Have you
ever seen one of those optical illusions which are two pictures in one? There’s one where it could be either two
faces looking at each other, or a cup.
There’s a moving one (and I’d invite you to google this one now [people got their phones out to look at this]): the spinning dancer illusion. Who thinks she’s
rotating clockwise?
Counterclockwise? It’s apparently
called a kinetic, bistable illusion.
That means that once you’ve seen it one way, it’s really hard to see it
any other way. Now, in this case, that’s
not really a problem. There’s no moral
reality that one way of seeing it is better than the other way, or even that
flexibility with these kind of illusions is really a virtue.
But, in
life, it’s different. In life, it’s also
true that once we’ve started seeing something, or someone, one way, it’s really
hard to see them another way. And that
can be a huge problem. So God, through
his prophets and through Christ, disrupts our preconceived notions of how
things really are.
The
widow of Zarephath has looked at her situation and made a pretty clear
judgment: it’s fatal. She’s convinced,
there’s no way out of this drought for her and her son, they’ll have one last
meal, and then they’ll die. I wonder what
it is that makes her stop and listen to this wandering foreigner, who seems to
be even more down on his luck than her.
Maybe considering herself a dead woman walking has given her a new
freedom, having nothing left to lose, she’ll stop and hear anyone out. Whatever moves inside her, she opens up. She lets the prophet disrupt her perception
of the situation, and finds in his words that God commands life. Out of what quite rationally seems like
certain death, God brings new life, because the insistent rationality of death
is not what gets the final say in our world.
I wonder what we consider futile, deadly, worth giving up on? I wonder how God is breathing life into it,
even as we speak?
What
about that other widow from our readings, the woman in the Gospel? No one seems to have noticed her. They’ve done what’s even worse than jumping
to a snap judgment of someone; they haven’t even noticed her. They’ve tacitly judged her, without even
realizing what they’re doing, as not worth paying attention to. There are all these rich people putting in
huge sums, which is impressive and genuinely good (Jesus doesn’t deny their
generosity). Think of looking at a red
carpet premiere where the cameras focus on the well-dressed celebs waltzing in,
and it never occurs to anyone to photograph the movie’s head electrician or
catering manager. These people don’t get
noticed; but Jesus notices, and Jesus acts to disrupt his disciples’
blindspots, to make them look again at the feature of scene that most impresses
him.
It
impresses him, leaves an imprint on him, because in that woman, he encounters
someone else who makes God known by her life.
What he did perfectly, she does powerfully, and, if we let him, Jesus
will keep directing our attention to people who can show us what God is up to. The most obvious way in which she
demonstrates something properly divine to the world is in her generosity. She
gives everything, her whole self, just like God who gave his only Son for our
salvation, God who doesn’t just give us a gift fallible and forgetful like
ourselves, but gives us his very self, including daily in this Eucharistic
feast.
But it’s
not just her generosity that Jesus wants us to see. It’s also her poverty. She is also an image of God in her
poverty. Because God doesn’t come to
earth to dazzle us with superhuman power, but to love us with poverty and
frailty. God, the almighty, the creator
all that is, came to earth as a weak defenseless baby, walked as a homeless
man, a member of a conquered people, and died pierced by sin. To the casual observer, Jesus’ death was a
colossal defeat, a shameful slaughter.
But that
can’t be how we see. What we see in the
shedding of Christ’s blood is the taking away of sin, the conquering of sin and
death, the ultimate victory, the ultimate triumph of love. Once we’ve started to see a broken body as
the source of true wholeness, our patterns of seeing anything and everything
else are shattered. All is charged with
hope.
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