On the surface, this coming Sunday’s New Testament readings, from 1 Corinthians 8:1-13 and Mark 1:21-28, seem not to have much in common. But they actually touch on a similar theme. First, the 1 Corinthians passage. Paul writes this letter to the Corinthians that scholars believe was actually comprised of several short letters—a whole course of correspondence between Paul and the community in Corinth, dealing with all and sundry problems the Corinthians were facing. One problem had to do with eating food prepared at temples to the Greek gods.
Apparently, this was a great way to get food, as people in the early Jesus movement in Corinth wanted very much to take part in it. And what’s the problem? If they do not acknowledge the Greek gods, how is the food at the temple different from any other food? The gods are nothing, so the food would be nothing out of the ordinary, right? Paul tends to agree with this assessment. Food is just food. But, he says. But. The problem they are dealing with is about seeing something clearly, seeing what really is. And the fact is, often we do not. And since some of those in Corinth cannot see that food sacrificed to the Greek gods is just regular food, and they think there is something idolatrous and irreverent in eating that food, it becomes a problem for them, a stumbling block. The important consideration is not the food itself, it is how the action of eating the food is seen by your community member, and how to be a loving friend to them, where they are right now.
The story from Mark is also about seeing clearly. It is one of the first stories in that gospel—right at the beginning. And it asks whether people of one group or another are able to see clearly who Jesus is and what he is doing. Can they recognize that he is showing God to them, revealing this before-time reality he likes to call the “kingdom of God,” or is he just another itinerant preacher? In the first century, both before and after Jesus, there were several wandering teachers who developed a following—several were even known for their healings and wonder-working. One can’t blame the people of Jesus’ day for being skeptical.
And in this story that we read in Mark, the people are skeptical. He teaches in the synagogue. But who is it that recognizes Jesus, who is it that sees Jesus as the “Holy One of God”? It is the unclean spirit in the story. The audience at the local Capernaum synagogue check him out, and they aren’t sure about him. They notice there is something intriguing about Jesus. Unlike the dime-a-dozen preachers and scribes, he speaks “like one who has authority”; yet still they are not sure about him. The truth is, you and I probably would not be either. The story reveals that the unclean spirit does see and know who Jesus is, and he wants to know what Jesus is going to do about it. “Have you come to destroy us?” the unclean spirit asks. “What have you to do with us?” —Jesus responds by sending the spirit away.
In the Corinthians passage, Paul writes about the concern of seeing something that’s not really there: people who think they see their friends honoring real rival gods by dining out at the temple. In Mark the issue is Jesus is recognized by someone in the audience who really sees him, but the one that recognizes him happens to be an “unclean spirit.”
Whereas the good folks who go to synagogue every Sabbath, who look put together on the surface, cannot quite see what is right before their noses.
When I was an undergraduate in college, my ethics teacher taught that ethics come down to this: being able to see clearly. We can do all kinds of philosophizing, all sorts of ethical calisthenics when we get into an ethical quandary, but when it comes down to a situation where we must make an ethical decision, we are only as good as our ability to see clearly, our ability to see a situation as it really is.
Recently, I was reminded how true this has been in my own life. For Christmas, my mom divided boxes of mementoes she had collected through the years into three bins for me and my sisters. In my box was a stack of letters I’d written her when I was 16, away for two months on a service trip to Mexico that pushed me to the utter limits of my young abilities, both emotionally and physically. I sorted all of those letters—about a dozen—into chronological order and devoted an evening to reading them. It was fascinating to have the perspective I have 30 years later! It was like flying as a hawk over the subject matter, able to see the whole context I could not see when I was deep down in the weeds of my own young life. I could see my fear and homesickness, and the many ways I was conforming to beliefs I didn’t share before the experience, and beliefs I wouldn’t share afterward—simply conforming so I would fit in and not feel so alone. Reading the letter now, from my perspective today, I could see how completely lost in a fog and overwhelmed I had been at that time, at sixteen, in that experience. Yet now I could see what was happening to this young me, and even more fascinating, all the would happen in the year after I returned home: Our family selling our house and moving across town, my changing schools and friends that year, my making unhealthy choices in relationships, my leaving high school a year early for college, and then about just two years after returning from that trip, my ending up married at 18 to a young man who was incredibly emotionally abusive.
How often we cannot see our lives clearly when we’re in the midst of them. We recognize this when we look back on situations five, ten, thirty years earlier in our lives, and see how completely bamboozled we were by our inability to see a situation clearly. We walked into so many jobs, friendships, commitments, loves blindly. And the fact is, we should all assume that at this very moment, we are doing the same thing. There are things we now don’t see clearly, and we will look back from a distance of years, and see just how much we could not see. We don’t have to beat ourselves up about it. It is part of being human.
But this is the important thing to remember: Our most important spiritual work is inviting in awareness and creating the silence and space in our lives that allows us to see a little more clearly. There is no more important spiritual work, because sometimes the stakes of not seeing can be very very high. I think for example, of climate change denial. There are spiritual practices that foster greater mindfulness, greater awareness, the ability to see, to be shown by the Spirit something we otherwise could not see. We are people who honor revelation. Yet these spiritual practices require solitude, they require silence so the truth can be revealed. And we have perhaps never been more pulled away from these practices by so many enticing distractions. It is certainly true for me. I have to be careful, to know when to turn off the podcast or the great audiobook. I have to tell the truth to myself and to acknowledge I need help with this whole business of seeing. After prayers of gratitude, my most frequent prayer is: God, help me to see clearly
This post appeared here first: Seeing Clearly
[Episcopal Cafe – Speaking to the Soul Blog]