There was a robber who cases a house for several evenings and, deciding that the occupants were gone, broke in one night looking for something small and valuable to steal. As he made his way in the darkness, using only his small flashlight, he heard a voice say: “Jesus is watching you.”
His first thought was that he was hearing his conscience—a voice from his Catholic grade-school days. But then he heard the voice again:
“Jesus is watching you.”
So he shined his flashlight around the room and in the corner he saw a parrot, who said again: “Jesus is watching you.”
Relieved, the burglar said: “Silly parrot. What’s your name?”
“Moses,” the parrot said.
“Moses?” The burglar said. “What kind of people name their parrot ‘Moses’?”
“The same kind of people,” the parrot said, “who name their pit bull ‘Jesus’.”
As we reflect on the Gospel today we might think about watching, about sight and seeing in the context of faith—how those two things, sight and faith, are connected.
That whole issue comes up very clearly in the reading, where we see Jesus give sight to the blind beggar, Bartimaeus. As he does so, Jesus very clearly connects these two things—sight and faith—when He says: “Go your way; your faith has saved you.” And it is after this, after attributing his being “saved” to his faith, that Bartimaeus receives his sight.
Faith seems to precede sight. Without faith there would have been no sight. Without faith, Jesus seems to be telling us, we cannot truly see.
Very much the same thing happens to Paul, of course, when he is traveling to Damascus and has this intense encounter with Jesus,
Observed as a flash of light, which leaves Paul blind for three days as he struggles to make sense of what he has experienced. It is only after that, after having this profound conversion experience that enables Paul to know who Jesus is for the first time, to have faith, that the scales come off Paul’s eyes and he sees—for the first time in his life—reality as it truly is.
The experience causes Paul to leave his entire past life behind and
Begin his work of spreading the Gospel throughout the world, just as receiving his sight causes Bartimaeus to leave his past behind and follow Jesus on the way.
As we reflect on these stories, and the interaction of sight and faith, we realize that the eyes of faith are not the same as our worldly eyes, that seeing through eyes informed by faith is different from seeing with simple worldly eyes. The reality is that all our sight is informed by what we believe. That is the lens, if you will, through which our vision is focused and filtered. Our belief system determined how we perceive reality, how we interpret the sense impressions that hit our optic nerves.
There is a line from one of my favorite movies that captures it perfectly. The movie is the Tim Allen classic from 19994, “The Santa Clause.” The movie is about a guy who through a series of accidents becomes the real Santa Claus. After he spends Christmas Eve delivering packages all around the world he ends up at the North Pole, where he is trying to make sense out of the experience he’s just had.
There is a scene where he is looking out a window at a square in the middle of the North Pole, where there is a polar bear directing traffic. He turns to an elf named Judy, who is his minder in the whole experience, and says: “There is a polar bear out there directing traffic. I see it, but I don’t believe it.”
Judy says: “Seeing isn’t believing; believing is seeing.”
Seeing isn’t believing; believing is seeing.
How we perceive the world is governed by our beliefs—faith precedes sight.
Or as the old hymn, taken from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians puts it, “we walk by faith, and not by sight.”
And if we lose track of that, if we think that our sight informed not by our faith but by the values of the world, is giving us an accurate picture of reality, we can be terribly deceived.
Think of the Eucharist, for example. In our worldly sight, without faith, what we receive in the Eucharist is nothing more or less than simple bread and wine. It looks like that, tastes like that, was made just as bread and wine is always made. To our worldly sight at the consecration in the Mass, nothing changes.
And yet we know, through faith, that our worldly sight deceives us. Through the eyes of faith, we look at the consecrated bread and wine and see the body and blood of Christ, which then only appears to be bread and wine.
Or think about the end of chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus tells the story of the Last Judgment, the story of the separation of the sheep and the goats, with the goats sent off, in Jesus’ words, to eternal punishment. Why? Because they had a failure of sight—they did not see the King in the faces of those who were hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison.
There problem was that they saw with the eyes of the world, and all those people in the eyes of the world were of no concern. They were certainly not royalty. They deserved nothing and the “goats” did nothing for them.
The sheep, on the other hand, somehow saw past what the world sees, and gave food and water and clothes and care and comfort to those most in need.
It taker strong eyes of faith to do that. And you know, we can strengthen our eyes of faith, just like we can strengthen our hums eyes. During World War II my uncle wanted to enlist in the Navy, but in those days, at least for the program he wanted, you had to pass a vision test. My uncle’s eyes weren’t quite good enough to qualify.
So he decided to eat carrots—lots and lots of carrots, all the carrots
he could eat, breakfast, lunch and dinner—for about two months. He went back to the Navy recruiting station and took the eye test again—and passed.
What we put into our minds, our souls, matters in the same way when it comes to our eyes of faith. A steady diet of junk food—promoting values of materialism, of arrogance, of selfishness, of greed. Glorifying power. Worshipping the things of this world. If that is what we consume all day, our eyes of faith can get pretty cloudy, pretty weak.
So we need to pray, and watch what we consume, to strengthen our spiritual eyes, because in this time as well as in Jesus’ time, we need to see reality as it really is, not just as it appears to be.
We read in the papers the stories these days of the thousands of migrants heading across Mexico for the US—apparently seeking jobs, safety, a better life. In the eyes of the world they are not entitled to entry here—they’re not citizens, they aren’t following the rules, they’re breaking the law.
All true.
But with the eyes of faith we see in the faces of the migrants our own brothers and sisters, fellow sons and daughters of God. Human beings endowed with inherent dignity. And maybe that sight impels us to find a solution to immigration issues that is consistent with that dignity.
Or we read about business practices that leave people without simple drugs that would save their lives, like insulin. In the eyes of the world that’s just business. No rules are being broken, and companies
should earn as much as they can for the benefit of their shareholders.
But what do our faith-filled eyes see, and what does that faith-informed sight cause us to say or do?
Are we truly walking by faith, and not just by sight?
These things matter because, as Moses the parrot says, “Jesus is watching us.”