I will rescue you from your people and from the gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ – Acts 26:17-18 (NRSVUE)
Today’s devotion is a reframing of the reflection from last Wednesday evening worship, on “Open our eyes, Lord.” I first invite you to watch this video, then scroll down below (the experiment in the video does not work well once you have read further, so please watch the video first if possible!)
We tend to only see what we want to see. There is a rather famous experiment where people are asked to count how many times a group passes a ball around. Yet while the group is passing the ball, a person in a gorilla suit walks through. Typically about half of the people watching this for the first time miss the gorilla passing through the scene because they are focused on the ball. This phenomenon is called “inattentive blindness.”
Essentially what it teaches us is that we are less aware of the world around us than we think we are. And this is a challenge because so much of the way we perceive the world is based on sight, at least for most of us. We humans tend to make all kinds of judgments about our surrounds, people we encounter, and a host of other things based on what we see – or think we see. This is problem for some concrete physical issues: one reason that bicycles and motorcycles are prone to be in accidents is that car drivers often don’t expect to see them and so they don’t. But it also impacts the way we think about the world – to a great extent the reality that we believe we live in is the reality that we have decided subconsciously ahead of time to pay attention to. Is our world one of fear or is it one of opportunity and blessing? We tend to notice what we assume is already there.
In Paul’s account of his conversion he shares how he had missed what God was doing in Jesus because he assumed he already knew everything about God and what God does. God had to stop Paul in his tracks and shut his eyes for a time so that he could look again and see the world properly, a world full of God in Christ. Jesus then calls on Paul to share about Christ, opening the eyes of others to see a world embedded with God.
For Martin Luther, our eyes always lead us astray precisely because we only see what we expect to see. Luther insists that we should see God all around us all of the time. God is present all around us; the world is saturated with God. Yet we do not see it because we do not expect to
see it. Our life should be one of wondering at the goodness of the world. We should see the richness of God’s creation. He says, for instance, “Now if I believe in God’s son and bear in mind that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before. Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, pears, as I reflect that he is Lord over and the center of all things.” (Luther’s Works, 22:496). The fact that we fail to notice the grandeur of those things around us is proof of how clouded by sin our eyes are. We look at the world and see whether something is useful to me or not, rather than seeing the presence of the Lord in it, or we pick out the ugliness around us to focus on, or disregard the world around us as unimportant or someone else’s concern. We see what we assume we will see, rather than seeing the glory of God. Like Paul, then, we need God to open our eyes that we might see the world as it is, full of God’s glory.