby Jesus, and of the pierced heart
that would come to his mother and to all who love him most dearly. The vision
that the Holy Spirit imparts to us—the eyes to see—is not a vision through
rose-colored glasses. It is the vision of triumph, of resurrection, the road to
which leads through the cross and grave.
To look
backward from Easter to the baby picture of Jesus now allows all of us to know
with Simeon and Anna, “yes this is the one; but what adventure awaits.” Come
Holy Spirit, give us eyes to see.
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