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Through the Eyes of Jesus: Restoring Dignity

Through the Eyes of Jesus      Restoring Dignity 
John 4: 1-2, 13-30


            Well, friends, today we continue our 40-day journey through the Season of Lent. This year, we’re inviting Jesus to help us see again, to see with new eyes, to see the world as Jesus sees it. My hope is that God’s Spirit will challenge us, convict us and grow us as we do this work together. To kick off this series, we’re going to spend some time looking at an important conversation Jesus has with a woman at the well, a story of restoring dignity and worth. If you have your Bibles…


There was a story making the rounds a few months ago on Facebook, written by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. I can’t tell you if the story is factually true, but what I can say is that the story speaks a lot of truth. Coelho tells the story of a young couple who recently moved into a new neighborhood, and every morning, the wife would sit at her kitchen table, with coffee in hand, looking outside her window at her next door neighbor. One morning, while the couple was having breakfast, the wife spoke up, pointed to her neighbor, and said, “That laundry is not very clean; she doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.” Her husband just listened and didn’t say a word. Every time the neighbor hung her laundry out to dry, the young wife would make the same comments. About a month later, the wife was surprised to look out the window and see a nice clean wash on the line. She turned and said to her husband, “Look, she’s finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?” The husband replied, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”


Sometimes our windows get dirty, don’t they? Growing up, I often heard the teaching about finger pointing. You’ve heard this before? Every time you point the finger at someone else, there are three others pointing back to you? But when we’re pointing the finger or looking out a dirty window, most of the time we don’t even realize what’s happening. There are lots of reasons why our windows get dirty. We drift away from God. We let down our guard. We get wounded by someone’s insensitive word or attitude. We hear a frightening news story. And it’s important to know the factors that contribute to the ways in which we see the world. But what’s more important, at least from my perspective, is to acknowledge what happens when our dirty windows become our preferred reality. We begin to create systems of “us” and “them”; we begin to slap labels on people; we begin to assume things about people we’ve never even met. And before we know it, our dirty window perspective becomes the only way, the right way, to see the world. And those are usually the times when God moves in next door and invites us to see what He sees. 


John 4 is a window-cleaning type of story, a story that announces God is doing a new thing. It’s one of the starkest examples of Jesus reaching out to restore human dignity. Through his actions with the woman at the well, Jesus begins to reveal just how far God’s love is willing to reach. The woman at the well is the last person you’d expect to be on the receiving end of God’s love and grace. To the disciples and especially to the Pharisees, people who had spent their lives studying the Scriptures, this woman failed to check off any of the right boxes. As a Samaritan, her religion wasn’t right. Her nationality wasn’t right. She was from the wrong country, had the wrong upbringing, was from the wrong side of town. And her morality would make most of us blush. But here was Jesus, sitting at a well, just waiting to start a conversation with her that would lead to a second chance and to new life. 


It might be hard for us to understand why this conversation with this woman was so significant, but the cultural divides between Jews and Samaritans were huge. It wouldn’t be overstating the truth to say that there was a bitterness between the two, maybe even a certain hatred that defined the ways in which they viewed the other. They couldn’t stand the other, they couldn’t stand to look at or even think about the other, and whatever they could do to avoid being in the same place, they did. We might not have that kind of bitterness toward other people, but I’m willing to bet that we have people in our lives who make us uncomfortable, and if we can avoid them, we will. I wonder who that person for you? Or maybe it’s a certain type of person? Maybe it’s someone who struggles with addiction, or someone from a different political party. Maybe it’s someone who caused you a lot of pain in the past or someone whose skin color doesn’t reflect your own. Maybe it’s a family member who keeps making questionable decisions or a personality that just rubs you the wrong way. For the disciples, this person was a Samaritan. They just could not see past the issues. They could not see beyond the differences. But Jesus could, and Jesus did, and it made all the difference.  


Jesus saw something about the woman at the well that nobody else could see, that nobody else really wanted to see. He saw her from the perspective of God the Father, and what he saw was what she could be, who God created her to be. In his book Unshockable Love, author and pastor John Burke reminds us of the Renaissance sculptor and artist Michelangelo, who created some our world’s most beautiful pieces of art. Maybe the most recognizable is the statue of David (Show here). Millions of people travel every year to see this symbol of beauty and strength, but this precious, beautiful sculpture didn’t begin this way. It began as a simple block of marble. But as Burke notes, “Michelangelo worked under the premise that the image of David was already in the block of stone, and his task was simply to reveal the masterpiece underneath the rough, jagged edges.” (p. 72)  


When Jesus looked at the woman at the well, He saw a masterpiece. She was full of rough, jagged edges, and lots of arguments that tried to keep Jesus at an arm’s length, but Jesus continued to call forth the hope that no one else could see- not even the woman. You know, after a while, you can begin to take on the identity of all the labels and definitions and boxes attached to your name. That’s probably why she was at the well at noon. It was an odd time to draw water, at the heat of the day, but it was a time when she knew nobody else would be around to see her, to judge her, to draw conclusions. But notice that Jesus never labels the woman. He addresses her as a human being, as a woman, a woman whose made mistakes, but a woman nonetheless. And in doing so, Jesus was beginning to restore her dignity. He was beginning to call out her true identity. She was more than the labels given to her. She was more than the sum of her past mistakes and current reality. She was God’s masterpiece, and Jesus was ready to help her take her next right step. 


I believe there are a lot of people out there who can identify with the woman at the well, people who are just trying to get by, hoping no one sees the messiness of their lives. And I have a suspicion most who feel that way can’t even begin to imagine the beauty God sees when God looks at them. But what if we could show them? What if we could help them begin to see what Jesus sees, the masterpiece that is there, waiting to be uncovered by God’s grace, mercy and love? What if we could help people see the image of God that rests inside every human being? We can, so long as we allow Jesus to clean our windows so we can see the world through His eyes. And through Jesus’ eyes, some pretty powerful things happen. 


Through Jesus’ eyes, any ordinary moment can turn into holy space. If we wake up every day expecting the Holy Spirit to be at work, then our ordinary rhythms of life can be the places where God breaks in and does something new. The Samaritan woman’s life was changed by a holy encounter at a common gathering spot- a well. What if we viewed our coffee breaks as places where God was readying to offer a life-giving encounter? What if we assumed that God’s Spirit was already at work before we sit down to enjoy our burger at McDonalds? What if we looked for signs of God’s activity in the people we’d least expect?


Through Jesus’ eyes, we might find ourselves drawn to people and places we’d normally avoid. It’s interesting to note that John says Jesus had to go through Samaria to get to his final destination. It’s not a misprint, but it’s also not entirely accurate. There were other ways, other routes, Jesus could’ve taken. But John isn’t trying to be a GPS. He’s trying to reveal the heart of God. Jesus didn’t have to go through Samaria to get where he was going, but he did have to take the disciples to the very people and place they despised so they could begin to see what God sees. This is what Jesus does. He’s always finding himself in places that we wouldn’t call appropriate or holy. But those are the places he goes, and the places he’ll invite us to go, to uncover hidden masterpieces. 


And through Jesus’s eyes, we’ll also stumble upon one more really important discovery: no matter how far we are on our own journey, the Holy Spirit will continue to chip away at our lives, gracefully shaping us into disciples who live, act and see more like Jesus. And our best response is to welcome this work with open arms. When the disciples return from their shopping trip in town, they’re surprised to see Jesus talking with the woman. But they’re not turned off. Maybe they realize Jesus is offering the same gift to the woman that he had once offered to them. Maybe they remember a day when they were in the very same position, a people who had been forgotten, labeled, judged and misunderstood. Yet Jesus moved into their neighborhood, walked into their lives and said, “Follow me.” And maybe that’s the point. You know, as far as I can tell, we’re never told what happened to the woman. We know she goes home, presumably a new person, and tells others about this man who changed her life. But after that? She fades into history. But we do know what happens with the disciples. As they allow the Holy Spirit to “create in them a new heart,” they begin to see the world as Jesus sees it. And convinced that the love of Jesus is worth it, they give their lives to sharing with the world this good news that changes everything. May the same be true of us. Would you pray with me? 

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